From Local to Global : The digital transformation

Ben Uri 2025 and its Future Founded 1915: 110th Anniversary Repositoned 2000: 25th Anniversary

from Local to Global

This free exhibition guide is for educational, research, private study and critique purposes only. It must not be reproduced in any format and is not for resale or to be used for any commercial or other purpose.

Page 2

Exhibition celebrating Ben Uri 1915 - 1925

from Local to Global Announcing the expansion of the Ben Uri Research Unit to build, digitally, the Ben Uri Research and Dissemination Institute recording, sharing and teaching the refugee and wide immigrant contribution to British society since 1900.

Page 3

Ben Uri 110 years: from Local to Global BEN URI 110 / 25: from Local to Global Ben Uri is 110 years young and simultaneously celebrate 25 years of the new Ben Uri positioned in the heart of British mainstream cultural sector This exhibition is built around the further and final expansion of the museum’s strategic plan, first published in 2018, to formalise the adoption of our core public benefit being within academia and online education - and being fully committed to a digital first future.

We will continue to be a hybrid institution exhibiting challenging and inspiring art reflecting both our proud Jewish heritage and our current and future, celebrating the contribution of the refugee and wide immigrant communities to our rich and diverse cultural mosaic.

One of the important cultural assets of Ben Uri is our policy to prioritise the stories of the artists and their journey to the UK even over their art. We live in an ever-increasing digital world dominated by images flashing across our phones, so image recall is more difficult and time for reflection much impaired. Stories however, particularly exciting often dramatic journeys across borders at times of war or persecution, more easily capture imagination and the recall is much longer.

The exhibition shares with you more than simply great art from our distinctive collection. The works are situated in different contexts, relating to our history and the exile/ immigrant experience in Britain to tell different but intertwined stories.

This is the backdrop to the unveiling of our next phase of expansion, and we are excited to share with you the detail and rational of our future for the rest of this Page 4

21st century and hopefully more. The Ben Uri Research and Dissemination Institute will extend our current Research Unit to research, consolidate and record the refugee and wide immigrant contribution to British society since 1900.

20% of the British population / 40% of Londoners are immigrants and their ongoing contribution to the wealth, cultural, scientific and financial, needs to be accurately and proportionately recorded and recognised.

This Institute will provide factual statistics and personal profiles that are designed to be used by schools, universities, scholars, business, politics and press alike as a tool to increase understanding and discredit senseless prejudice mostly based on ignorance of the facts.

The catalogue features a revealing essay (and complete schedule) about 100 years of Ben Uri exhibitions by Dr. Rachel Dickson who alongside colleague Sarah MacDougall (and to a far lesser degree me) curated the majority of our 116 exhibitions since we three joined forces close to 25 years ago near the start of our remarkable journey.

As this is the last exhibition I will curate before my retirement in early 2026, I take this opportunity of paying the greatest tribute to them both for their comradeship, friendship, shared passion and commitment to building Ben Uri into a globally recognised scholarly institution.

Ben Uri would not have achieved its reputation without their expertise and engagement.

David J Glasser Executive Chair

TODAY:

Recording, Sharing and Teaching the Immigrant Contribution to British visual culture since 1900 through 3300 published profiles and another 1800 in the works. See buru.org.uk and diaspora-artists.net

How Ben Uri Uses Art Differently Why Ben Uri Uses Art Differently We prioritise global digital engagement over the physical.

We frame our research within the context of social integration.

We prioritise artists and their milieu over their artworks.

The stories of migrations captures imagination beyond the art.

TOMORROW:

Recording, Sharing and Teaching the Immigrant Contribution to British Society since 1900 - launching in 2026 Rationale: Research on its own no longer generates a positive return on investment. Accurate and inaccurate information is widely available online and with the rise of AI, which promises to misinform as much as inform, factual evidence and testimony is essential.

Ben Uri’s academic research needs to be, and is designed to be, easily understood by scholars, students and the general public alike.

Deliverables: Fact not Fiction

Our research is widely used by universities across Britain and abroad, supporting undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral work across the humanities, with a special focus on bridging the gap between the digital and the physical.

We are developing citizenship modules for schools based on our evidence that a high percentage of superstars and superheroes, in whichever sector of our local communities or national and global societies, are either first or second generation immigrants and often to Britain.

Benefits: We believe that if we can educate children at school, students at university, and the general public at large on the contribution of immigrants to our society, we have a greater chance of minimising racial friction and bigotry based on ignorance and misconception.

12 Key Specialisms within the new Research Institute launching in 2026 are Visual Arts: Design: Architecture Media: Technology: Science

Literature: Performance: Music Business: Sport: Hitler Emigres

Page 5

2030: The Ben Uri Research a

Recording, sharing and teaching the Immigra

DIREC RESEARCH MANAGER AND EDITOR

RESEARCH MANAGER AND EDITOR

DISSEMINATION & IMPACT MANAGER

Research officer

Research officer

Research officer

Research officer

Research officer

Research officer

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Visual Arts

Design

Architecture

Literature & Poetry

Performance

Music

2D - all 3D - all Dealers Scholars

Product Fashion Graphic

City Office Residential

Theatre Dance Art

Classical Modern Contemporary

Modern Contemporary

IT Officer / Maintenance

Cost = £1m Page 6

and Dissemination Institute

ant contribution to British Society since 1900

CTOR RESEARCH MANAGER AND EDITOR

RESEARCH MANAGER AND EDITOR

DISSEMINATION & IMPACT MANAGER

Research officer

Research officer

Research officer

Research officer

Research officer

Research officer

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Univ Placement

Media

Technology

Science

Business

Hitler émigrés

Sport

Film TV Radio Online

Internet AI Industrial Domestic

Medical Ecology Physical Social

All

All disciplines

Football Cricket Boxing Rest

Symposiums

per annum Page 7

The immigrant contribution to British society: Did you know?

Visual Arts Francis Bacon (Born 1909, Ireland; migrated to the UK) Lucien Freud (Born 1922, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1933) Frank Auerbach (Born 1931, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1939) Anish Kapoor (Born 1954, India; migrated to the UK, 1970s) Paula Rego (Born 1935, Portugal; migrated to the UK, 1950s) Oskar Kokoschka (Born 1886, Austria; migrated to the UK, 1938) Jacob Epstein (Born 1880, USA; migrated to the UK, 1905) Gustav Metzger (Born 1926, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1939) Rasheed Araeen (Born 1935, Pakistan; migrated to the UK, 1960s) Ibrahim El-Salahi (Born 1930, Sudan; migrated to the UK, 1990s)

Design George Him (Born 1900, Poland; migrated to the UK, 1937) - Graphic Designer Hans Schleger (Born 1898, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1932) - Graphic Designer F. H. K. Henrion (Born 1914, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1936) - Graphic Designer Eva Zeisel (Born 1906, Hungary; migrated to the UK in 1938) - Fashion Designer Hussein Chalayan (Born 1970, Cyprus; migrated to the UK, 1978) - Fashion Designer Erdem Moralioglu (Born 1977, Canada; migrated to the UK, 2000) - Fashion Designer Mary Katrantzou (Born 1983, Greece; migrated to the UK, 2003) - Fashion Designer Jimmy Choo (Born 1948, Malaysia; migrated to the UK, 1982) - Fashion Designer Tom Dixon (Born 1959, Tunisia; migrated to the UK, 1963) - Fashion Designer Zeev Aram (Born 1931, Romania; migrated to the UK, 1957) - Fashion Designer

Architecture Dame Zaha Hadid (Born 1950, Iraq; migrated to the UK, 1972) Berthold Lubetkin (Born 1901, Georgia; migrated to the UK, 1931) Ernő Goldfinger (Born 1902, Hungary; migrated to the UK, 1934) Erich Mendelsohn (Born 1887, Poland; migrated to the UK, 1933) Serge Chermayeff (Born 1900, Russia; migrated to the UK, 1910) Walter Segal (Born 1907, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1936) Peter Moro (Born 1911, Germany; migrated to the UK in 1936) Amyas Connell (Born 1901, New Zealand; migrated to the UK in 1930) George Checkley (Born 1893, New Zealand; migrated to the UK before the 1920s) Mouzhan Majidi (Born 1964, Iran; migrated to the UK before 1985)

Literature and Poetry Salman Rushdie (Born 1947, India; migrated to the UK in 1964) - Author Kazuo Ishiguro (Born 1954, Japan; migrated to the UK in 1960) - Author Doris Lessing (Born 1919, Iran; migrated to the UK in 1949) - Author V. S. Naipaul (Born 1932, Trinidad and Tobago; migrated to the UK in 1950) - Author Caryl Phillips (Born 1958, Saint Kitts and Nevis; migrated to the UK in 1958) - Author Grace Nichols (Born 1950, Guyana; migrated to the UK in 1977) - Poet John Agard (Born 1949, Guyana; migrated to the UK in 1977) - Poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (Born 1952, Jamaica; migrated to the UK in 1963) - Poet Ben Okri (Born 1959, Nigeria; migrated to the UK in 1978) - Poet T. S Elliot (Born 1888, USA; migrated to the UK in 1914) - Poet

Performance Anton Walbrook (Born 1896, Austria; migrated to the UK in 1936) - Actor Antony Sher (Born 1949, South Africa; migrated to the UK in 1968) - Actor Earl Cameron (Born 1917, Bermuda; migrated to the UK in 1939) - Actor Lucie Mannheim (Born 1899, Germany; migrated to the UK in 1930s) - Actor Pearl Connor Mogotsi (Born 1924, Trinidad and Tobago; migrated to the UK in 1948) - Actor Tom Stoppard (Born 1937, Czechia; migrated to the UK in 1946) - Playwright Mustapha Matura (Born 1939, Trinidad and Tobago; migrated to the UK in 1962) - Playwright Marie Rambert (Born 1888, Poland, migrated to the UK in 1914) - Ballet Dancer Rudolf Nureyev (Born 1938, Russia; migrated to the UK in 1961) - Ballet Dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (Born 1889, Ukraine; migrated to the UK in 1947) - Ballet Dancer

Music Composers Egon Wellsz (Born 1885, Austria; migrated to the UK in 1938) Roberto Gerhard (Born 1896, Spain; migrated to the UK in 1939) Berthold Goldschmidt (Born 1903, Germany; migrated to the UK in 1935) Hans Gál (Born 1890, Austria; migrated to the UK in 1938) Joseph Horovitz (Born 1926, Austria; migrated to the UK in 1938) Franz Reizenstein (Born 1911, Germany; migrated to the UK in 1934) Errollyn Wallen (Born 1958, Belize; migrated to the UK in 1960) Sir Andrzej Panufnik (Born 1914, Poland; migrated to the UK in 1954) Malcolm Williamson (Born 1931, Australia; migrated to the UK in 1950) Alexander Goehr (Born 1932, Germany; migrated to the UK in 1933)

Page 8

Media Sir Alexander Korda (Born 1893, Hungary; migrated to the UK in 1931) - Film Producer Stanley Kubrick (Born 1928, USA; migrated to the UK in 1961) - Film Director Ncuti Gatwa (Born 1992, Rwanda; migrated to the UK in 1994) - Film Actor Audrey Hepburn (Born 1929, Belgium; migrated to the UK in 1937) - Film Actor Richard Curtis (Born 1956, New Zealand; migrated to the UK in 1972) - Script Writer Emeric Pressburger (Born 1902, Hungary; migrated to the UK in 1935) - Script Writer Sydney Newman (Born 1917, Canada; migrated to the UK in 1958) - TV Producer Lew Grade (Born 1906, Ukraine; migrated to the UK in 1912) - TV Producer Graham Norton (Born 1936, Ireland; migrated to the UK in 1984) - TV Presenter Terry Wogan (Born 1938, Ireland; migrated to the UK in 1969) - Radio Presenter

Technology Ismail Ahmed (born 1960, Somalia; migrated to the UK in 1988) Taavet Hinrikus (born 1981, Estonia; migrated to the UK in 2006) Sieng van Tran (born 1975, Vietnam; migrated to the UK in 1981) Silas Adekunle (born 1991, Nigeria; migrated to the UK circa 2003) Romi Savova (born 1985; migrated to the UK) Stephanie Shirley (born 1933, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1939) Lara Suzuki (born, Brazil; migrated to the UK, circa 2015) Shrouk El-Attar (born circa 1992, Egypt; migrated to the UK, 2007)

Science Ernis Boris Chain (Born 1906 Germany; migrated to the UK in 1933) - Scientist Hans Krebs (Born 1900, Germany; migrated to the UK in 1933) - Scientist Max Ferdinand Perutz (Born 1914 Austria; migrated to the UK in 1936) - Scientist Hugh Blanschko (Born 1900 Germany; migrated to the UK in 1933) - Scientist Nicholas Kurti (Born 1908 Hungary; migrated to the UK in 1933) - Scientist Andrew Bonar Law (Born 1858, Canada; migrated to the UK in 1870) - Politician Robert Maxwell (Born 1923, Czechoslovakia; migrated to the UK in 1940) - Politician Alf Dubs (Born 1932, Czechoslovakia; migrated to the UK in 1939) - Politician Gisela Stuart (Born 1955, Germany; migrated to the UK in 1974) - Politician Nadhim Zahawi (Born 1967, Iraq; migrated to the UK in 1978) - Politician

Business Steven Bartlett (Born 1992, Botswana; migrated to the UK in 1994) Michael Marks (Born circa 1859, Belarus; migrated to the UK in 1882) Surinder Arora (Born 1958, India; migrated to the UK in 1972) Montague Burton (Born 1885, Lithuania; migrated to the UK in 1900) Harry Gordon Selfridge (Born 1858, USA; migrated to the UK in 1906) Charles & Baron Forte (Born 1908, Italy; migrated to the UK in 1911) Karan Bilimoria (Born 1961, India; migrated to the UK in 1980) Gulu Lalvani (Born 1939, Pakistan; migrated to the UK circa 1950s) Lakshmi Mittal (Born 1950, India; migrated to the UK in 1995) Will Shu (Born 1979, USA; migrated to the UK in 2001)

Sport Mo Farah (Born 1983, Somalia; migrated to the UK in 1992) Emma Raducanu (Born 2002, Canada; migrated to the UK in 2004) Marc Guéhi (Born 2000, Côte d’Ivoire; migrated to the UK in 2001) Kevin Pietersen (Born 1980, South Africa; migrated to the UK in 2000) Andrew Strauss (Born 1977, South Africa; migrated to the UK in 1983) Greg Rusedski (Born 1973, Canada; migrated to the UK in 1995) Tessa Sanderson (Born 1956, Jamaica; migrated to the UK in 1962) Manu Tuilagi (Born 19991, Samoa; migrated to the UK c.2004) Sam Kerr (Born 1993, Australia; migrated to the UK in 2019/2020) Vivianne Miedema (Born 1996, Netherlands; migrated to the UK in 2017)

Popstars Freddie Mercury (Born 1946, Zanzibar; migrated to the UK, 1964) Sade Adu (Born 1959, Nigeria; migrated to the UK, 1964) M.I.A. (Born 1975, Sri Lanka; migrated to the UK, 1986) Rita Ora (Born 1990, Kosovo; migrated to the UK, 1991) Taio Cruz (Born 1980, Brazil; migrated to the UK, childhood) Beebadoobee (Born 2000, Philippines; migrated to the UK, 2003) Sinéad O’Connor (Born 1966, Ireland; migrated to the UK, late 1980s) Enya (Born 1961, Ireland; migrated to the UK, 1983) Billy Ocean (Born 1950, Trinidad; migrated to the UK, circa 1960) Mika (Born 1983, Lebanon; migrated to the UK, circa 2003)

Hitler Emigrés Sigmund Freud (Born 1856, Austria; migrated to the UK, 1938) - Founder of Psychoanalysis Ernst Gombrich (Born 1909, Austria; migrated to the UK, circa 1937) - Art Historian Nikolaus Pevsner (Born 1902, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1933) - Art Historian Max Perutz (Born 1914, Austria; migrated to the UK, 1936) - Molecular biologist Hans Krebs (Born 1900, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1933) - Biochemist Kurt Schwitters (Born 1887, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1940) - Artist Karl Popper (Born 1902, Austria; migrated to the UK, 1937) - Philosopher Elias Canetti (Born 1905, Austria; migrated to the UK, 1939) - Writer Hans Keller (Born 1919, Austria; migrated to the UK) - Musicologist Claus Moser (Born 1922, Germany; migrated to the UK, 1936) - Statistician Page 9

20 21

20 11

20 01

19 91

Immigration numbers to Britain:

Total UK Population Foreign-born population

67.1m

59.1m

55.2m

53.3m

11.1m

7.7m

4.7m

3.7m

% of total population born abroad (approx)

16.5%

13.1%

8.6%

7%

Zimbabwe

1,587,000 134,900 270,800 108,900 211,500 124,200

1,312,600 137,500 191,200 67,800 191,000 118,300

809,900 127,300 87,000 43,300 132,000 47,200

504,600 112,400 47,000 38,500 64,000 96,400

Caribbean (Total)

246,500

264,100

253,200

245,400

Afghanistan

85,693 182,400 135,000 155,000

62,161 152,500 111,000 148,700

14,875 48,500 96,000 115,600

23,800 72,900 21,800

273,000 920,400 623,600

211,500 694,100 482,100

153,000 455,900 308,200

105,000 409,000 234,100

85,800 155,300 263,400 324,700 276,700 743,100 538,900 59,800 127,600

82,300 137,900 273,600 407,400 134,600 579,100 79,700 35,900 91,100

75,800 89,500 243,600 473,000 102,000 58,100 7,200 15,200 52,900

78,000 53,400 215,500 592,600 91,000 73,700 3,900 27,000 26,600

Africa (Total) Kenya Nigeria Somalia South Africa

China Hong Kong Phillipines Bangladesh India Pakistan Cyprus France Germany Ireland Italy Poland Romania Russia Turkey

2024 Estimate: Total UK Population: 69.3million Page 10

19 81

197 1

19 61

195 1

Ben Uri’s primary focus on their contribution to our society

51.8m

51.6m

48.6m

46.3m

3.3m

3.1m

2.4m

2m

Total UK Population Foreign-born population

6.4%

6.1%

5%

4.3%

% of total population born abroad (approx)

559,800 100,500 30,000 32,700

164,200 59,500 28,600 19,800 7,900

61,200 35,900 13,100 15,400

42,800 2,200 2,900 300 29,100

Africa (Total) Kenya Nigeria Somalia South Africa Zimbabwe

293,600

216,000

109,100

13,300

Caribbean (Total) Afghanistan

17,600 59,000 18,100

13,500 29,500 14,900

9,200 10,000 12,400

8,600 3,500 9,800

47,900 382,800 173,800

38,700 322,000 139,900

157,400 30,700

110,800 11,100

India

83,000 43,600 178,400 579,800 101,200 91,600 3,700 e 11,000 8,200

32,100 35,900 157,700 615,800 109,000 110,900 4,100 48,100 6,600

25,400 30,400 121,000 737,400 81,300 119,500 4,500 53,400 3,900

10,200 30,400 96,400 492,700 33,200 151,700 5,700 76,300 3,300

Cyprus

China Hong Kong Phillipines Bangladesh Pakistan France Germany Ireland Italy Poland Romania Russia Turkey

Foreign-born population: 13.9m – % of total population born abroad (approx): 20% There was no census in 1941. Where not from census/ONS, the figures are calculated and then rounded down to the nearest hundred.

Ben Uri 110 / 25 from Local to Global Telling stories through and from our Collection to a global audience engaged in our 13,000 page (and growing) online presence.

Page 12

benuri.org

benuricollections.org.uk

buru.org.uk

diaspora-artists.net

Solomon Alexander Hart Historical genre painter Solomon Alexander Hart was born into a Jewish family in Plymouth, England in 1806 and has been called ‘the first important AngloJewish artist’; his father, Samuel (fl. 1785-1830), and younger brother, Mordecai (1808-1841), were wellknown engravers. Barred from the local Grammar School because of his Jewish origins, Hart was taught by a Unitarian minister and, unable to afford an apprenticeship premium, learned to draw by copying ancient sculptures at the British Museum. In 1823 he entered the Royal Academy (RA) to study painting, supporting himself by making copies and colouring theatrical prints. James Northcote, R.A. (also from Plymouth) befriended and assisted both Samuel Hart (and later Solomon J. Solomon (1860-1927), who became only the second Jewish Royal Academician, in 1906) at the Royal Academy Schools. Hart’s earliest painting, a portrait miniature of his father, was shown at Somerset House in 1826, the year he also began exhibiting at the RA; he showed his first oil painting, In the Synagogue (The Writing on the ‘Instruction’, there in 1828. In 1830 he showed his first Wall), c.1837–38 works on Jewish subjects, ‘The Elevation of the Law’ (Suffolk Street Gallery) and ‘Polish Synagogue’ at the Society of British Artists – the latter was well received and brought him many commissions. His ‘Conference between Manasseh ben Israel and Oliver Cromwell’, bought by F. D. Mocatta, was presented to Jews’ College London but later lost during the Blitz in 1940-41.

Hart was elected an Associate Royal Academician in 1835 and became the first Jewish Royal Academician in 1840, Professor of Painting (1854–63), and finally, librarian in 1864; he was also an active member of the Athenaeum. Celebrated as a painter of historical scenes, he visited Italy, c.1841–42, making an elaborate series of drawings later used for works on Italian themes. An influential figure, Hart was also curator of the Painted Hall, Greenwich, and an adviser to the British and South Kensington museums. Hart was a member of the Western Synagogue. Among his friends were J. M. W. Turner and Sir William Collins, who is said to have introduced him to his children saying: ‘This is Mr Hart, whom we have just elected Academician [...] Mr Hart is a Jew, and the Jews crucified our saviour, but he is a very good man for all that, and we shall see something more of him now’.

Solomon Alexander Hart died in London, England on 11 June 1881 and is buried, like his father, at the Brompton Cemetery in London. At the time of his death, he was the longestlived of the Royal Academicians. His memoirs were edited by his Athenaeum colleague Alexander Brodie and published posthumously in 1882 as ‘The Reminiscences’. His work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Jewish Museum London, the Laing Art Gallery, The Royal Academy of Arts and the V&A.

Page 13

Lazar Berson Lazar Berson was born into a Jewish family in the village of Skopichky, Russia (now Skapiškis, Lithuania) on 16 October 1882. Little is known about his early life, although he probably spoke Yiddish at home and received a traditional Jewish religious education.

At the turn of the century, he studied painting in St Petersburg, where he was influenced by the Jewish cultural renaissance and the renewed interest in Russian and Jewish folk art and craft. Berson took these ideas to Paris, where he continued his studies, probably as a student under Professor Cormon at the École des Beaux-Arts. Later, Berson described studying ‘together with a prayer quorum of Jewish children’, referring to the large number of mostly eastern-European Jewish émigré artists then working in Paris. Between 1911 and 1912 he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne alongside Marc Chagall, Léon Bakst, Moise Kisling and Jules Pascin, and lived at La Ruche (the beehive), at the same Design for Ben Uri Art Society, 1915 address as the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. In contrast to other École de Paris artists who embraced modernist styles, Berson maintained the decorative approach to traditional folk art and sought to develop a specifically Jewish type of art.

Following the outbreak of the First World War, Berson moved to London, where he set up a portrait studio and wrote articles for Jewish and Yiddish newspapers, espousing his uncompromising Jewish nationalist, Zionist and fierce anti-assimilationist views. In 1915, he realised his long-held ambition of forming a society for Jewish art when he founded ‘The Jewish-National Decorative Art Association (London) Ben Ouri’, in Whitechapel. This enabled him to develop his primary interest in decorative art, and the carving of wooden vessels, plates and boxes with motifs drawn from ancient illuminated manuscripts. In ‘the Ben Uri studio’ in West London, he brought together a number of East End artisans, who together with the jeweller Moshe Oved worked on a series of decorative ‘Jewish’ designs on wooden plates and bowls. In addition, Berson produced the Ben ouri albom, ‘one of the world’s first Yiddish art albums’, printed in 1916 by the Ukrainian-born Hebraist Israel Narodiczky (1874– 1942), as a fundraiser. By 1916, the Society had over 100 members and had organised many events and classes, but in September of that year, Berson left without warning for America, later returning to France. According to another of Ben Uri’s founder members, Judah Beach, Berson was later detained by the Nazis in Nice and deported to Poland but survived the war and later resurfaced in Nice, where he continued to work as a painter until his death. Lazar Berson died in Nice, France on 27 July 1954. Ben Uri holds two copies of the Ben Uri Album (one hand-coloured), commissioned by Berson, as well as other decorative designs and a circular wooden plate for Pesach (Passover). The Jewish Museum London also holds a decorative plate by Berson, commissioned by Morris Myer, editor of the Yiddish daily newspaper Di Tsayt to commemorate a speech given by the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill in 1915.

Page 14

Georg Ehrlich Sculptor, painter and graphic artist Georg Ehrlich was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) on 22 February 1897 and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts, now Angewandte, University of Applied Arts, Vienna) from 1912–15, mastering etching and lithography.

During the First World War, he served in the Austrian army. He later moved to Munich, holding his first solo exhibition there in 1920 and establishing a reputation as a graphic artist working in an Expressionist manner. In 1924, after returning to Vienna, he worked predominantly as a sculptor in a realist style and his first commission, a memorial for the blind organist Josef Labor (1928, Vienna, Central Cemetery), was followed by many others, and he exhibited widely. He was awarded a Gold Medal at the World Exhibition, Paris, in 1937, but in the same year fled to England, joined a few months later by his wife, Bettina (née Bauer, 1903–85), a painter and later a successful illustrator, who also assisted him in casting and patinating his bronzes.

Ehrlich’s work was included in the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art mounted at the New Burlington Galleries in London, as a riposte to the Nazi so-called ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition mounted in Munich in 1937. He held a solo show at Two Sisters, 1945–46 the Matthiesen Gallery, London, in 1939.

In June 1940 Ehrlich was interned as a so-called ‘enemy alien’ in Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man, participating in the first camp exhibition in September 1940. After release, he participated in wartime refugee exhibitions, including those under the auspices of the AIA (Artists’ International Association): Artists’ Aid Russia (1942, Wallace Collection), Artists’ Aid Jewry (1943, Whitechapel) and ‘For Liberty’ exhibition (1943). He exhibited frequently at Ben Uri Gallery in 1944, 1951, 1953, 1955, 1956, 1961 and 1968. His public commissions include a pietà Bombed Child (1943, Chelmsford Cathedral), a small, classical war memorial, Pax (1945, Canley Cemetery, Coventry), and the double-figure, Young Lovers (1951, now in the Festival Gardens outside St Paul’s Cathedral, London). His Two Sisters (1944) is at Essendon Primary School, Welwyn Garden City. A regular Royal Academy exhibitor, Ehrlich became an Academician in 1963, had an Arts Council exhibition in 1964, and was a member of both the Royal Society of British Arts and the London Group. His bronze portrait heads include Benjamin Britten (1950–52).

Georg Ehrlich died in Lucerne, Switzerland, on 1 July 1966, and was buried in Vienna.

A memorial exhibition was held at the O’Hana Gallery, London, in 1968. His work is represented in UK collections including the Arts Council Collection, the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Red House, Aldeburgh, Tate and the V&A, and in many international museums including in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Israel, Italy and the USA.

Page 15

Ben Enwonwu Painter and sculptor Odinigwe Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu MBE, better known as Ben Enwonwu, was born in Onitsha, Nigeria on 14 July 1917; his father was a traditional Igbo sculptor of masks and religious imagery, and his mother was a successful textile merchant. Through his father, he was exposed to art from a young age. Enwonwu studied art under Kenneth C Murray at Government College, Ibadan and Government College, Umuahia (1939-44), and while still a student, his work was included in a group exhibition at Zwemmer Gallery, London in 1937. He held his first solo exhibition in Lagos in 1944 prior to relocating to England on a graduate scholarship to study at Goldsmiths, London (1944); Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford (1944-46); and the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1946-47), followed by postgraduate studies in anthropology in 1948. He became a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland the same year.

The Dancer (Agbogho Mmuo-Maiden Spirit Mark), 1962

Enwonwu also exhibited in group exhibitions with the London Group (1945-46) and a show of ‘modern art’ in Paris in 1946.

Original on loan to In 1947 he held the first in a series of five solo exhibitions at Tate Modern Nigerian William Ohly’s Berkeley Galleries, London (the last in 1955), Modernism exhibition followed, in 1950, by a further series in New York, Boston, Howard University in Washington DC, and Gallery Apollinaire in Milan, consolidating his reputation as a pioneering African modernist. His son, Oliver, has observed that Enwonwu was ‘credited with inventing a Nigerian national aesthetic by fusing indigenous traditions with Western techniques and modes of representation’ (cited Naima Mohamud, Ben Enwonwu: The Nigerian painter behind ‘Africa’s Mona Lisa’ (BBC News, 17 October 2019).

In the 1950s he travelled, lectured and exhibited extensively, especially in the USA and Africa.

He was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II to sculpt her portrait, executed in London in 1957, and unveiled at the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA) later the same year. In 1958 he became a member of the RBA and was awarded an MBE. He maintained a London studio, also lecturing at Lagos University and acting as cultural advisor to the Nigerian government.

He was also a visiting artist at the Institute of African Studies at Howard University, Washington, DC, and Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Ife, Illife, Nigeria.

Ben Enwonwu died in Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria on 5 February 1994. His work is featured in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lagos, in Nigeria and in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Government Art Collection, and the University of Birmingham.

Page 16

Josef Herman Painter and draughtsman Josef Herman was born into a Jewish, working-class family in Warsaw, Poland on 3 January 1911. He studied at the Warsaw School of Art and Decoration (1930-31), and first exhibited in his native city in 1932.

Following increasing anti-Semitism, he left Poland for Brussels in 1938, where he was inspired by the Belgian Expressionists. With the onset of the Second World War, he was forced to flee via southern France and arrived in Glasgow in 1940, where he was reunited with fellow Polish artist Jankel Adler, whom he had known briefly in Warsaw.

Together the two artists contributed, together with Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson, to a resurgence of the Scottish arts scene during this period.

Herman moved briefly to London in 1943, exhibiting at the Lefevre Galleries, London (with L S Lowry, 1943) prior to his relocation to the Welsh mining village of Refugees, c.1941 Ystradgynlais (1944-55), which gave rise to his best-known body of work focusing on the Welsh miners and their community. In 1951 he was included in the South Bank Festival of Britain Exhibition and continued to exhibit widely including with the émigré art dealers Roland, Browse & Delbanco (1946, 1948, 1952, then regularly until 1975), in London, with Ben Uri (including alongside Martin Bloch in 1949), at the Geffrye Museum (with Henry Moore, 1954), the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1956) and Camden Arts Centre (1980), as well as at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff (1989), Abbot Hall, Kendal (2005), and many further exhibitions with Flowers and Flowers East Galleries, who represented him for many years.

Josef Herman died in London, England on 19 February 2000. His work is represented in numerous UK public collections including London (Tate, V&A), Wales (National Museum), Scotland (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art); as well as in Canada, Australia, Israel, South Africa and New Zealand. An exhibition exploring his early years in Warsaw, Brussels, Glasgow and London, 1938-43 was held at Ben Uri Gallery in 2011.

Page 17

Hutchinson Internment Camp, Isle of Man 1940 - 1944

Page 18

Hugo Dachinger Graphic artist, designer, painter and sculptor, Hugo ‘Puck’ Dachinger was born in Gmunden, Upper Austria on 19 September 1908 to Jewish middle-class parents. He studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Leipzig, Germany (1929-32), paying for his tuition by selling portrait drawings and working as a salesman and window-dresser. Afterwards he worked as a graphic designer, moving in 1932 to Vienna, where he invented a system of moveable type (patented in 1933) and established workshops in Leipzig, Zagreb and Budapest. In 1938, travelling via Denmark, he immigrated to England, settling in North London and establishing the successful Transposter Advertising Ltd firm with Ernst Rosenfeld (which closed in 1945). From June 1940–January 1941 Dachinger was interned, first at Huyton, Liverpool and then in Mooragh Camp, Ramsey, on the Isle of Man. After release he married fellow artist and German émigré Meta Gutmann (who nicknamed him ‘Puck’). He exhibited at German-Jewish émigré Portrait of a Man: Wilhem Hollitscher, Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery in London in Internment Camp, 1940 1942 and alongside fellow Austrian artists at the prestigious Redfern and Leger Galleries from 1941–45, also continuing to work as an inventor and designer for various publishing companies. Dachinger’s work has been included in survey exhibitions including Kunst im Exil in Grossbritannien 1933-45 (Berlin, Oberhuasen, Vienna and London, 1986), Art Behind Barbed Wire (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2004) and Ben Uri’s Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain, c. 1933-45 (London, Isle of Man and Birkenhead, 2009–10). Hugo Dachinger died in 1995. In 2012 the Austrian Cultural Forum held the first UK Dachinger retrospective.

His work is held in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the Manx Museum, Isle of Man.

Page 19

Ernst Eisenmayer Painter and sculptor Ernst Eisenmayer was born into a Jewish family of Austro-Hungarian descent in Vienna, Austria on 18 September 1920. Following Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in Germany in 1933 and the rise of increasingly anti-Semitic legislation, followed by the Anschluss (annexation of Austria) in 1938, Eisenmayer was imprisoned, aged 18, in Dachau Concentration Camp, where he witnessed many atrocities and made a series of drawings. In 1939 he managed to escape to England (as he later narrated in his memoir, ‘A Interment in Douglas, 1940 Strange Haircut’), but following the introduction of internment for so-called ‘enemy aliens’ in June 1940, he was interned on the Isle of Man from October 1940 until August 1941, first in Central (situated around a promenade in Douglas), until February 1941, then Onchan (a village north of Douglas, enclosed by barbed wire), and finally at Mooragh Camp in Ramsey. He made art throughout internment, often using improvised materials, sketching portraits of fellow internees, landscapes, camp views and everyday scenes, including a drawing entitled ‘Internment in Douglas’ (1940, now Ben Uri Collection); he also participated in the Onchan camp art exhibition, organised in April 1941, and one of his drawings was reproduced in the camp magazine, ‘The Onchan Pioneer’. After release, he joined the Young Austria movement, where he met fellow refugee artists Erich Deutsch (Eric Doitch) and Heinz Inländer (Henry Inlander) who became close friends, and with whom he afterwards studied at Camberwell School of Art (1946–47). In 1944 his work was included in an exhibition of Austrian art in exile.

Postwar Eisenmayer initially worked for a small London firm designing and making jewellery, but as his reputation grew he decided to become a full-time artist in 1962. He held solo exhibitions in several cities including London, Osaka, and his birthplace, Vienna. In 1962 he held a solo exhibition at Ben Uri’s Berners Street Gallery and ten years later, he became a member of the Ben Uri Arts Committee. Between 1974 and 1988 he lived in Italy, then spent eight years in Amsterdam, before eventually returning to his native Vienna in 1996.

In the same year his work was included in a Ben Uri loan exhibition, ‘Paintings Drawings and Sculpture by Austrian Artists Whose Lives Were Disrupted by the Holocaust’. He died in Vienna, Austria on 27 March 2018.

Eisenmayer’s work later underwent a critical reassessment. In 2002 the exhibition ‘About the Dignity of Man: Ernst Eisenmayer – Life and Work’ was held at the Jewish Museum, Vienna and in 2010 his painting ‘Strip Poker’ closed Ben Uri’s 2010 exhibition ‘Forced Journeys’, which toured to Douglas on the Isle of Man and Birkenhead, to mark the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Manx internment camps, followed by a solo exhibition ‘Art Beyond Exile’ curated by Prof Fran Lloyd at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, and the Sayle Gallery, Douglas, Isle of Man in 2012. Eisenmayer’s work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Kings Lynn Museums, Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery and Southlands College at the University of Roehampton.

Page 20

Michael Schreck Painter and sculptor Michael Henry Schreck was born to Orthodox American-Jewish parents in Tarnów, Austria-Hungary (now Tarnów, Poland) on 13 July 1901. He held American citizenship until 1929 when he applied for naturalisation in Austria. Interested in art from an early age, he was educated in Tarnow and Vienna and later studied fine art in Vienna. In 1923, upon the death of his father, he took over the family Internment Camp Warth business manufacturing ladies clothing. Between 1934 and Mills - Agony, 1940 1938, he frequently visited England on business and in 1935 he established Vienna Fashions Ltd manufacturing dresses of Viennese design in Holborn, London. Following the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria) in March 1938, Schreck moved to England, renaming his company Michael Henry Limited.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War and the subsequent introduction of internment for so-called ‘enemy aliens’ in May 1940, Schreck was interned: firstly, in the notorious Warth Mills internment camp, outside Bury, Greater Manchester, where he produced a sketch detailing the appalling conditions entitled ‘Agony’ (1940, Ben Uri Collection). His fellows internees included Peter Midgley (né Fleischmann), who described the experience as a ‘nightmare’ and Hermann Fechenbach, who went on hunger strike as a result. Schreck was subsequently interned in Onchan Camp on the Isle of Man, where further artist inmates included Jack Bilbo, Henry de Buys Roessingh, Ernst Eisenmayer, and Hermann Nonnenmacher. He contributed drawings to the camp publication, The Onchan Pioneer and exhibited drawings and watercolours at the Interned Artists Exhibition, held in Bilbo’s Cabin in August 1940, as well as the Art and Christmas Card exhibition (1940). A solo show of portraits of fellow internees included Austrian-Jewish businessman Ernst Urbach (whose son, Alexander married refugee artist Eva Aldbrook), as well as John Duffield M.A., Vicar of Onchan, who befriended the internees and lectured at the informal Camp University. Schreck’s wife and children were also interned (1940-41) in a separate camp on the Isle of Man. The whole family was released in November 1941, on condition that Schreck took employment as export manager with a clothing manufacturer in London. His company had ceased trading during his internment but after 1942 he attempted to revive it, employing his wife as secretary.

(We are grateful to Alan Morgenroth and Rachel Pistol for this information). Despite being granted naturalisation in 1948, he left shortly afterwards for Canada, settling in Outremont, Quebec, in 1953. He continued to make excursions to and networks within continental Europe, including in 1964 when he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, and was awarded the Grand Prix International, Deauville and a ‘Mention Grand Finale’ at the Prix International de Vichy. He was awarded the Prix Rencontre International, Chateau de Senou, France in 1965.

He also visited Italy and became a member of the Accademia Italia.

In the late 1950s Schreck immigrated to the USA, where he remained for the rest of his life. His work included portraits, landscapes, riverscapes and latterly, abstracts, as well as sculpture, including modernist marbles and a number of bronzes in a Brutalist manner. A book on Shreck’s sculpture (authored by Alfred Werner) was published by the University of Miami Press in 1975.

Michael Schreck died at his home in Hollywood, Florida, USA on 2 August 1999.

In the UK his work is held in the Ben Uri Collection.

Page 21

Oscar Nemon Oscar Nemon (né Oskar Neumann) was born into a Jewish family in Osijek, Austria-Hungary (now Croatia) on 13 March 1906. In 1924 he moved to Vienna, hoping to study at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, but after being rejected, worked at his uncle’s bronze foundry.

In 1925, Nemon moved to Brussels and studied sculpture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, winning a gold medal. He remained in Brussels until 1938, visiting Vienna in 1931, where he sculpted Sigmund Freud.

Soon afterwards he changed his surname to Némon (later using Nemon). In year, he held a solo exhibition at the Académie, exhibiting portrait heads of the Belgian establishment including PaulHenri Spaak, King Albert I and Emile Vandervelde.

Winston Churchill, 1950s Due to rising anti-Semitism, Nemon fled Brussels in 1935, travelling between Belgium and England, until 1938, when he settled in London (he was naturalised in 1948). Most of the Osijek Jewish community perished during the Holocaust. In 1939, against the wishes of her family, Nemon married Patricia Villiers-Stuart, and they settled in the Oxford suburbs. Nemon continued to make busts and portraits throughout his career, working predominantly in clay, plaster and stone, with finished works cast in bronze. His portrait busts included John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate Gallery; Karl Parker, Keeper of the Department of Fine Art, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Max Beerbohm, essayist and caricaturist, and members of the British Royal Family including Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother; Earl Mountbatten of Burma; and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Nemon’s best known works are public statues of Winston Churchill, who named Nemon as his favourite sculptor; they are widely sited including at the House of Commons, London, and Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto. The Ashmolean Museum held a retrospective in 1982 and Nemon completed his last major work, a monumental memorial to the Royal Canadian Air Force in Toronto, in 1984.

Oscar Nemon died in Oxford, England on 13 April 1985. His works are in public collections including the Ashmolean Museum, the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, the Freud Museum, the Government Art Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Palace of Westminster.

Page 22

Kurt Schwitters Installation artist, painter and poet, Kurt Schwitters was born into an affluent family in Hanover, Germany on 20 June 1887 and studied art in Hanover and Dresden. He produced his first abstract paintings in 1917, associated with avant-garde circles and exhibited regularly at Galerie Der Sturm between 1918 and 1928. Partly influenced by the Dadaists, in 1919 he created his own idiosyncratic form of art: ‘Merz’ – a term derived from the name ‘Kommerzund-Privatbank’ which appeared on a scrap of newspaper – uniting all aspects of his prolific output: painting, collage, sculpture, architecture, poetry, drama, typography and happenings. From 1923 his home in Hanover became his most complete Merzbau installation, its rooms filled with the detritus of everyday life alongside larger-scale architectural elements. In 1930 he exhibited with Cercle et Carré in Paris and in 1931 joined the group AbstractionDouglas from the Internment Camp, 1940 Création.

In January 1937 Schwitters fled to Norway, joining his son Ernst, and in December began a second Merzbau in Lysaker (destroyed by fire in 1951). In July in Munich the Nazis mounted the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, including four of Schwitters’ works previously confiscated from German museums and the following year his work was also included in the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art at the New Burlington Galleries in London, organised as a riposte to the Nazi show. In April 1940 Schwitters and Ernst fled for Britain, where they were moved between internment camps in Scotland and England before arriving in Hutchinson Camp (known as the ‘artists’ camp’ due to the high number of artist internees) on the Isle of Man in mid July 1940. Schwitters painted portraits and landscapes, performed his poetry, created ephemeral Merz and participated in a camp exhibition (November 1940), also contributing drawing and short stories to the camp’s newspaper, The Camp Almanac. After his release in late November 1941, Schwitters remained in London and contributed works to mixed exhibitions at Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery in London (1942 and 1944), also holding there his only solo exhibition in England in December 1944, with a catalogue introduction by Herbert Read. He also exhibited with the Artists’ International Association and at exhibitions supporting aid to Russia and to China.

A solo exhibition of 19 of his works was held at the Kunstmuseum, Bern in early 1945; in June that year he moved to the Lake District, where he lived until his death, participating in Artists’ Society exhibitions in Grasmere. With the original Hannover Merzbau destroyed by allied bombing in 1943, Schwitters created a new Merzbau on a barn wall in Ambleside, funded by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Kurt Schwitters died in Kendal, Lake District, England on 8 January 1948.

His work is now represented in many major European and international collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Tate, and MoMA, New York.

The Sprengel Museum, Hanover holds the Schwitters archive, and the most comprehensive documentation of his work and the Ambleside Merzbau has now been recreated by the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University.

Page 23

Josef Herman See page 17 for full biography

Internment Camp Portraits, Norwood, 1940

Refugees, 1941 Page 24

W W II - GENOCIDE

Page 25

Marc Chagall Artist Marc Chagall was born into a Jewish family in the town of Vitebsk, Russia (now in Belarus) on 7 July 1887. He attended a traditional Jewish school and a Russian high school, moving to St Petersburg in 1907, where he studied at the Imperial School for the Protection of the Fine Arts, and later at the Zvantseva School, led by Léon Bakst. In May 1911, Chagall arrived in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie de La Palette and settled at La Ruche (the Beehive) studios in Montparnasse, mixing with other Jewish immigrant artists, subsequently known as the Ecole de Paris juifs, including Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine, as well as key figures in French modernism, among them Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay.

Chagall frequently used animals for symbolic purposes in his dream-like paintings that brought together aspects of French tradition with Russian folklore and Jewish motifs. His first solo exhibition took place at Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin, in 1914 and he returned to Russia to visit his family the same year.

During his visit, the outbreak of the First World War Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio, 1945–47 prevented his return to Paris and following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, he was appointed Fine Arts Commissar for the province of Vitebsk. In 1922 he left again for Berlin, where his work was published by the periodical Der Sturm.

In 1923 Chagall returned to Paris, where he stayed until 1940, becoming a French citizen in 1937. He visited Palestine in 1931. Following the German occupation in May 1940, Chagall and his wife Bella remained in ‘Vichy France’, until one year later, with help from Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art (who added Chagall’s name to that of prominent artists and intellectuals at risk), the American journalist Varian Fry and American Vice-Consul in Marseilles, Hiram Bingham IV, the Chagalls escaped to the USA on forged visas. They found refuge in New York, where Chagall remained for the rest of the war, however, after Bella’s sudden death in September 1944, Chagall plunged into mourning and stopped painting until the following April when news of the Holcaust breaking through pathé newsreels compelled his artistic response. In 1946 a major Chagall retrospective was held at The Museum of Modern Art; he remained in America for a further two years before returning to France in 1948, and settling in the south-eastern town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1952. In later life, Chagall produced the windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem depicting the Twelve Tribes of Israel. He also accepted commssions for stained-glass schemes for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, the Peace Window for the UN in New York (1963-64), and the windows in memory of Sarah d’AvigdorGoldsmid at Tudeley chapel in Kent (1968-85). Marc Chagall died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France on 28 March 1985. The Musée National Marc Chagall is in Nice and his work is in international collections all over the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris; and in the UK, the Ben Uri Collection, and the Tate, London.

Page 26

George Grosz George Grosz (né Georg Ehrenfried Groß) was born in 1893 in Berlin, Germany. After expulsion from school, he trained at the Dresden Academy and later at the school of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin (under Emil Orlik); he was greatly influenced by graphic artists including William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier and by popular art forms including graffiti. From 1916 he began to paint in oils and his lithographs featured regularly in books and magazines including ‘Ulk’. He served twice during the First World War (the first time as a volunteer) and was twice discharged for medical reasons. This experience sharpened his political conscience resulting in a series of bitingly satirical works that were particularly critical of militarism, corruption and hypocrisy and, as a mark of disrespect for German militarism, he Americanised his name (along with John Heartfield) in 1917 and joined the Sparticist uprising in 1918. Between 1917 and Final Solution, 1941 1920 Grosz was a prominent member of the Dada movement in Berlin and also became the leading exponent of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. He held his first solo exhibition in Munich in 1920 and his first retrospective in Brussels in 1932.

In 1933, only days before Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship of Germany, Grosz moved to New York to avoid persecution under the Nazi regime and to take up the offer of a teaching post at the Art Students League of New York. In his absence, he was stripped of his German citizenship, 285 of his works were confiscated from public collections and many, together with a number of his books and portfolios, were destroyed. In New York he produced a hard-hitting series of works criticising the Nazi regime including The Interrogation and The Lecture (both Ben Uri Collection), featuring his friend the Jewish Communist and writer Erich Mühsam, tortured and murdered by the Nazis in Orianeburg Concentration Camp. In 1937 Grosz’s work was included, in his absence, in the infamous ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition that opened in Munich before touring throughout Germany and Austria; the following year, he was also represented in the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art mounted at the New Burlington Galleries in London, as a riposte to the Nazi show, although later he largely abandoned his satirical work for landscapes and still-lifes.

In 1938 Grosz became a naturalised American citizen and published his autobiography, ‘A Little Yes and a Big No’ in New York in 1946, but, disillusioned with the ‘American Dream’, he returned to postwar Berlin in 1959. Georg Grosz died in Berlin, Germany, shortly after his return on 6 July 1959, after falling down the stairs. His work is represented in the UK in the Ben Uri Collection, the Fitzwilliam Museum and Tate, as well as in many international museum collections.

Page 27

Immigrant artists from across the world enriching British visual culture

Page 28

Clara Klinghoffer Painter Clara (née Chaje Esther) Klinghoffer was born into a Jewish family in Szerzezec, a village near Lwów (now Lviv), in Polish Galicia, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Ukraine) on 18 May 1900. She moved to England with her family at the age of three, settling first in Manchester, before moving to London’s East End. She drew from a young age, briefly taking classes at the John Cass Institute in Aldgate in 1914, before moving to the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Duncan Grant and Bernard Meninsky (1915–18) - the latter famously declared ‘Good Heavens! That child draws like da Vinci’ and she quickly established a reputation as the new ‘girl genius’, gaining a bursary to the Slade School of Fine Art (1918–20) under Prof. Henry Tonks. While still a student, recommended

by Alfred Wolmark, she held her first exhibition at the Hampstead Art Gallery in 1920. Further solo exhibitions at prestigious London galleries followed: the Leicester Galleries, London (1923, 1932), the Redfern Gallery (1926, 1929, 1938) and Godfrey Phillips Galleries (1929); she also exhibited with the Goupil Gallery salons – where her drawings, especially studies of women and children (often based on her six sisters) were frequently likened to Raphael – as well as with the New English Art Club (NEAC), the London Group, the Women’s International Club, the Royal Academy and the Carnegie International. In 1923 Girl in Sari, 1926 and 1927 her work was included in exhibitions of ‘Jewish art’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (although she disliked this label).

In 1926 she married Dutch journalist Joop Stoppelman and moved with him to Paris in 1928. Following her solo exhibition in Amsterdam in 1928, they moved to Holland with their children in 1930. She continued to show at the NEAC in London, becoming a member in 1933; in 1935 her painting ‘The Girl in the Green Sari’ was shown at Ben Uri, having been acquired for the Ben Uri Collection (the first work by a female artist to enter the permanent collection) the same year; her work was subsequently included in numerous exhibitions from 1946 onwards. In 1939, aware of the imminent threat of German invasion, the family moved again, this time to America, settling in New York, where Klinghoffer held solo exhibitions in 1941, 1951 and 1958. In her later years, however, her work suffered from the decline in demand for figurative painting; her final solo show was in Mexico City in 1969.

Clara Klinghoffer died in London, England on 18 April 1970. A private exhibition was held in London in 1972, with retrospectives at the Belgrave Gallery, London in 1976 and Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle in 1977. More recently, her work was included in two 2018 exhibitions rediscovering neglected female artists: ‘Prize and Prejudice’ (UCL) and ‘50 50: Fifty Works by Fifty British Women Artists 19001915 (Mercer’s Hall, London; and University of Leeds). She is represented in UK collections including Aberdeen Art Gallery, the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, Kettle’s Yard, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate.

Page 29

Lancelot Ribiero Artist Lancelot (né Lanceloté José Belarmino) Ribeiro was born into a Catholic family from Goa (then a Portuguese colony) in Bombay (now Mumbai), India on 28 November 1933. He moved to England in 1950 to study accountancy (which he hated), initially living with his half-brother, the painter F. N. Souza, switching in 1951 to study life drawing at St. Martin’s School of Art (until 1953), as well as writing poetry (from 1954) and experimenting with jewellery design. Following National Service in the RAF in 1954, Ribeiro returned to Bombay in 1955 and continued as a poet, becoming a full-time artist in 1958. He held his first solo exhibition at the Bombay Artist Aid Centre in 1961, a sell-out which gained him a commission to paint a 12ft mural for Tata Iron and Steel, and also participated in the exhibition Ten Indian Painters which toured Europe and North America. In 1962, Ribeiro was nominated for the All India Gold Medal and returned to London, co-founding the Indian Painters’ Collective, UK (IPC) in 1963 and initiating the exhibition Six Indian Painters at India House, London in 1964; he held a solo exhibition at Everyman Gallery, Hampstead in 1965.

In 1972, he lectured on Indian Art and Culture at the Commonwealth Institute, co-founding the Rainbow Art Group in 1976, which evolved into the Indian Artists UK group in 1978. He went on to exhibit extensively in both solo and group shows in India, Europe, the USA and Canada.

King Lear, 1964 original on loan to the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts exhibition ‘Eye Witness’

Ribeiro’s early work, principally townscapes and portraits, was inspired by Indian and Goan architecture and the Christian tradition. He later experimented with polyvinyl acetate (PVA), a precursor of acrylic paint, which had a reduced drying time, and employed a brilliant palette, largely embracing abstraction from the 1960s-80s, also exploring landscape and the practice of Tantra.

Retrospectives were held at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery (1986) and Swiss Cottage Library Gallery (1987). Lancelot Ribeiro died in London, England on 25 December 2010.

In the accompanying catalogue to the posthumous exhibition, ‘Restless Ribeiro’, at Asia House, London in 2013, his friend, the Indian poet, translator and critic R. Parthasarathy, observed that Ribeiro’s ‘true subject’ was his ‘origins – Goan roots, estrangement from India, and exile in London. How does a human being come to terms with multiple histories and in the process achieve wholeness’. Ribeiro is represented in UK collections including the British Museum; Burgh House, Hampstead; New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester; Tate; the University of Sussex and the V&A. In 2020 his work was included in Ben Uri’s virtual exhibition, ‘Midnight’s Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain’.

Page 30

Nasser Azam Sculptor and painter Nasser Azam was born in Jhelum, Pakistan in 1963 and moved to London, England with his parents in 1970.

Initially, he pursued a career in the financial sector, maintaining his artistic practice in his spare time in a make-shift Birmingham studio. His early works depicted family life, and were more consciously religious rather than political, as he experimented with a number of painting styles ranging from symbolism to abstraction. In 1983 he was interviewed for a BBC documentary.

After travelling widely in Japan, Europe and The Newborn, 1981 America, Azam became Artist-in-Residence at County Hall Gallery, London (2007–10), holding two exhibitions, ‘Anatomica’, inspired by illustrations in both fashion magazines and medical textbooks (2008) and ‘Life in Space’ (2009). In the same year, his monumental abstract bronze, ‘The Dance,’ was unveiled on London’s South Bank, opposite the Houses of Parliament. A series of performance paintings, carried out in extremte conditions followed, including in 2010 a visit to the ice deserts of Antarctica resulting in 13 large paintings, displayed in the Tokyo Metro, Japan and London Underground in 2011. In 2012 his 12-metre-high bronze sculpture, ‘Athena’, was unveiled at London City Airport, followed by a six-metre bronze, ‘Evolutionary Loop 517’, outside the Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, in May 2013. Two years later, his threemetre-high commissioned portrait painting of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist, Nobel prizewinner and refugee, was unveiled at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (now displayed permanently at Birmingham University). In 2019, London’s Saatchi Gallery hosted Azam’s largest and most comprehensive solo exhibition to date, displaying paintings inspired by his journey to Lake Saiful Malook, near the mountains of Kashmir.

Nasser Azam lives and work in London. His work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Aberdeen University and Birmingham University. He has also carried out commissioned work for the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland, in Dublin.

Page 31

Tam Joseph

The Hand Made Map of the World, 2013

Tam Joseph was born in Roseau on the Caribbean island of Dominica and immigrated to England in 1955 at the age of eight. He studied at the Central School of Art and Design and then at the Slade School of Fine Art, afterwards working on ‘Yellow Submarine’, the animated film featuring the Beatles. During the 1960s-70s, he travelled in Europe and the Far East, then studied typography at the London College of Printing. He worked for the magazine ‘Africa Journal’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s, also travelling extensively in Africa. In 1979 he illustrated the children’s book ‘Titch the Cat’ by Buchi Emecheta. His works include ‘UK School Report’ (1980), depicting the passage of a Black youth through the British education system in three portraits captioned: ‘Good at sports’, ‘Likes music’ and ‘Needs surveillance’, and ‘Spirit of the Carnival’ (1982), referencing the uneasy relationship that existed between Black communities and the police in Britain during the early 1980s, particularly at the annual Notting Hill Carnival, which was purchased for Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2016 with the assistance of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant.

Tam Joseph has exhibited extensively in group shows in the UK, including ‘No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990’ (Guildhall Art Gallery, 2015), and ‘Life Between Islands Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now’ (Tate, 2021-22), as well as in France, the USA and Senegal.

His work is held in UK public collections including the Arts Council Collection, the Ben Uri Collection, Bradford Museums & Galleries, Glasgow Museum Resource Centre, Museums Sheffield, Tate, and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. In September 2023 Joseph featured in the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Reunion’, exploring the foundation of the BLK Art Group. ‘Tam Joseph: I Know What I See’, an extensive survey of his work covering paintings and sculpture from over 40 years, with an introduction

by Eddie Chambers, was published in 2023. Tam Joseph lives and works in London.

Page 32

Eva Frankfurther Eva Frankfurther was born into a cultured, assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, Germany on 10 February 1930. Following the rise of National Socialism in Germany, she escaped to London with her siblings (her father and stepmother followed a few months later) in 1939 and the family settled in Belsize Park. In the early 1940s she was enrolled at South Hampstead Girls School, with her older sister, Beate, and both were evacuated to Berkhamsted during the Blitz.

After the war, she studied at St Martin’s School of Art (194651), where her fellow students included Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, who recalled Frankfurther’s ‘contempt for professional tricks or gloss’ and her work as ‘full of feeling for people’ (cited M. Bohm Duchen, in ed., B. Planskoy, ‘Eva Frankfurther 1930-59: Paintings, lithographs and drawings, London: Peter Halban, 2001). She exhibited alongside her contemporaries in the Seventh Exhibition of Paintings, West Indian Waitresses, c.1955 Lithographs & Sculpture by Students of St Martin’s School of Art at the Coffee House Gallery, Leicester Square (c. 1949-51).

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 counter-hand 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. ‘West Indian, Irish, Cypriot and Pakistani immigrants, English whom the Welfare State had passed by, these were the people amongst whom I lived and made some of my best friends’, she observed. ‘My colleagues and teachers were painters concerned with form and colour, while to me these were only means to an end, the understanding of and commenting on people.’ Although she avoided the art establishment, she participated regularly in the East End Academy’s annual exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1952– 57) and in Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists at Ben Uri Gallery in 1956. Between 1948 and 1958 she also travelled extensively in Europe and in her last year, spent eight months living and working in Israel. She returned to London in October 1958; suffering from depression, she took her own life in January 1959.

In 1962 a posthumous retrospective was held at Ben Uri Gallery in London, followed by further solo shows at Clare College, Cambridge (1979), Bedford Central Library (1980), Margaret Fisher Gallery (1981), and a memorial exhibition at the Boundary Gallery (2001), curated by her sister, Beate Planskoy, and Agi Katz. She has been the focus of two further exhibitions at Ben Uri Gallery, ‘Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry’ (2014), showing the artist in the context of her peers, and ‘Refugees: The Lives of Others’ (2017), launching a dedicated website to the artist. Her work has also been included in numerous mixed exhibitions including ‘Kunst im Exil in Grossbritannien 1933-45’ (Berlin, 1986) and ‘Postwar Modern’ at the Barbican (2022). Eva Frankfurther’s work is in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection; Clare College, University of Cambridge; The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards, University of Cambridge and South Hampstead Girls School, as well as private collections in the UK and abroad.

Page 33

Frank Auerbach Painter Frank Auerbach was born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Germany on 29 April 1931 and, following the rise of Nazism, was sent to England in 1939 via a private scheme set up by the British-born writer Iris Origo; his parents, who remained behind, subsequently perished in concentration camps. Auerbach spent his childhood at Bunce Court, an independent, private boarding school, relocated following Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 by its founder Anna Essinger from south Germany to the village of Otterden, in Kent, and providing a haven for its mostly Jewish refugee pupils.

He attended St Martin’s School of Art (1948–52) and studied at David Bomberg’s evening classes Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II, 2004 at Borough Polytechnic together with Leon Kossoff, as well as at the Royal College of Art (1952–55).

In 1956 Auerbach participated in a group show at Ben Uri Gallery, and in the same year was given his first solo exhibition by dealer Helen Lessore at the Beaux-Arts Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1963. The artist was for many years represented by the Marlborough Galleries in London, and then by Marlborough’s former Director Geoffrey Parton. In 1976 Auerbach was one of a loose group of figurative painters selected by R. B. Kitaj for the exhibition ‘The Human Clay’, giving rise to the controversial label ‘The School of London’, although he stated that he did not feel part of this or any group.

Auerbach occupied the same studio in Mornington Crescent (formerly occupied by Kossoff, and before him Gustav Metzger) in Camden for almost 70 years and the surrounding area was a frequent subject in his painting, executed in a characteristic vigorous impasto, for which he mades often hundreds of preliminary drawings. He focused on a close circle of family and friends as sitters including E. O. W. (Estella Olive West), Juliet Yardley Mills, his wife Julia (née Wolstenholme) and art historian and curator Catherine Lampert. Auerbach had retrospectives at the Hayward Gallery (1978) and Tate Britain (2015) and numerous solo exhibitions including at the British Pavilion in the 1986 Venice Biennale and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (1989).

Frank Auerbach died in London, England on 11 November 2024. His work is included in numerous collections throughout the UK including Abbot Hall, the Arts Council, the Ben Uri Collection, the British Council, Pallant House Gallery, the National Gallery, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Royal College of Art, and Tate, as well as many international collections.

Page 34

Oskar Kokoschka Artist, poet, playwright and teacher Oskar Kokoschka was born in Pöchlarn, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1886. He studied at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) and became an associate of the Wiener Werkstätte design workshops in 1907. He exhibited at the first Vienna Kunstschau in 1909 and held his first solo show at the Galerie Paul Cassirer, Berlin in 1910, also contributing to Herwarth Walden’s Expressionist periodical Der Sturm. During the First World War he was wounded, while serving on the Houses of Parliament, 1967 eastern front and settled in Dresden while recovering in 1917. The first monograph of his work was published by Paul Westheim in 1918 and the following year Kokoshka became a professor at the Akademie. During the 1920s and 1930s he travelled widely in Europe (including London in 1925 and 1926), North Africa, and the Middle East, returning to Vienna in 1931, where his defence of the Jewish painter Max Liebermann brought him into opposition with the Nazi regime.

Escaping Vienna’s political turmoil, he moved to Prague in 1934 to paint a commissioned portrait of Czechoslovakian president Tomáš G. Masaryk. In 1937 eight of Kokoschka’s paintings were included in the Nazis’ Entartete Kunst (‘degenerate art’) exhibition including a Self-Portrait, that he afterwards reworked to ironically reflect the ‘degenerate’ label.

The following July, 19 of his works were included in the London exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art at the New Burlington Galleries, intended as a riposte to the Nazi show. In October 1938 Kokoschka and Olda Palkovská, his future wife, fled to England, settling initially in London. He exhibited in the First Group Exhibition of German Austrian Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors at the Wertheim Gallery in 1939 and served as Honorary President of the Free German League of Culture (FGLC) from 1941, after a brief spell in Cornwall. Their North London circle included German Jewish refuge artist Fred Uhlman, through whose wife Diana, daughter of the Conservative MP Henry Page Croft, Kokoschka was commissioned to paint portraits of Michael and Posy Croft, also painting the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky (1943, Tate).

In 1947 the émigrée art historian Edith Hoffmann authored the first English-language Kokoschka monograph and in 1950 he was commissioned by Count Antoine Seilern to create a monumental ceiling mural, the Prometheus Triptych (now The Courtauld Institute of Art), for his London house. In 1953 the Kokoschkas left England for Villeneuve in Switzerland. A retrospective was held at the Tate Gallery in 1962. In this period Kokoschka was commissioned by German-Jewish émigré Bernhard Baer, director of the Ganymed Press in London, to create 16 original lithographs for a deluxe limited edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which Kokoschka called his ‘most beloved work in print’, disseminated through Marlborough Fine Art in London by Viennese-born gallerist Harry Fischer. In 1966 Pragueborn émigré art historian J. P. Hodin published his Kokoschka biography; followed by the artist’s own autobiography in 1974.

Oskar Kokoschka died in Montreux, Switzerland on 22nd February 1980. His works are held in major collections in the UK including the Ben Uri Collection, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Tate and the V&A, as well as many international collections.

Page 35

All Roads Lead to Whitechapel

Page 36

Mark Gertler Mark Gertler was born the fifth and youngest child of Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents in Spitalfields, London, England on 9 December 1891. During a period of economic downturn, the family was repatriated to Przemyśl, Galicia, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire (now Southern Poland), the following year. After his father’s departure to seek work in America, the family lived on the brink of starvation until eventually they were reunited in London in 1896. Following a brief apprenticeship at Clayton and Bell stained-glass makers, and evening classes at the Regent School Polytechnic, Gertler entered the Slade School of Fine Art in 1908, with a loan from the Jewish Education Aid Society; twice winning the Slade scholarship and leaving with another from the British Institution in 1911. He began exhibiting while still a student with Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club in 1910, had a joint show with John Currie at the Chenil Galleries, Chelsea in 1912, and began showing with the New English Art Club the same year. In 1914 his work The Coster Woman, 1923 was included in the so-called ‘Jewish Section’, co-curated

by Bomberg and Jacob Epstein at the exhibition ‘Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. He was turned down for military service during the First World War, firstly on the grounds of his ‘Austrian’ parentage, then later, after being called up in 1918 was excused active service on the grounds of ill health and not forced to publicly declare his pacifist convictions, which were instead expressed in his anti-war painting Merry-Go-Round (1916, Tate). Although offered a commission as a war artist, after an attack of depression, he left it unfulfilled.

Gertler was a leading member of the London Group from 1915 onwards, exhibited with Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop in 1917 and 1918 and participated regularly in the Goupil Salons (1915-37). He had five solo shows at the Goupil Gallery, London (1921, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1926), but tuberculosis, first diagnosed in 1920, seriously undermined his health, frequently confining him to sanatoria: from November 1920 until May 1921, and then again, in 1925, 1929 and 1936. He had six further solo shows in his final decade: at the Leicester Galleries, London (1928, 1930, 1932 and 1934) and at the Lefevre Galleries, London in 1937 and 1939; from 1934, until its closure on the eve of the Second World War, he also taught part-time at the Westminster School of Art. In 1934 and 1937 his work was also included in group shows at the Ben Uri Gallery.

Suffering from ill health and depression, Gertler committed suicide on 23 June 1939.

Memorial exhibitions were held at the Leicester Galleries in 1941, Ben Uri Gallery in 1944 and Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1949. Posthumous solo exhibitions have been held at The Minories, Colchester, and tour (1971), Camden Arts Centre (1992), and Ben Uri Gallery, London (1982, 2002 and 2019), with a further show at Piano Nobile Gallery (2012) and a Tate room display in 2018. His work is held in more than 40 UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Southampton City Art Gallery, the Tate and the V&A.

Page 37

Alfred Wolmark Aaron Wolmark was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland on 28 December 1877, and moved to England with his family in 1883, first to Devon and then to the East End of London.

He trained at the Royal Academy (from 1895), where he added the English ‘Alfred’ to his name, exhibiting there (1901–36), as well as with the Allied Artists Association (1908–16) and the International Society (1911–25). He had his first solo exhibition at Bruton Galleries in London (1905). Wolmark’s teenage years in London’s East End and two lengthy stays in his native Poland between 1903–6, had a huge visual and spiritual, impact on his early Rembrandtesque work and Jewish subject matter.

Sabbath Afternoon, c.1909–10 In July 1911, after an artistic epiphany on honeymoon in Concarneau, Brittany, Wolmark jettisoned his early methods in favour of the ‘New Art’ and embarked upon the pioneering ‘colourist’ path that he followed for the next two decades of his working life. A pioneer as a painter of both the Jewish community in London’s East End and as an early modernist, Wolmark has been called the ‘father’ of the Whitechapel Boys. He was the only artist to be included in both the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s 1906 ‘Jewish Art and Antiquities Exhibition’ and in David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein’s ‘Jewish Section’ at the 1914 exhibition ‘TwentiethCentury Art: A Review of Modern Movements’.

Wolmark exhibited regularly with the Ben Uri Art Society, as well as at the Grafton (1911, 1916, 1917) and Whitechapel Galleries (1910, 1914, 1927, 1956). In 1915 he co-founded the JAAS (Jewish Association of Arts and Sciences) with Adrian Alfred Woolfstein (Adrian Wolfe). Closely associated with the Ben Uri for many years: in 1925, together with Solomon J Solomon, Wolmark presided over the official opening of the Ben Uri’s first gallery in Great Russell Street, also acting as Vice-President from 1923–56, and as an adviser on purchasing policy. In the 1930s he introduced Cyril Ross and Ethel Solomon (Mrs Robert Solomon) to the Society. His oeuvre also included theatre designs for two Diaghilev ballets, pottery and stained-glass windows. Despite his success, Wolmark was rejected from both the London Group (1914) and the Royal Academy (1938). He died in London, England on 6 January 1961. His work is in many UK collections including the Arts Council Collection, the Ferens Art Gallery, the Government Art Collection, the Jerwood Collection, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), the National Portrait Gallery, Southampton City Art Gallery and The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery at the University of Leeds.

Page 38

Moshe Oved Writer, sculptor, jeweller, founder of the antique jewellery shop Cameo Corner, and dealer in cameos and antique jewellery, Mosheh Oved (aka Edward Goodack or Edward Good) was born into a Jewish family in Skepe, then within the Russian Empire (now Poland) in 1885. In 1903 he immigrated to England and settled in London’s East End, where he initially worked as a watchmaker. After establishing Cameo Corner, located first at 1 New Oxford Street, and after the Second World War in Museum Street, he also designed and made his own jewellery and metalwork. In the 1920s Oved met his future wife, jewellery designer Gwendoline Ethel Rendell (1900–1983); largely selftaught, she had worked for the Arts and Crafts jeweller John Paul Cooper, and by 1924 had her own workshop in Doughty Street under the name of Miss Rendle. She converted to Judaism and took the name Sah Oved, producing radical jewellery in the interwar and postwar years.

Oved was a founding member of the Ben Uri Society in 1915 Determined, 1946-48 and made a gold and diamond brooch to Lazar Berson’s design for Ben Uri in 1916. He was a great supporter of Yiddish culture, holding an honorary office within Ben Uri from its inception until 1956, and always maintaining that its main goal should be to collect pictures and open a gallery. The collection in these years was influenced by his taste as he helped to fund and facilitate the acquisition of a number of important early works by artists including Simeon Solomon, Jacob Kramer, David Bomberg and Samuel Hirszenberg. In 1924 his portrait was painted by fellow Polish artist Maurice Minkowski and Oved presented it to the Ben Uri Collection in 1929.

Oved collected 124 autobiographical stories and short tales in his book Visions and Jewels (1925), and included anecdotes about Max Nordau, Sholem Asch and Jacob Epstein, among many others. His other volume, The Book of Affinity (1933) was a deluxe production with original colour lithographs by Epstein (Oved presented two busts by Epstein to Ben Uri in 1947).

From 1927 to 1937 the Oveds lived in Jerusalem, afterwards returning to London. According to anecdote, it was while sheltering in the basement of Cameo Corner during the Blitz, that Oved first began casting in wax animal rings designed by Sah to steady his trembling hands.

He took up sculpting at the end of the war. In 1948 an exhibition, Sculptural Expressions by Mosheh Oved, comprising 16 bronze heads, 15 ‘Beasts and Birds’, 7 candelabra, described as ‘in commemoration of the 6,000,000 exterminated Jews’, and a piece described as ‘Chessman’, executed between 1946 and 1948, was held at St George’s Gallery, 81 Grosvenor Street, London, then under the directorship of Viennese émigré Lea Bondi Jaray. A foreword describes how ‘At the age of 60 Mosheh Oved long known as a writer has found a new way of expressing his fantasies and visions through the medium of sculpture.

This exhibition is the product of the last two years work’.

Mosheh Oved died in London, England in 1958. His work is represented in the UK in the Ben Uri Collection. Examples of Sah Oved’s jewellery are held in the V&A. Page 39

David Bomberg David Bomberg was born to PolishJewish parents in Birmingham, England on 12 May 1890. The family moved to Whitechapel in 1895, where he later became prominent among the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ - the term applied to a loose, informal group of young, Jewish, mainly immigrant artists who were either born, raised or worked in the East End in the first two decades of the 20th century, and who, both collectively, and individually, made an important contribution to British Racehorses, 1912-13 Modernism. Initially apprenticed as a chromolithographer, he attended night classes under Walter Sickert and also worked as an artist’s model before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was seen as a ‘disturbing influence’. In 1913 Bomberg visited Paris with Jacob Epstein, making contact with artists including Modigliani and Picasso. Bomberg’s harrowing service in the trenches during the First World War was compounded by a disastrous experience as a commissioned war artist, explored in a series of related drawings. His postwar disillusionment is most powerfully expressed in the masterly Ghetto Theatre (1920), purchased the same year for the Ben Uri Collection, initiating a lifelong relationship. Afterwards Bomberg made a series of peopled landscapes before travelling in 1923 to Jerusalem, where he began to work en plein air for the first time. Following expeditions to Jericho, Petra and Wadi Kelt, he produced a series of detailed, realistic landscapes, which evolved from tightly topographical treatments into a looser, characteristically expressionistic style, heralding the painterly achievements of his final years.

After a series of disappointments in the 1930s and 1940s Bomberg concentrated on portraits of friends and family, as well as a series of searching self-portraits. Although only reluctantly granted a Second World War commission to paint a bomb store in 1942, Bomberg produced many drawings and paintings on the subject, among them an impressive, large-scale study for a projected (but unrealised) mural. Following his visit to Spain in 1929, a renewed vigour resulted in a series of works based on the cathedral at Toledo, flowering on his second visit in 1934–35, into dramatic landscapes of the gorge at Ronda and flickering night-time processions during Holy Week. These experiments were curtailed by the onset of the Spanish Civil War, but over a decade later picked up and progressed in the west country, where his loosened handling verged on the abstract, and in Cyprus in 1948. His final works culminated in the fulfillment of his early promise after his return to Ronda, where he spent his last years. After becoming seriously ill, Bomberg travelled back to England, but died in London shortly after his return, on 19 August 1957.

His work is represented in the UK in a number of important public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Tate, and the V&A. A posthumous touring exhibition (Pallant House, Chichester; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; Ben Uri Gallery, London), accompanied by a monograph, was organised by Ben Uri in 2017-18.

Page 40

Jacob Epstein Sculptor Jacob Epstein was born into a relatively prosperous family of Russian/Polish-Jewish immigrants in New York City, USA on 10 November 1880, but as a teenager rejected the Orthodoxy of his upbringing. From 1893–98 he attended classes at the Art Students’ League and was inspired by the multicultural communities around him. After spending the winter of 1899–1900 cutting ice in New Jersey, he turned to sculpture, working in a bronze foundry (1901–2).

On the proceeds of his first professional commission to illustrate Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), he sailed to Chaim Weizmann, 1933 Europe. In Paris he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts (1902–3) and the Académie Julian (1903–4), sharing the appreciation of artists including Picasso and Modigliani, for Indian and West African art traditions.

Epstein moved to London in 1905 and in 1907 he received his first major British commission, creating 18 nude sculptures for the facade of the British Medical Association Building (now Zimbabwe House) on the Strand. This commission, like many of Epstein’s other early works, was highly controversial and criticised as indecent. Epstein’s second public commission to carve Oscar Wilde’s tomb for Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris (completed in 1912), directly inspired by Assyrian sculpture in the British Museum, abandoned the conventional figure and proved equally controversial. A champion of direct carving, he was also associated with the short-lived Vorticist group, co-curated the so-called ‘Jewish Section’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s ‘Review of Modern Movements’, with David Bomberg in 1914, and was a cofounder of the London Group. During the First World War, Epstein was conscripted into the Jewish 38th battalion of the Royal Fusiliers in 1917 but was discharged, without seeing active service following a breakdown in 1918.

Epstein’s work often challenged prevailing notions of sexuality and beauty and favoured the non-European model. He had solo shows at the Leicester Galleries in 1917, 1920, 1924, 1939 and 1950, a retrospective at Tate in 1952. His public commissions continued to attract controversy including the carved relief Rima (1924–5, Hyde Park), a memorial to the naturalist and author W. H. Hudson, and the monumental figure groups, Night and Day (1928–9), for Charles Holden’s London Underground headquarters, and later monumental carvings including Genesis (1930), Ecce Homo (1934–35), and his autobiographical Jacob and the Angel (1940-41, Tate). However, his portrait heads, usually cast in bronze, were always in demand. Epstein also painted in watercolour and gouache, and his scenes of Epping Forest were frequently exhibited in Leicester Galleries, London. He exhibited in group shows at Ben Uri Gallery from 1934 onwards, and was Patron of the Ben Uri art Society in 1936–37. During the Second World War was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to execute six portrait busts including one of Winston Churchill. Epstein was knighted in 1954.

Epstein completed his large bronze Bowater House group for Edinburgh Gate, Knightsbridge (1958–9) on the day that he died in London, England on 21 August 1959; he was buried in Putney Vale cemetery. A posthumous exhibition of bronzes was held at Ben Uri Gallery in November 1959. In 1980, his centenerary year, restropsectives were held at Ben Uri Gallery, Birmingham Museum & Gallery and Tate. More than 300 of his works are in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the V&A.

Page 41

Mark Gertler For full biography see page 37

Rabbi + Rabbitzen, 1914 Page 42

Isaac Rosenberg Isaac Rosenberg was born into a Jewish immigrant family in Bristol, England on 25 November 1890 and raised in great poverty in Whitechapel. Despite an early talent for drawing and writing, by the age of fourteen he was unhappily apprenticed to a firm of Fleet Street engravers.

He took evening art classes at Birkbeck College, London, where he won many prizes, before following Mark Gertler and David Bomberg to the Slade School of Fine Art (1911–14). Often unable to afford models, his oeuvre includes many self-portraits as well as landscapes and works on literary themes.

In 1914 his work was included in the socalled ‘Jewish Section’ co-curated by Bomberg Self Portrait in steel helmet, 1916 and Jacob Epstein as part of ‘TwentiethCentury Art: A Review of Modern Movements’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Afterwards Rosenberg visited his sister in South Africa where he painted, wrote and lectured about art, before returning to England in 1915. After enlisting in the army in October 1915, he was sent to the Front in 1916, from where he sent home his poignant Self-portrait in Steel Helmet (1916). He was killed, aged 27, while on patrol in Fampoux, France on 1 April 1918.

Despite publishing only two short collections of poetry during his lifetime, Rosenberg is now regarded as one of the finest War Poets of his generation. The exhibition, ‘Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle’ (Ben Uri, 2008), was the first to examine his art in the context of his Whitechapel peers. Rosenberg’s work is in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Imperial War Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate, and UCL.

Page 43

The Horrors of War

Page 44

George Grosz

The Lecture (aka Letter to an Anti-Semite), 1935

Interrogation, 1938 Page 45

George Grosz George Grosz (né Georg Ehrenfried Groß) was born in 1893 in Berlin, Germany. After expulsion from school, he trained at the Dresden Academy and later at the school of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin (under Emil Orlik); he was greatly influenced by graphic artists including William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier and by popular art forms including graffiti. From 1916 he began to paint in oils and his lithographs featured regularly in books and magazines including ‘Ulk’. He served twice during the First World War (the first time as a volunteer) and was twice discharged for medical reasons. This experience sharpened his political conscience resulting in a series of bitingly satirical works that were particularly critical of militarism, corruption and hypocrisy and, as a mark of disrespect for German militarism, he Americanised his name (along with John Heartfield) in 1917 and joined the Sparticist uprising in 1918. Between 1917 and 1920 Grosz was a prominent member of the Dada movement in Berlin and also became the leading exponent of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. He held his first solo exhibition in Munich in 1920 and his first retrospective in Brussels in 1932.

In 1933, only days before Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship of Germany, Grosz moved to New York to avoid persecution under the Nazi regime and to take up the offer of a teaching post at the Art Students League of New York. In his absence, he was stripped of his German citizenship, 285 of his works were confiscated from public collections and many, together with a number of his books and portfolios, were destroyed. In New York he produced a hard-hitting series of works criticising the Nazi regime including The Interrogation and The Lecture (both Ben Uri Collection), featuring his friend the Jewish Communist and writer Erich Mühsam, tortured and murdered by the Nazis in Orianeburg Concentration Camp. In 1937 Grosz’s work was included, in his absence, in the infamous ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition that opened in Munich before touring throughout Germany and Austria; the following year, he was also represented in the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art mounted at the New Burlington Galleries in London, as a riposte to the Nazi show, although later he largely abandoned his satirical work for landscapes and still-lifes.

In 1938 Grosz became a naturalised American citizen and published his autobiography, ‘A Little Yes and a Big No’ in New York in 1946, but, disillusioned with the ‘American Dream’, he returned to postwar Berlin in 1959. Georg Grosz died in Berlin, Germany, shortly after his return on 6 July 1959, after falling down the stairs. His work is represented in the UK in the Ben Uri Collection, the Fitzwilliam Museum and Tate, as well as in many international museum collections.

Page 46

Emmanuel Levy Emmanuel Levy was born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents in Hightown, Manchester, England in 1900. Like Jacob Kramer, he was one of a small group of Jewish artists, whose families, fleeing persecution, restrictive legislation and economic hardship settled in the north of England as part of a wider wave of Jewish migration to Britain at the close of the nineteenth century. Hightown was immortalized by the Jewish writer Louis Golding in his bestselling novel Magnolia Street (1932), which Levy later adapted as a radio play. His father was the beadle at the Great Synagogue, Cheetham Hill and he attended the local Jews’ Free School, before studying at Manchester School of Art under Adolphe Valette (c. 1918) together with L. S. Lowry (whose portrait he drew), as well as at St Martin’s School of Art in London, and in Paris. He returned to Manchester for his first solo show in 1925. His early work included Jewish subject matter, such as The Mourners (Sitting Shiva) (1928, Ben Uri Collection), Crucifixion, 1942 executed in a semi-Cubist manner. In 1928 Levy was appointed a special instructor in life drawing at Manchester University School of Architecture upon the recommendation of Valette, whom he succeeded. He also gave popular public demonstrations in portrait painting. From 1929, for several years, he was Art Critic for Manchester City News and the Evening News and his 60-year career was so closely associated with his native city that Lord Ardwick described him as ‘a Manchester man through and through. But’, he continued, ‘there is nothing provincial or even distinctly English in his work. He is a citizen of the world’.

Although he experimented with Cubism and Surrealism, Levy abandoned these styles in favour of naturalism, specializing in figurative work exploring the human condition.

His wife, Ursula Leo (1915–1984), one of his pupils and a painter in her own right, was a German-Jewish refugee from Nazism and during the Second World, he painted ‘Crucifixion’ (1942), a cri-de-coeur against Jewish persecution under the Nazis in mainland Europe. He held six solo exhibitions in Manchester between 1925 and 1963, with further solo shows in London, including at Ben Uri (1953, 1978 and 1989), where his work was also shown from 1935 onwards in numerous group shows; a further solo show was held in Brunner, Norwich in 1952.. Retrospectives were held at Salford City Art Gallery (1948), Fieldborne Galleries, London (1976) and Stockport Art Gallery (1982). He also exhibited with the AIA (Artists’ International Association) including in 1953 and 1954.

Emmanuel Levy died in London, England in 1986. His work is represented in UK Collections including the National Portrait Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, Salford Museum and Art Gallery and the Whitworth. In 2014 Ben Uri Gallery curated a posthumous retrospective, Made in Manchester: Emmanuel Levy, at Manchester Jewish Museum.

Page 47

The Beginning of the End D Day landings 6 June 1944

Page 48

Barnett Freedman Barnett Freedman was born in London’s East End to RussianJewish immigrant parents. Between the ages of nine and thirteen, he was confined by ill health to the London Hospital and worked afterwards as a signwriter, stonemason’s assistant and architect’s assistant, latterly attending evening classes at D-Day Preparations (Briefings), 1944 St. Martin’s School of Art. Through the intervention of Sir William Rothenstein he won the London County Council Scholarship and studied at the Royal College of Art (1922–25) under Paul Nash, himself an Official War Artist during both wars. In 1928 Freedman became a still life instructor at the RCA and later taught at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, under Albert Rutherston (Rothenstein’s younger brother). He held his first exhibition at the Bloomsbury Bookshop in 1929 and his realist style in this period is linked to that of the Euston Road School. Freedman afterwards became well-known for his commercial illustration and poster work for notable clients, such as the London Underground, and carried out a number of commissions in this post including designing publicity for Shell, the BBC and the General Post Office and Ealing Films. In 1935 he designed the George V Silver Jubilee postage stamp.

Freedman also became a successful and prolific book illustrator and book jacket designer.

His illustrations include work for Faber and Faber, such as Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1931), The Folio Society, and the Baynard and Curwen Presses. Using pen and chalk for reproduction by line blocks for black and white and auto-lithography for colour, Freedman developed an immediately recognisable style. He also became a distinguished letterer and typographer.

Barnett Freedman died in London, England on 4 January 1958. His work can be found in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Imperial War Museum, Museums Sheffield, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries, Pallant House Gallery, Salford Museum & Art Gallery, and Tate. In 1958 an Arts Council retrospective was held at the Tate Gallery, followed by a further retrospective, ‘Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain’, at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester in 2020.

Page 49

Justice: The Nuremberg Trials 1945-46

Page 50

Laura Knight

Prisoners in the Dock at the Nuremberg Trials no.1, 1946

Prisoners in the Dock at the Nuremberg Trials no.2, 1946

Painter and etcher Laura Knight (née Johnson) was born in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, England on 4 August 1877 and was raised by her mother in modest circumstances. During the First World War, prohibited from painting the coast, the Knights moved to London, where Laura specialised in studies of famous ballet dancers including Anna Pavlova and Lydia Lopokova.

In 1927 she was elected associate of the Royal Academy and in 1929 was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Three years later she was elected the first Honorary President of the Society of Women Artists, also exhibiting with the Women’s International Art Club, and in 1936 she became the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy since its foundation. She was a supporter of the antifascist AIA (Artists’ International Association), formed in 1933.

During the Second World War she produced influential poster designs for the army, as well as paintings documenting the preparations for war as an Official War Artist from around 1940. In 1946 she attended the Nuremberg Trial of Nazi war criminals, commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to make studies that were later realised on a large-scale canvas, The Nuremberg Trial (1946, Imperial War Museum). After the war, she returned to her favoured subjects of theatre and country life, and exhibited widely. Laura Knight died in London, England on 7 July 1970. Her works are represented in numerous UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Imperial War Museum, Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, Nottingham City Museums and Galleries, the Royal Academy, and the Tate.

Page 51

Solomon J. Solomon Painter Solomon Joseph Solomon was born into a Jewish family in London, England on 16 September 1860 (his younger sister was the painter Lily Delissa Joseph). He studied in London at Heatherley’s Art School (1876) and then at the Royal Academy schools in Paris (under Alexandre Cabanel) and in Munich.

After concluding his studies, he travelled widely in Italy, Spain and North Africa, before re-settling in London, where, as a tutor at the Royal Academy, his pupils included the young Alfred Wolmark, J H Amshewitz and Samuel Rahamin Samuel (later Samuel FyzeeRahamin). During the 1890s he had a studio on Holland Park Road and was part of the Holland Park circle of artists that sprung up around Leighton House in the late 19th century. In 1897 Solomon married, and both his wife, Ella, who often laid out his colours for him, and their three children often posed as his models. He painted numerous informal pictures of his own family life and ‘wedding portraits’ of his relatives.

The Breakfast Table, 1921 Celebrated for his historical and biblical works, as well as his society portraiture, in 1906 he became only the second Jewish Royal Academician (his contributions to the annual RA exhibition were hung in what came to be known as Solomon’s corner) and President of the Royal Society of British Artists. An extremely influential figure in Jewish circles, he was a founder and the first President of the Jewish cultural and philanthropic organisation known as the Maccabeans and the main art adviser to its offshoot, the Jewish Education Aid Society, which assisted many of the so-called ‘Whitechapel Boys’. His book, ‘The Practice of Oil Painting’, was published in 1910, serving as a guide for both art students and teachers.

Solomon also pioneered the technique of camouflage for tanks and army equipment during the First World War, writing the book ‘Strategic Camouflage’ (published in 1920), as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Engineers. His camouflage system was subsequently used in the Second World War. He also designed a stained-glass window for the Hampstead Synagogue. Solomon was the second President of the Ben Uri Art Society from 1924–26 (succeeding Israel Zangwill). He died at his home at Birchington, Kent, England on 27 July 1927. His work is well represented in UK collections including the British Academy, the Imperial War Museum, Leighton House, the Museum of London, Tate and the Walker Art Gallery.

Page 52

Immigrant artists from across the world enriching British visual culture.

Page 53

Jacob Kramer Jacob Kramer was born into a Jewish family in Klintsy, Russia (now Klincy, Ukraine) on 26 December 1892, immigrating to England with his family and settling in Leeds in 1900. He studied at Leeds School of Art from 1907-1911, holding a senior scholarship in his final year. From 1913 he corresponded with Michael Sadler, modernist collector and Vice Chancellor of Leeds University, also attending Leeds Art Club. In the same year, he was awarded a Jewish Education Aid Society scholarship to study for one year at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where his circle included ‘Whitechapel Boys’ Mark Gertler and David Bomberg. Bomberg and Jacob Epstein included his work as part of the so-called ‘Jewish Section’ in a review of modern movements at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1914 and he exhibited with the New English Art Club the same year.

In 1915 he was elected a member of the London Group and included in the Vorticist exhibition at the Doré Galleries, London; he held his first solo exhibition in Bradford the same year. In 1916 he had a solo exhibition at Bradford Arts Club and in 1917 joined the Allied Artists Association, also lecturing at Leeds Art The Philosopher, 1922 Club the same year. During the First World War he spent a short time as a regimental librarian, a post facilitated by Herbert Read.

In 1919 he held a solo exhibition at Frank Rutter’s Adelphi Gallery in London, returning to Leeds in 1920, where in 1931 he set up the Yorkshire Luncheon Group.

In 1935 Kramer had a solo exhibition at the Leger Galleries, London and participated regularly in Ben Uri’s Annual Exhibition of Works by Jewish Artists from 1935–50. In 1960 Kramer’s retrospective at the Leeds City Art Gallery attracted a record attendance. He died in the Jewish Home of Rest, Balham, London on 4 February 1962 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Gildersome in Leeds. Two posthumous exhibitions have been held at Ben Uri Gallery: Jacob Kramer Reassessed in 1984 (touring to Leeds, Bournemouth and Kingstonupon-Hull), and William Roberts & Jacob Kramer: The Tortoise and the Hare (touring to Leeds) in 2003. A Centenary exhibition was held at the University Gallery, Leeds in 1992.

Page 54

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Sculptor and draughtsman Henri Gaudier was born in Saint-Jean-de Braye, near Orléans in France on 4 October 1891. At the age of fourteen he made his first visit to England, studying in Bristol on a fellowship. Afterwards, he moved to Germany and then Paris, where he began to sculpt. In 1911 he returned to London accompanied by the Polish writer Sophie Brzeska, who was twenty years his senior, adding her surname to his. By 1913 GaudierBrzeska was part of a progressive circle which included T E Hulme, Ezra Pound and Jacob Epstein, becoming a founder member of The London Group, as well as a member of the Vorticists and publishing work in their journal “Blast”. He also had a close friendship with artists Horace Brodzky and Alfred Wolmark, both of whom he sculpted. His sculptures, predominantly of the human head, figures and animals, closely based on observations from nature, increasingly became radically simplified and geometrical. In 1915 he volunteered for the army, sending Edward Wadsworth drawings from the trenches for inclusion in the London Group exhibition.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska died in action on 5 Sculptural Head of Brodzky, c.1913 June in Neuville-Saint-Vaast, France at the age of 24. His work is extensively represented in UK collections, particularly Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, which holds the bulk of his estate as well as the Ben Uri Collection, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Tate, The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art and the University of Hull.

Page 55

Orovida Pissarro Orovida (née Orovida Camille Pissarro) was a second generation émigrée, born into an assimilated Jewish family in Epping, Essex, England on 8 October 1893. A member of the distinguished Pissarro painting dynasty, she was the only daughter of the landscape painter, printmaker, wood engraver, designer and printer Lucien Pissarro (1863–1944) and the wood-engraver, designer, and printer Esther Pissarro (née Bensusan, 1870–1951); she was the granddaughter of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (1830–1903). Orovida began drawing and painting at an early age and was the first woman born into the Pissarro family to become a professional artist. She lived and worked predominantly in London, where she was a prominent member of several British arts clubs and societies.

Refugees, 1947 She first learned to paint in the Impressionist style from her father, studying formally only briefly with Walter Sickert in 1913; she began experimenting with etching in 1914, becoming a prolific printmaker and holding a solo exhibition of etchings and drawings at the Adelphi Galleries in 1919. In 1921 she held a joint exhibition with the French artist Marie Laurencin.

Throughout her career, Orovida always remained outside mainstream British art movements. She was greatly influenced by an exhibition of Chinese Paintings and Japanese Screens held at the British Museum in 1924 and developed a personal style that combined elements of Japanese, Chinese, Persian, and Indian art. Her rejection of both Impressionism and her surname – she preferred to be known simply as Orovida – reflected her wish to achieve independence from the painting legacy of the Pissarro dynasty, although she remained proud of the connection, and in 1943 participated in an exhibition entitled ‘Three Generations of the Pissarro Family’ (a further show of this name was held posthumously at the Leicester Galleries, London in 1977).

During the Second World War, she took up oil painting and etching due to a deficiency of egg (and hence tempera) and her style changed. She became absorbed in the study of animals at London Zoo, relating them to the people in their countries of origin. She exhibited widely with a number of solo shows at venues including the Redfern Gallery in London and participated in exhibitions at Ben Uri Gallery in 1934, 1936, 1937, 1944, 1947, 1951 (twice) and 1956 during her lifetime, as well as posthumously. She was a prominent member of the Women’s International Art Club (WIAC), exhibiting in 1921, 1925, 1927-34, 1936-40, 1942, 1944-53, also serving on the executive and hanging committee in 1935, as well as exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy between 1917 and 1967. She remained active until the end of her life, while also developing and maintaining the Pissarro family archive, established by her parents in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Orovida Pissarro died in her home in London, England on 8 August 1968. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, held a memorial exhibition in 1969. Her works can be found in UK public collections including the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Ben Uri Collection; the London Borough of Camden; Manchester Art Gallery; Portsmouth Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Page 56

Jacob Epstein For full biography see page 41.

Bronze bust of ‘Jacob Kramer’, 1921

Page 57

Elsa Fraenkel Sculptor Elsa Fraenkel (nee Rothschild) was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Bensheim, Germany on 25 August 1892. She trained at the Karlsruhe Academy. In 1918 she married and moved to Hanover, where she was a member of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ cultural circle in the 1920s. Their friendship was later rekindled in exile in England and she brought with her two artworks by Schwitters, including Untitled: für Frau Fränkel (Ben Uri Collection), inscribed to her and dated 1928, providing a direct link between these two refugees from Nazism. Fraenkel remained in Hanover until 1933, travelling annually to Paris. She specialised in portrait sculpture, and although uncommissioned, her works were exhibited in Hanover, Berlin, Brunswick and Mannheim. Her sculpture of a young girl/ bust of a girl was purchased in 1927 by the Landesmuseum, Hanover.

Following her divorce in 1933, Fraenkel returned to Paris, before immigrating to London, bringing many of her sculptures with her and later establishing a studio in St John’s Wood. In 1935 Fraenkel exhibited six works with the Leicester Galleries and the following Head of Chungsen Chou, 1928 year participated in Ben Uri’s annual open show. Ben Uri subsequently commissioned her portrait of Haham, Sir Moses Gaster, Head of the Sephardi community, accessioned in 1947. She exhibited frequently with the Women’s International Art Club (WIAC) between 1937 and 1953, showing works including her head of Chinese student Chungsen Chou (Ben Uri Collection) in 1937, as well as two versions of the mathematician Prof. Dr. Conrad Muller (one with eyes open and one with eyes closed) in 1938, Sidney Sabin in 1942, and Shirley Solomon (Ben Uri Collection) in 1948. In 1947 she held a three-person show at Ben Uri Gallery with fellow emigres Walter Trier and Elsa Fraenkel, and in 1951 participated in Ben Uri’s Festival of Britain Anglo-Jewish Exhibition. She was also a member and officer of the Essex Art Club, with whom she also exhibited. In 1970 she moved to India to be with her daughter and family.

Elsa Fraenkel died in Bangalore, India on 13 June 1975. Her work is represented in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Hove Museum, Brighton, the Leo Baeck Institute in London, and Tate.

Page 58

Ernest Neuschul Painter and graphic artist Ernest (né Ernst) Neuschul was born into a Jewish family in Aussig, Austria-Hungary (now Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic) in 1895. He studied in Prague and later, Vienna, initially influenced

by Expressionism. During the First World War he moved to Cracow, Poland in 1916 to avoid conscription. Afterwards, he studied at the Academy of Arts in Berlin and in Prague met the Dutch-Javanese dancer Takka-Takka (Lucie Lindemann, 1890-1980), whom he married in 1922. She became his first principal model; he designed her costumes, and over the next four years they toured Europe, the USA and Canada together as a Javanese dance couple, Double Portrait, 1933 with Neuschul adopting the name ‘Yoga-Taro’.

In 1919, following his first solo exhibition in Prague, Neuschul was recognised as one of the leading exponents of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. As a socialist and member of the Communist Party (KPD), his subjects reflected his commitment to recording the lives of working people and he joined the anti-fascist Novembergruppe (Chair, 1932).

In 1927 Neuschul held a solo exhibition in Berlin, becoming Chair of drawing and painting at the Charlottenburg Municipal Art School (1931) and Professor of Fine Art at the Berlin Academy of Fine Art (1932). Following the rise of Nazism, he was dismissed from his Professorship and labelled a ‘degenerate artist’. At the invitation of the Moscow Artists Association, he moved to Moscow in 1935, holding a solo exhibition at the Museum of New Western Art, but warned it may be unsafe, he returned to Aussig in 1936, where his work was slashed and disfigured with swastikas in 1937. In 1938, Neuschul left for Prague with his second wife, painter Christl Blell, and his son, Tyl Peter, fleeing on the last train which the Nazis allowed out of Czechoslovakia in 1939. He fled to Britain with the help of David Grenfell, Labour MP for Gower, Wales, whose portrait he painted in gratitude. During the war he lived in Mumbles, Swansea, painting local working people, including steelworkers, miners and cockle pickers, and portraits including Mayor of Swansea, J.R. Martin, and Lewis Jones MP. He exhibited with the Free German League of Culture at the Wertheim Gallery, London in 1939, lectured for the Anglo-Sudeten Club and contributed articles to the Club’s newspaper (1942-45). In 1944 his paintings were exhibited at the National Museum of Wales.

In 1946 Neuschul settled in Hampstead, anglicising his name to Ernest Norland, but despite a solo exhibition at Twenty Brook Street Gallery in 1950, struggled to repeat his earlier success. Retrospectives were held in Jerusalem (1959) and Berlin (1966). His late work gradually moved towards simplified figuration and eventually to full abstraction.

Ernest Neuschul died in London, England in 1968. His first UK retrospective was held posthumously at the Leicester Museum & Art Gallery in 1988. His work is represented in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, and Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, as well as in public collections in Germany, the Czech Republic and Russia.

Page 59

Kurt Schwitters For full biography see page 23.

Untitled, 1928

Page 60

Clare Winsten Painter and sculptor Clare Winsten (née Clara Birnberg) was born to Galician Jewish parents in Romania on 10 August 1892, and later immigrated to England with her family c. 1902.

She was a member of the Women’s Freedom League, as well as the only girl among the so-called ‘Whitechapel boys’, a group of artists and poets linked through the East End Jewish community centred around Whitechapel and Stepney. The latter included her future husband Stephen Winsten (formerly Samuel ‘Simy’ Weinstein), the poet/publisher John Untitled (Vorticist Figures), c.1911-12 ‘Jimmy’ Rodker, and Joseph Leftwich (who coined the name), as well as the painter/ poet Isaac Rosenberg and painters Mark Gertler and David Bomberg, whom she studied alongside at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her work was included in the ‘Jewish Section’ cocurated by Bomberg and Jacob Epstein as part of the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s ‘TwentiethCentury Art: A Review of Modern Movements’ in 1914, although she also showed more innovative work outside this section. Bomberg, with whom she afterwards fell out, painted her and she and Rosenberg created reciprocal portraits.

During the First World War, the Winstens, were Pacifists, Conscientious Objectors and members of the ‘No Conscription’ fellowship. They married in 1916 and in November of the same year, Stephen Winsten undertook the first of three consecutive terms of imprisonment for his beliefs. Postwar both worked on humanitarian causes and became Quaker Humanists. Stephen Winsten published a book of poems ‘Chains’ (1920), for which Clare produced a number of (unpublished) illustrations, based on his prison experience.

Clare Winsten’s output included drawings (including a sequence on Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’), paintings and sculpture including a commission for Toynbee Hall, and several of George Bernard Shaw, their neighbour at Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, in the late 1940s, about whom Stephen wrote a number of books.

Clare Winsten died in Abberton, near Colchester, England in 1989. Her work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, UCL and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin. A gift left to UCL in Winsten’s will established her eponymous prize for female artists in order to support them in their early career development.

Page 61

Chaïm Soutine Chaïm Soutine (né Chaim-Iche Solomonovich Sutin) was born to a poor Jewish family, the tenth of eleven children, in the shtetl of Smilovitz, Russian Empire (now Smilavičy, Belarus) on 13 January 1893, and drew from an early age. He studied at the School of Fine Arts, Vilna (1910-13), and in the Atelier Cormon at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1913–15), becoming closely associated with the group of foreign-born, predominantly Jewish artists, known as the ‘École de Paris’. The majority including Marc Chagall, Isaac Dobrinsky, Jacques Lipchitz lived and worked together in great poverty in the studios known as La Ruche (‘the Beehive’) near the old Vaugirard slaughterhouses of Montparnasse. In 1915 Lipchitz introduced Soutine to Amedeo Modigliani with whom he developed a strong friendship. During the First World War Soutine enlisted in the work brigades but was La Soubrette (Waiting Maid), c.1933 soon dismissed on health grounds, having developed the stomach problems which would later kill him.

His oeuvre includes a number of powerful, visceral landscapes and an important series of Rembrandt-inspired beef carcasses painted in a characteristic, expressionistic style. The American collector Albert Barnes bought a significant amount of Soutine’s work in 1923, affording him financial stability for the first time. He held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Bing, Paris in 1927. In 1928 Waldemar George published the first monograph on Soutine as part of ‘les artistes juifs’ series; Elie Faure’s followed a year later. In this period Soutine produced a series of bold character studies of pastry cooks, choirboys, boot boys, bell-boys and maids, dressed in the uniforms of their professions. From then on, he worked mainly in Paris, spending the summers near Chartres with his patrons Marcellin and Madeleine Castaing.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War and the German Occupation, Soutine sought refuge from occupied Paris in Touraine in 1941, using a false identity card, but in 1943, suffering from a rapid decline in health, he was forced to return to Paris for an operation on his perforated stomach ulcers. He died shortly afterwards in Paris on 9 August 1943.

Work by Chaïm Soutine is held in five UK public collections: the Ben Uri Collection, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the National Galleries of Scotland (Modern), the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art and Tate, as well as in numerous international collections including Paris, New York and Switzerland, among others.

Page 62

TODAY:

Recording, Sharing and Teaching the Immigrant Contribution to British visual culture since 1900 through 3300 published profiles and another 1800 in the works. See buru.org.uk and diaspora-artists.net

How Ben Uri Uses Art Differently Why Ben Uri Uses Art Differently We prioritise global digital engagement over the physical.

We frame our research within the context of social integration.

We prioritise artists and their milieu over their artworks.

The stories of migrations captures imagination beyond the art.

TOMORROW:

Recording, Sharing and Teaching the Immigrant Contribution to British Society since 1900 - launching in 2026 Rationale: Research on its own no longer generates a positive return on investment. Accurate and inaccurate information is widely available online and with the rise of AI, which promises to misinform as much as inform, factual evidence and testimony is essential.

Ben Uri’s academic research needs to be, and is designed to be, easily understood by scholars, students and the general public alike.

Deliverables: Fact not Fiction

Our research is widely used by universities across Britain and abroad, supporting undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral work across the humanities, with a special focus on bridging the gap between the digital and the physical.

We are developing citizenship modules for schools based on our evidence that a high percentage of superstars and superheroes, in whichever sector of our local communities or national and global societies, are either first or second generation immigrants and often to Britain.

Benefits: We believe that if we can educate children at school, students at university, and the general public at large on the contribution of immigrants to our society, we have a greater chance of minimising racial friction and bigotry based on ignorance and misconception.

12 Key Specialisms within the new Research Institute launching in 2026 are Visual Arts: Design: Architecture Media: Technology: Science

Literature: Performance: Music Business: Sport: Hitler Emigres

Explore Visit us online whenever suits you as open 24/7 and join over 40,000 who explore every month.

Benuri.org & Buru.org.uk open 24/7 to suit you Gallery exhibitions open every Wednesday to Friday at Boundary Road, London NW8