Eva Frankfurther

(1930 Berlin, Germany – 1959 London, England) Immigrated to England 1939

Eva Frankfurther was born into a cultured and assimilated Jewish family with a strong leaning towards the arts, in Berlin, Germany in 1930. Following the rise of Nazism, she escaped to London with her siblings in April 1939; her father and stepmother followed afterwards, just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. After a year at Stoatley Rough, a mixed boarding school in Haslemere, Surrey for German refugee children, she was later evacuated with her sister, Beate, to Hertfordshire for a further four years.

Between 1946 and 1951 Eva studied at St Martin’s School of Art, where her fellow students included Leon Kossoff and fellow child refugee from Nazism, Frank Auerbach, who recalled Frankfurther’s ‘contempt for professional tricks or gloss’ and her work as ‘full of feeling for people’. Disaffected with the London art scene, after graduating, she moved to Whitechapel. For the next six years, she earned her living working the evening shift as a counterhand at Lyons Corner House and, later, in a sugar refinery, leaving herself free to paint during the day. Inspired by artists as diverse as Rembrandt, Käthe Kollwitz and Picasso, she took as her subject the ethnically diverse, largely immigrant population among whom she lived and worked. Her studies of the new Caribbean, Cypriot and Pakistani communities, as well as Jewish, Irish and Italian East Enders, portrayed both at work and at rest, with empathy and dignity, are her greatest achievement. Never without a sketchbook, she also made hundreds of vivid sketches, occasionally from life, most often from memory, usually in a few telling lines. Despite exhibiting regularly in local group shows at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Bethnal Green Museum, she rarely signed or dated her work, often selling it at low prices or giving it away to friends.

Between 1948 and 1958 Frankfurther also travelled extensively in Europe and the USA. In her last year, she spent eight months living and working in Israel, where a large body of her work was stolen. She returned to London in October 1958 and, suffering from depression, took her own life in London, England in 1959. Retrospectives were held at Ben Uri Gallery (1962) and Clare Hall, Cambridge (1979), followed by an important exhibition at the Boundary Gallery, London in 2001, and two further exhibitions at Ben Uri Gallery in 2014 and 2017. Her work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection and Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Eva Frankfurther

Beate

Planskoy

Black-and-white photograph

© Beate Planskoy

Self-portrait in Red, 1951-58

Oil on paper, 76 x 55 cm

Private Collection © The Estate of Eva Frankfurther

Eva Frankfurther, Self-portrait in Red, 1951-58)

When Eva Frankfurther’s posthumous exhibition at Clare College, Cambridge in 1979 was reviewed by art historian and critic Frank Whitford, he observed: ‘The work on show is so good that I wondered why I had not heard of Eva Frankfurther before. It did not surprise me to find that she was a refugee from Germany, coming to Britain at the age of nine, for her style of portraiture belongs so clearly to a German tradition’ (Cambridge Evening News, 27 November 1979).

This half-length self-portrait is one of Frankfurther’s boldest and most Expressionist. Wearing a vivid red jumper (identified by her sister as one of her favourites), she shows herself with a painting rag in her right hand, which is shown over-large, perhaps to emphasise her profession, although no further tools of her trade are included. After the war, materials were still scarce and expensive, and Frankfurther worked predominantly in oil on paper. Here, paint has been thinly applied in vertical streaks, particularly in the lower half of the picture, where at times the paper shows through, and in denser layers to the hands, neck and face, the latter finished with a firm, black outline.

West Indian Waitresses, c. 1955

Oil on canvs, 76 x 55 cm

Ben Uri Collection

Presented by Beate Planskoy (the artist’ sister), 2015

© The Estate of Eva Frankfurther

Eva Frankfurther, West Indian Waitresses, c. 1955

Frankfurther often focused on women’s faces and postures observing her subjects with empathy and dignity, although typically they neither smile nor engage with the viewer. In her half-length double portrait of two Caribbean waitresses at Lyon’s Corner House, she employs loose brushwork and a restricted palette. The composition is carefully arranged so that the two waitresses appear to mirror one another, implying their close personal as well as professional relationship. Frankfurther’s migrant Corner House workers also document the changing landscape of postwar Britain with its new multicultural communities and changing working practices. The rose-coloured background is also typical of the ‘feminine’ palette that indicates Frankfurther’s instinctive sympathy for working women.

Woman with Two Children, c. 1955

Oil on paper

76 x 54 cm

Private Collection

© The Estate of Eva Frankfurther

Eva Frankfurther, Woman with Two Children c. 1955

In Woman with Two Children, the vivid scarlet of the toddler’s dress and bow and the mother’s Titian-red hair, stand out against the muted background and her drab overcoat, suggesting the biting postwar austerity of the family’s straitened lives. The composition is strengthened by an invisible diagonal that binds the two children to their mother.