Central School and Slade School graduate, Tam Joseph was born in Dominica and migrated to England in 1955. His work explores the many and multi-faceted inspirations, aspirations, and contradictions that shape contemporary realities. ‘The Hand Made Map’ of the world playfully reorders conventional geographies, blurring boundaries and suggesting new and unexpected possibilities for the world political map. ‘Painting is about looking and interpreting and interpreting and looking again. It’s about scraping back to go forward,’ he has observed. A version of this painting was first presented as a billboard at the 2014 Edinburgh Art Festival and also forms part of a series of responses by artists around the city and online to mark the dates (30 July - 30 August) at what would have been the 2020 Festival (cancelled due to the world pandemic).
The Artist
Artist Tam Joseph was born in Roseau, Dominica, in the Caribbean, in 1947 and immigrated to England at the age of 8. He attended life-drawing classes at the Islington Art Studio and went on to complete a foundation course at the Central School of Art in London in 1966-67. He subsequently enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, but left after two months, and briefly worked on Yellow Submarine, the 1968 animated film featuring the Beatles, as a painter and tracer. Joseph travelled in Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India before entering the London College of Printing in 1973 to study typographic design.Three years later he graduated and began to work as a layout artist and graphic designer for Africa and West Africa magazines, as well as a designer of album covers. His work took him on further travels to Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Togo and Senegal during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1979, he illustrated Buchi Emecheta’s children’s book Titch the Cat, published by Allison and Busby. In the 1970s, he also worked with the Keskidee Centre Collective, a hub for African and Afro-Caribbean politics and arts in North London, including designing theatre sets.
As his career as an artist developed, Joseph’s work has been exhibited widely, in solo shows including This is History in Bradford, Sheffield and Carlisle (1998-99), and Evolution - Tam Joseph Paintings (2020). He has also featured in group exhibitions including From Two Worlds, Whitechapel Art Gallery (1986), and Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950sNow at Tate Britain (2021-22).
Joseph’s work combines humour with political and historical narratives to explore the inspirations, aspirations, and contradictions of contemporary realities. Chambers writes that he has ‘contributed a number of memorable paintings that locate themselves at the centre of social and political commentary, often doing so in ways that reflect the artist’s characteristic wit, humour, cynicism, and perceptiveness’ (Black Artists in British Art, p. 75).Two of Joseph’s bestknown works are Spirit of the Carnival and UK School Report. Spirit of the Carnival commented on the growing police presence at the annual Notting Hill Carnival, and the experiences of those on the receiving end of police brutality and intimidation, while at the same time celebrating black cultural resistance and resilience in the face of racism. Attempts have been made to link Joseph to the 1980s Black Art movement, but the artist distances himself and his work from any attempts at definition. He has insisted: ‘I wasn’t trying to develop a distinctly Black art. I was trying to develop myself as a person, through my art, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do all the time’. Nevertheless, ‘Joseph, whilst championing artistic independence, never forgets he is a African. His African-ness is the starting point for his work. From there, he can move in any direction he wants’ (Tam JosephThis is History). Joseph’s eclectic practice, working and experimenting across media as a painter, illustrator, graphic artist, printmaker and sculptor, challenges cultural and racial stereotypes in Britain, and explores diaspora, identity, spirituality, politics, and histories of slavery, colonialism and empire.
Tam Joseph lives and works in London.
Guidance notes on Immigrant Artists
Zory Shahrokhi
Revolution Street 2, 2019
by Zory Shahrokhi
(1963- )
Mixed media on paper, 58.5 x 82.8 cm
A zoomable image of this painting is available on our website to use in the classroom with an interactive whiteboard or projector.
This is one of two related works of the same title that form the artist’s commissioned response to the exhibition, Liberators: 12 Extraordinary Women Artists from the Ben Uri Collection (2018). The title of both pieces refers to ‘the Girls of Enghelab (Revolution) Street’ movement, started in central Tehran in 2018, after a woman removed her headscarf in protest against the compulsory wearing of the hijab. The swallow - a symbol of freedom also utilised in the artist’s installation, Flying (2015), is here shown within a diamond-shaped headscarf. The companion piece features six fabric swallows made from scraps of Persian cloth sent to the artist from friends and relatives in Iran.
Shahrokhi says of her work: ‘I grew up in Iran and as a result my work is strongly influenced by Persian poetry, fabric and rug design. When still I was a teenager – a couple of years after the 1979 revolution – I lost almost all the people dear to me. They were imprisoned, missing or executed due the government’s crackdown on the opposition. The traces of those events are reflected in my work. I experiment with traditional art techniques combined with new technology while through abstract expression practice I investigate issues and perceptions around freedom related to displacement, exploitation, and gender oppression. Experiencing the dehumanisation of refugees and the ongoing struggle to be part of this society naturally is part of my work.’ (Traces online project).
The Artist
Visual artist Zory Shahrokhi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1963 and later immigrated to England after the 1979 revolution. She studied art at London Metropolitan University and at the University of Hertfordshire. Her practice developed through a concern in exploring cultural/political agendas, employing performance in relation to installation and photography. She explores a wide range of media processes as well as sculpture and time-based imagery, working with abstract representations of the human body to communicate literally and metaphorically, using domestic objects such as safety pins, spoons,
cloth, rose blossoms, and hair. While her artistic expression is influenced by her background, it is also concerned with more universal issues around the contemporary human condition and breaches in human rights. She is primarily interested in the issues and perceptions around displacement, exploitation and gender oppression.
Shahrokhi has exhibited widely with galleries including the Foundling Museum, Norwich Art Centre, and Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art. Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, including ‘Unexpected: Continuing Narratives of Identity and Migration’ (Ben Uri Gallery, 2016), ‘Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art’ (the Royal West of England Academy, 2019) and ‘Migrations: Masterworks from the Ben Uri Collection’ (Gloucester Museum, 2019). In 2018 she was commissioned by Ben Uri to respond to the exhibition ‘Liberators: 12 Extraordinary Women Artists from the Ben Uri Collection’, creating two related artworks, both entitled ‘Revolution Street 2’ (now in Ben Uri Collection) exploring issues of freedom, identity and migration. In May 2022 she undertook a Residency at Edinburgh Printmakers. She lives and works in London.
Guidance notes on Immigrant Artists
Lancelot Ribeiro
King Lear, 1964
by Lancelot Ribeiro (1933-2010)
Oil on canvas, 99 x 52.7 cm
A zoomable image of this painting is available on our website to use in the classroom with an interactive whiteboard or projector.
Ribeiro’s bold image of King Lear – his spiky crown reminiscent of Christ’s crown of thorns but also echoing the sharp-edged architectural forms in the artist’s early townscapes – relates both to Shakespeare’s troubled king and to the Christian imagery that peopled Ribeiro’s early work. This drew on his Catholic upbringing and education, particularly the harsh regime he endured at St Mary’s Senior Cambridge School Mount Abu (Rajputana) run by Irish Christian brothers in Rajasthan, which he attended between the ages of 9 and 11. In a review of his 1961 Bombay exhibition Ribeiro listed the types of portrait heads he painted at this time as: ‘colonialists, kings, tyrants, Christ (resurrected), tycoons, women and thugs’ (cited ‘Restless Ribeiro’, 2013, p. 38). They included an earlier Untitled image of Christ with a crown of thorns and stigmata, executed in a monochrome palette, in 1961. Through these ‘portraits’ he explored concepts of power and evil, presenting his subjects facing the viewer in dramatic close up.
Ribeiro’s half-brother, the painter F. N. Souza, who also frequently drew on Christian imagery, used a similarly dramatic contrast of a Black figure against a white backdrop in his ‘Negro in Mourning’ (1957, Birmingham), painted at the time of London’s Notting Hill race riots. Ribeiro’s Lear was painted in 1964, the year of the British General Election, which followed the 1962 Act controlling the previous liberal postwar immigration policy, and his own response in co-founding the Indian Painters’ Collective, UK (IPC) in 1963. Against this backdrop, King Lear, could also be read as one of a series of self-portraits. An extract from an article on Ribeiro’s 1965 Hampstead exhibition related the following encounter: ‘Looking curiously at a painting of a man with a long, lopsided face, a distorted mouth and a strange coloured complexion, I asked the artist what it was. ‘A self portrait’, he answered!’ (cited Restless Ribeiro, p. 30).
In the accompanying catalogue to the posthumous 2013 ‘Restless Ribeiro’ exhibition, the artist’s friend, 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’.
The
Artist
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.
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. 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.
Guidance notes on Immigrant Artists
Hormazd Narielwalla
Bands of Pride, 2017 by
Hormazd Narielwalla (1979- )
Mixed media collage, 53.5 x 37.5 cm
A zoomable image of this painting is available on our website to use in the classroom with an interactive whiteboard or projector.
“The Bands of Pride” (2017), commissioned by the Migrations Museum for their show “No Turning Back: Seven Migration Moments that Changed Britain”, is a multi-panel collage and a response to the Expulsion of Jewish people from England (1290). The artist comments: ‘I was shocked to discover that in 1274 Edward 1 forced Jewish people to wear two pieces of yellow felt. This dehumanizing racist decree was designed for Jewish people to become targets of discrimination. Other policies; of not being able to own property, not being able to recover debt owed to them, not being able to trade etc., finally led to the Expulsion. Clearly a minority was being scapegoated for the countries financial problems.
I started to think about this Decree in contemporary times: Could it happen? Only 70 years ago European Jewish people under German Nazi rule were forced to wear the Star of David, which led to a more unbelievably violent consequence. It made me think about how this dehumanizing policy would affect my Jewish friends. I approached all of them to supply me with photos of themselves and their families, which became an integral part of the commission. I also spoke to them about the choice of colour, and concluded that it cannot be yellow, as the work could be seen as a celebration of the Decree rather than my subjects.
I came across the Blue City: Chefchaouen in Morocco, where, notably, Jewish settlers painted all the houses in shades of blue. I decided the artwork would be made in shades of blue to celebrate Jewish culture and contributions’..
The Artist
Artist Hormazd Narielwalla was born in Mumbai, India in 1979 and moved to Britain in 2003, originally to study as a fashion designer. He holds a PhD from University of Arts, London. His field of research is an original collage technique around the iconic brown paper of discarded tailoring patterns and he describes his practice as ‘influenced by cross-cultural perceptions’. His first solo show, ‘Study on Anansi’, was exhibited
by Paul Smith in 2009. His solo display ‘Lost Gardens’ was commissioned by the Southbank Centre, London (2016) and he has also held solo shows at the India Art Fair in Delhi and, in 2015, at the Museum of Fashion in Bath. His work has been commissioned by the Crafts Council for the national touring exhibit ‘Block Party’ (2011) and ‘Collect 13’ at the Saatchi Gallery (2013). Narielwalla won the Saatchi Showdown Art Prize (2014) and the Paupers Press Prize at the International Print Biennale, Newcastle (2016). His collaborations include Centre of Possible Studies / Serpentine Gallery, Beams Tokyo, V&A, Artbelow and Hyatt Regency London. His work is also in the permanent collection of the V&A.
He has observed, ‘As a young gay man growing up in India, Western culture hardly permeated. It seeped in very gently, drop by drop. Then in the 1990s MTV started broadcasting music videos from the West and my first glimpse of David Bowie was from the 1970s, with his bright red hair and green, glass-like eyes. His beauty captured my imagination immediately. He showed me a different kind of masculinity in the character of Ziggy Stardust – the hair, the make-up, the costumes, in addition to his music and stagecraft. Bowie’s shape-shifting ability to create different personas was the starting point for images that at their basis explore ideas of transformation into another self. My dancing dolls are a form of celebration. Highly decorative and drawing on an extensive collection of papers I have sourced from all over the world, ranging from Japanese Chiyogami, Nepalese Lokta, Dutch gold and hand-blocked papers. Beauty as a form of seduction.’ Hormazd Narielwalla lives and works in London.
Guidance notes on Immigrant Artists
Kurt Schwitters
Untitled: für Frau Fränkel, 1927 by Kurt
Schwitters
(1887-1948)
Collage on card, 7.6 x 5 cm
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This tiny work, listed as no. 1515a in the Schwitters Catalogue Raisonné, exemplifies Schwitters’ highly individual way of working, fusing his interest in the avant garde group Dada - which saw the modern world as meaningless - with a collage technique. It was acquired directly from the family of the sculptor Elsa Fraenkel in June 2019 and provides a fascinating link between these two refugees from Nazism, whose earlier friendship was rekindled in England. The inclusion of the word ‘Paris’ references Schwitters’ visit to Paris in 1927, as well as Fraenkel’s own trips there in the 1920s.
The Artist
Installation artist, painter and poet, Kurt Schwitters was born into an affluent family in Hanover, Germany on 20 June 1887. Having studied in Dresden alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz, in 1919, partly influenced by the Dadaists, he created his own idiosyncratic art form: Merz –a term derived from the name ‘Kommerz- und Privatbank’ which appeared on a cut-up scrap of newspaper – which united 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.
Schwitters’ avant-garde work brought him increasingly into conflict with the Nazi regime from 1933 onwards. His contract with Hanover City Council was terminated in 1934 and examples of his work in German museums were confiscated and derided in 1935. Following the arrest of members of his close circle, he was wanted for questioning by the Gestapo and on 2 January 1937 Schwitters followed his son and fled to Norway where a second Merzbau was constructed. Following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Norway, Schwitters was amongst a number of German citizens who were interned by the Norwegian authorities at Vågan Folk High School in Kabelvåg on the Lofoten Islands. Following his release, Schwitters fled to Leith, Scotland with his son and daughter-in-law on the Norwegian
patrol vessel Fridtjof Nansen between 8 and 18 June 1940. By now officially an ‘enemy alien’, he and his son were moved between various internment camps in Scotland and England before arriving on 17 July 1940 at Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. He produced over 200 works during his internment, including more portraits than at any other time in his career, many of which he charged for, and also contributed to the camp newsletter, The Camp.
After his release on 21st November 1941, Schwitters moved to London where he mixed with artists including fellow émigrés Jankel Adler, Naum Gabo and László Moholy-Nagy and the English artist Ben Nicholson. In August 1942 he moved with his son to 39 Westmoreland Road, Barnes, London relocating after the war to Ambleside in the Lake District. 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. After a second stroke in February 1946, he and his companion Edith Thomas (‘Wantee’) moved to 4 Millans Park.
Kurt Schwitters died in Kendal, England on 8 January 1948. His work is represented in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection and Tate, and many international collections including MoMA. The Sprengel Museum, Hanover holds the Schwitters archive and the most comprehensive documentation of his work and section of Schwitters’ Ambleside Merzbau is now on permanent display at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University.
Guidance notes on Immigrant Artists
Güler Ates
Home Performance 1, 2014
by Güler Ates
(1977- )
Giclee print, 73 x 105 cm
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In this performance, set in Lapa, Rio – a neighbourhood famed for its architectural monuments and Bohemian culture – a veiled figure crosses the foreground pulling a house behind her. Ates’ practice explores concepts of displacement, particularly the notion that we carry our ‘mental home … wherever we go’. She writes of her practice, ‘An exploration into the bewildering experience of displacement lies at the heart of my work. I engage with the potential of pattern and motif within Islamic art: layers held within lavish architectural spaces, offering cover or exposure, alluding to the theatrical. My work begins with film and photography, yet with a subsequent layering of imagery – resulting in a disruptive blur of cultural perceptions. The idea of ‘the veil’, which sits at the core of my art practice, is thus compounded. Manifestations of this are realised through performance and site-responsive activities that merge Eastern and Western sensibilities’.
The
Artist
Artist Güler Ates was born in Muş, Eastern Turkey in 1977, and immigrated to Britain in around 2001. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London in 2008 with an MA in Printmaking before being appointed a digital print tutor at the Royal Academy Schools. She has also held visiting lecturer posts at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Hertfordshire, among other institutions.
Ates’ multidisciplinary work encompasses video, photography, printmaking, and performance through which she explores contemporary experiences of identity, diaspora and cultural displacement. In her photographic series, the concept of the veil plays a pivotal role: using only natural light, she places fully veiled female figures in different contexts, including a 16th-century English university library, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the City Palace Museum in Udaipur in India. These continually changing contexts represent and examine the definition of the exotic that merges Eastern and Western sensualities. The veil is a garment as much as a concept, a metaphor, a mystery, expressing what
is invisible, silent or holy. It forms part of a poetic language revealing and concealing the body. In the artist’s own words, ‘The figures in these works inhabit the places in a ghostly manner. The allusion is both to invisibility and visibility’ (Times of India). By working with Islamic motifs and patterns overlaid on the fabric worn by these veiled women, Ates combined elements from Middle Eastern exoticism from her own heritage with those representing Victorian propriety. She explained: ‘In my art, I deal with the journey that I took from Istanbul to London, exploring female identity and displacement, which also is autobiographical’ (Varsha Naik 2012).
Ates has exhibited frequently at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, as well as in many solo exhibitions in the UK and internationally from 2010 onwards. Her work has been featured in numerous groups shows including New Contemporaries Archive Films, ICA (2010), 2Q13: Women Collectors, Women Artists, Lloyds Club, London (2013), Journey at the Jewish Museum, London (2015), Unexpected: Continuing Narratives of Identity and Migration, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London (2016) and Migrations: Masterworks from the Ben Uri Collection at Gloucester Museum (2019). Ates has also completed residencies in India (2012 and 2009), Rio de Janeiro (2013–2014), Istanbul (2014) and at Eton College, Berkshire (2015, which led to a solo exhibition in 2018), and the London District of the Methodist Church (2019). Güler Ates continues to live and work in London. Her work can be found in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Government Art Collection, the Royal Academy of Art and the V&A, as well as in MAR in Rio de Janeiro, among others.
Guidance notes on Immigrant artists
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky
Circus Scene
by Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906-1996)
oil on canvas, 53.6 x 90.3 cm
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Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s evocative painting of a circus performer surrounded by ponies exemplifies her mature expressionist style, rooted in allegory and psychological insight. Rendered in gestural, painterly strokes and a palette dominated by velvety blacks, ochres, and luminous greens, the scene captures a moment of performative spectacle tinged with surreal introspection. The central female figure, adorned in a feathered headdress, orchestrates a ring of white ponies whose stylized forms echo the theatricality and artifice of the circus environment. The dramatic lighting and elliptical composition recall the influence of Max Beckmann, Motesiczky’s early mentor, while the emotive colouration and dreamlike atmosphere evoke the work of Oskar Kokoschka, her later artistic touchstone in England. Painted during her long exile in Britain following her flight from Nazi-occupied Austria, this work reflects Motesiczky’s continued exploration of identity, displacement, and the performance of self. The circus—an enduring motif in modernist visual culture—becomes, in her hands, a metaphor for the fragility of public presentation and private containment. The expressive distortion of form and the dense layering of pigment are characteristic of her wider practice, which often probes the tension between surface and depth. This painting resonates as both social commentary and personal allegory, demonstrating Motesiczky’s singular position within 20th-century émigré art history.
The Artist
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was born in Vienna, Austria, into a wealthy Viennese Jewish family on 24 October 1906. She left school at the age of 13 to study art privately, attending art classes in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt, Paris, and Berlin and, in 1927/8, was invited by Max Beckmann whom she had first met
(when she was a teenager) to join his master class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Mainhe became the most significant artistic influence on her early work. Following the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria) on 12 March 1938, the artist - together with her mother, Henriette, and her childhood nannyfled to Holland the following day (her brother, Karl, who remained behind perished in Auschwitz in 1943); she held her first exhibition at The Hague in 1939, leaving for London shortly afterwards. Motesiczky remained in England for the rest of her life. She maintained friendships among the émigré network, particularly with the writer Elias Canetti (who also became her lover) and Oskar Kokoschka - the most important influence on her work in England - as well as sculptor Mary Duras and graphic artist Milein Cosman.
In 1943, she joined the Artists’ International Association (AIA), with whom she exhibited, also showing at the Czechoslovak Institute, London in 1944. She held solo exhibitions in The Hague and Amsterdam (1952), the Städtische Galerie, Munich (1954), the Beaux Arts Gallery, London (1960), and in Vienna, Linz, Bremen and Munich (1966); a major retrospective was held at the Goethe Institute, London, to great critical acclaim in 1985; followed by another at the Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere in Vienna in 1994. Her oeuvre encompassed portraiture (including latterly many moving portraits of her ageing mother), self-portraits, still-lifes and allegorical paintings. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky died in London, England on 10 June 1996. Important posthumous exhibitions were held at Tate Liverpool (2006) and in Vienna (2008), and a catalogue raisonée by Ines Schlenker was published in 2009. In 2009 Motesiczky's work was included in the survey exhibition Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain, c. 1933-45 at Ben Uri Gallery, as well at the exhibition, Out of Autria, marking the 80th anniversary of the Anchluss, in 2018. Her work is held in numerous UK collections including the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge; the National Portrait Gallery; the Southbank Centre and Tate.
Guidance notes on Immigrant artists
Clara Klinghoffer
Portrait of the Artist’s Sister Rachel: Rachel in a Red Dress (1920) by Clara
Klinghoffer
(1900-1970)
Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 58.5 cm
A zoomable image of this painting is available on our website to use in the classroom with an interactive white-board or projector.
This luminous portrait by Clara Klinghoffer ex-emplifies her mature style—an elegant synthesis of classical draughtsmanship and modern painterly sensibility. The sitter, rendered with a subtle psychological acuity, is positioned against a richly worked, chromatically expressive background that evokes inner depth rather than specific setting. Klinghoffer’s mastery of form and texture is evident in the treatment of the subject’s crimson garment, which is built up in confident, tactile strokes, contrasting with the delicacy of the sitter’s skin tones and poised expression. The work’s introspective calm and poised composition echo the influence of Italian Renaissance masters, to whom Klinghoffer’s early drawings were fre-quently compared.
Born in Galicia in 1900 and raised in London’s East End, Klinghoffer emerged as a prodigious talent, trained under Bernard Meninsky and Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her early promise was swiftly recognised, and she was hailed in the 1920s as a “girl genius.” While Klinghoffer resisted the label of ‘Jewish artist,’ her portraits of women—often drawing on her six sisters—resonate with a diasporic sen-sitivity and humanistic warmth. This painting exemplifies her commitment to figuration at a time when abstraction was ascendant, asserting the enduring relevance of the observed human figure imbued with psychological presence and quiet strength
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 Lon-don Group, the Women’s International Club, the Royal Academy and the Carnegie International. In 1923 and 1927 her work was included in ex-hibitions of ‘Jewish art’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (although she disliked this label).
The Artist
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.
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 Klinghof-fer held solo exhibitions in 1941, 1951 and 1958. In her later years, however, her work suffered from the decline in demand for figurative paint-ing; 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 Lon-don in 1972, with retrospectives at the Belgrave Gallery, London in 1976 and Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle in 1977. 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.
Guidance notes on Immigrant artists
Lucien Pissarro
The Pagoda, Kew (1919) by
Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944)
Oil on canvas, 52.5 x 42.5 cm
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This luminous landscape by Lucien Pissarro exemplifies his synthesis of French Impressionist technique with a distinctly British sensibility. Painted with vibrant, broken brushstrokes and a high-key palette, the work captures the soft morning or late afternoon light filtering through a stand of trees, casting long, dappled shadows across a gently sloping lawn. A distant architec-tural feature—likely a church spire— anchors the composition in both place and time, lending a quiet narrative element to an otherwise medi-tative scene. The atmospheric handling of light and colour demonstrates Pissarro’s enduring allegiance to the principles of Impressionism, inherited from his father, Camille Pissarro, and shaped by early exposure to Seurat and Signac. Having settled permanently in England in 1890, Lucien became a key figure in the transmission of Continental modernist ideals into British art. His role in founding the Éragny Press with his wife Esther reflects a broader Arts and Crafts ethos, marrying fine art with design and print-making. Though he participated in avant-garde circles such as the Fitzroy Street and Camden Town Groups, his landscapes often resist urban modernity, favouring pastoral quietude. This painting, with its balance of formal structure and lyrical spontaneity, encapsulates Lucien Pissarro’s contribution to early 20th-century Anglo-French visual culture.
London in 1890. In 1894, together with his wife, Esther (1870-1951, née Bensusan), a wood-engraver, designer, and printer, he established the publishing house, Éragny Press, based in Epping Forest in Essex, and named after the French village, where the family had lived since the 1880s. This enabled him to explore and experiment with printmak-ing and book design, though he was primarily considered a landscape painter. In 1906 he joined the New English Art Club, where he exhibited landscapes of the British countryside including Surrey, Dorset, and Devon. In 1907 he was in-vited by Walter Sickert to join the Fitzroy Street Group, and later with Sickert went on to become a co-founder of the Camden Town Group. In 1919, he formed the shortlived Monarro Group, aiming to show artists inspired by Monet and his father Camille Pissarro. From 1922 to 1937 he painted regularly in the south of France, also travelling to Derbyshire, south Wales, and Essex and between 1934 and 1944 exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. He died in Hewood, Dorset, England on 10 July 1944, bequeathing his collection to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He is also represented in numerous other UK public collections including the Courtauld, the Government Art Collection, Leeds Art Gallery, the University of Hull and the William Morris Gallery.
The Artist
Painter Lucien Pissarro was born into a Jewish family in Paris, France on 20 February 1863, the eldest son of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro; his only child was the painter Orovida Pissarro. He grew up in France, mixing frequently with artists from his father’s circle and was particularly inspired by the work of Signac and Seurat. In 1886, he exhibited at the last of the Impressionist exhibitions and from then on (until 1894) showed with the Salon des Indépendants. He first visited Britain in 1870–71 during the Franco-Prussian War, returning to France in 1883–84, then settling permanently in
Guidance notes on Immigrant artists
Martin Bloch
Svendborg Harbour, Denmark (1934) by Martin Bloch (1883-1954)
Oil on canvas on board (69 x 79 cm)
A zoomable image of this painting is available on our website to use in the classroom with an interactive white-board or projector.
This dynamic harbour scene by Martin Bloch ex-emplifies his mature, post-impressionistinflect-ed expressionist style, marked by vivid colour, rhythmic structure, and a vigorous engagement with the urban-industrial landscape. Rendered with bold, angular forms and an exuberant pal-ette, the composition conveys a sense of animat-ed disorder—masts, cranes, boats, and architec-ture intersect in a visual cacophony suggestive of modernity’s ceaseless motion. The acidic greens and saturated blues of the port buildings contrast sharply with the pink-violet hues of the sky, heightening the painting’s emotional charge and formal tension.
Bloch’s early architectural training and his expo-sure to avant-garde circles in Berlin, Paris, and Spain inform the painting’s compositional scaf-folding and colour logic, while his experience of displacement as a Jewish émigré gives psycho-logical depth to his urban visions. Having fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and endured wartime internment in Britain, Bloch developed a highly personal painterly language—restless, gestural, and fiercely chromatic—that resisted prevailing aesthetic norms. This work captures his endur-ing fascination with transformation: of light, space, and cultural identity.
As a teacher and frequent exhibitor with the Ben Uri Gallery, Bloch left a lasting impact on British modernism. His industrial scenes are not merely depictions of place, but expressions of resilience, fragmentation, and the vitality of lived experi-ence.
The
Artist
Martin Bloch was born into a nonobservant Jewish family in Neisse, Germany (now Nysa, Poland) 16 November 1883. He initially trained as an architect and later studied drawing in Ber-lin under Lovis Corinth. He held his first solo exhibition at art dealer Paul Cassirer’s Gallery in Berlin in 1911, then travelled to Paris and to Spain, where he lived between 1914 and 1920, before returning to Berlin to co-found a paint-ing school with Anton Kerschbaumer and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
Following the rise of the Nazi Regime and the condemnation of his art as ‘de-generate’, Bloch left Germany in 1934, moving first to Denmark and then to England, where he settled in London, opening a second painting school with Australian painter Roy de Maistre in 1936. Four of his oil paintings had already been included in the ‘Exhibition of German-Jewish Artists’ Work: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture’ (5–15 June 1934) organised at the Parsons Gal-lery, London by GermanJewish emigre dealer, Carl Braunschweig (later Charles Brunswick), which included in total 221 artworks by 86 art-ists suffering persecution under the Nazi regime. His work was also included in the important ‘Exhibition of Twentieth-Century German Art’ at the New Burlington Galleries in 1938, intended as a riposte to the notorious ‘Entartete Kunst’ (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition organised by the Nazis in Munich in 1937. Bloch held his first solo London show at the Lefevre Gallery in 1939. Between 1940 and 1941 Bloch was one of many so-called ‘enemy aliens’ interned, first at Huy-ton Camp, Liverpool, then briefly on the Isle of Man. Afterwards, he exhibited in Oxford and Cambridge in 1941. He was naturalised in 1947. He was a regular exhibitor with Ben Uri Gallery, he joined the hanging committee for the 1948 Spring Exhibition, and held a joint exhibition with Josef Herman at Portman Street in 1949. Bloch’s work also featured in Ben Uri’s Festival of Britain AngloJewish Exhibition 1851–1951 Art Section, an adjunct to the main Anglo-Jew-ish Exhibition held at University College in 1951. In the same year he also contributed to the Arts Council exhibition ‘60 Paintings for 51’. In 1952 he had a solo travelling show in Canada. Martin Bloch died in London, England on 19 June 1954. A retrospective was held at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London in 1955, the Arts Council organised a touring memorial exhibition in 1957 and a further memorial show was held at Ben Uri in 1963. In 2007, Martin Bloch: A Painter’s Painter, was held at the Sainsbury Centre, Nor-wich. Bloch’s work is represented in numerous UK collections including the British Museum, the Government Art Collection and the Tate.
Guidance notes on Immigrant Artists
Feliks Topolski
Camp Guards and Inmates after Liberation, 1945
by Feliks Topolski
(1907-1989)
Print on paper, 73 x 105 cm
A zoomable image of this painting is available on our website to use in the classroom with an interactive whiteboard or projector.
During the Second World War, Topolski, already in England, was appointed an official war artist for the Polish government in exile, and then for the British government. Picture Post magazine sent him to Russia, and he also travelled to Egypt, Palestine, the Levant, India and Burma. In April 1945 Topolski accompanied the Polish II Corps to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, arriving two weeks after its liberation. His drawings of the camp featured in Ben Uri’s 1947 exhibition, Subjects of Jewish Interest, and Topolski subsequently worked as an official artist at the Nuremberg Trials. His distinctive and dynamic style of draughtsmanship made him one of the most celebrated Polish artists in Britain. Topolski’s Chronicles – published in multiple instalments between 1953 and 1982 and containing over 2,300 drawings – and from which this image has been taken and cut down – were inspired by seventeenth and eighteenth-century broadsheets, combined with Topolski’s on-thespot sketches. Each image was hand-printed on rough brown “butcher’s” paper on a press in his studio, and each issue, devoted to a different news item, was distributed to 2,000 global subscribers, including museums, universities, libraries and private collections. The breadth and scope of the Chronicles show Topolski’s position at the heart of political, cultural and social debates of his time.
The Artist
Feliks Topolski was born Felicjan Typlel-Topolski in Warsaw, Poland on 14 August 1907 and trained at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He arrived in England in 1935, commissioned by “Wiadomości Literackie” (“Literary News”) to record King George V’s Silver Jubilee. During the Second World War he was appointed an official war artist for the Polish government in exile, and then for the British government, commissioned to make drawings of life in London during the air raids of October 1940. He also visited the Russian Front for “Picture Post” magazine for six months from 1941-42 and made independent submissions to the War Artists’ Advisory Commitee until the end of the war. Further travels took him to Egypt, Palestine, the
Levant, India and Burma. He accompanied the Polish II Corps, arriving in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp two weeks after its liberation in April 1945; his drawings of the camp featured in Ben Uri’s 1947 exhibition, “Subjects of Jewish Interest”. He subsequently worked as an official artist at the Nuremberg Trials. Topolski was also known for his portraits of writers including H. G.Wells, Graham Greene, John Mortimer and Evelyn Waugh, and politicians Harold Macmillan and Aneurin Bevan. He also painted murals, contributed to BBC programmes, and designed theatrical sets. He was elected a senior Royal Academician as a draughtsman in 1989. Feliks Topolski died in London, England on 24 August 1989. His work is in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Government Art Collection, The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Trust (Wightwick Manor).
