In Jeune Servante (Waiting Maid) Soutine focuses on a single subject against an unadorned background, an anonymous, working-class figure in uniform painted with typically expressive and tactile brushwork. The painting also has a second title, La Soubrette (referring to a coquettish character derived from operetta), which - possibly to encourage sales - was given when the work was offered for sale in London in 1938 in a show entitled The Tragic Painters at Alex, Reid & Lefevre Ltd., when it was also dated to c.1925, although the original title seems closer to the artist’s intentions. Working direct from the life, Soutine captured an expression somewhere between weariness, wariness and submission, but drew attention to the maid’s inner life by emphasising her individuality. His virtuoso paint handling illuminates her white apron with a dazzling display of colour. This portrait relates to Soutine’s series of powerful character studies of pastry cooks, choirboys, boot boys, bellboys and maids, dressed in the uniforms of their professions, in exaggerated poses ranging from awkwardness to arrogance. From the 1930s Soutine’s figure paintings became less frenzied and more meditative. La Soubrette was unveiled in 2012 at the exhibition, From Russia to Paris: Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries. It is one of only seven Soutines in British museum collections.
The
Artist
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 (191013), 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 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 and died shortly afterwards on 9 August 1943. His work is in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Courtauld and Tate, and in numerous international collections including in Paris, New York and Switzerland.
Guidance notes on Jewish Artists
Leon Kossoff
Portrait of N M Seedo, c. 1957 by Leon
Kossoff
(1926-2019)
Charcoal on paper, 103 x 71 cm
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This portrait is one of three associated works depicting émigrée Sonia Husid (1906–1985), known by her nom de plume N. M. Seedo. Possibly a distant relative of Kossoff’s, she was an important model for the artist in this period. Seedo refers to their friendship in her semiautobiographical account, In the Beginning was Fear (1964), which also movingly describes her experiences of pogroms, fear and loss in Romania. In this empathic portrait, Kossoff clearly conveys her strength through suffering.
Seedo was also known in her own right in Britain as a Yiddishist. Born in Bessarabia and educated in Vienna, she was a member of the socialist Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair and the (then illegal) Romanian Communist Party before she settled in England in 1930. Seedo married fellow immigrant and Yiddish writer Y. I. Lisky (originally Yehuda Itamar Fuchs, official name Summer Fuchs) in London in 1935; they subsequently divorced and remarried in 1970.
Portrait of N. M. Seedo bears a striking resemblance to Seated Woman, a 1957 oil painting, and a charcoal and conté drawing of the same title exhibited in Kossoff’s second and third London Group exhibitions. Heavily delineated with fluent thick black marks and depicted in three-quarters profile, N. M. Seedo sits with her hands together, and eyes downcast. The tubular arm-rest that portions off the bottom left corner is a compositional device that recurs in later works.
The
Artist
Artist Leon Kossoff was born to Jewish immigrant parents in Islington, London, England in1926. His parents were both born in what was formerly the Russian Empire, and is now the Ukraine (both emigrated as children, and met and married in London in 1924); Leon was raised in the East End, where his parents ran a bakery. During the Second World War he was evacuated to King’s Lynn in Norfolk, where his host family encouraged his passion for drawing, and he subsequently attended life classes at Toynbee Hall in the East End, and Saturday classes at St Martin’s School of Art. Following National Service with
the Royal Fusiliers Jewish Brigade (1945–48), he studied at St Martin’s School of Art (1949–53) and the Royal College of Art (1953-56), alongside Frank Auerbach, with whom he also attended David Bomberg’s evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic (1950-52), which proved a formative experience.
In 1956, the year in which he participated in the Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists at Ben Uri Gallery, he had the first of five solo shows at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Art Gallery (1957-64), followed by more than 30 further solo exhibitions hosted by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1981), the Venice Biennale (1995), Tate (1996), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2000) and the National Gallery (2007). He also participated in numerous group exhibitions including in 1976, The Human Clay, an exhibition selected by R. B. Kitaj, which brought together a loose group of figurative artists, whom he referred to as representing a ‘School of London’, a label subsequently much debated.
London was the focus of much of Kossoff’s work, from early postwar bombed cityscapes to a series based on Christ Church, Spitalfields and scenes of intense human activity including the underground, train stations, parks and swimming pools in Dalston, Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Kilburn, Willesden and the Embankment. He also drew daily from life, often in charcoal. His final exhibition ‘Leon Kossoff: A London Life’, was held at Piano Nobile, London in 2019. Leon Kossoff died in London, England on 4 July 2019, aged 92. His work is represented in numerous UK collections including the Arts Council, the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal College of Art and Tate, and in international collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and MoMA. A retrospective, accompanying the publication of a catalogue raisonné of paintings, edited by Andrea Rose, was held at Annely Juda Fine Art in 2021.
Guidance notes on Jewish Artists
R B Kitaj
Red Self-portrait after Masaccio, 2005
by R B Kitaj
(1932-2007)
Oil on canvas, 61 x 61 cm
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In his later years, Kitaj made numerous works exploring his Jewish identity including self-portraits, frequently referencing the Old Masters. Executed in his favoured square format, this self-portrait takes a detail - the seated figure of St. Peter - from Masaccio’s Florentine fresco, The Tribute Money (c. 1425), reconfigured in expressive long, vertical red brushstrokes in a vivid red and pink palette, juxtaposed with short horizontal slashes of white and green. Gallerist Geoffrey Parton has observed how ‘Kitaj’s turbulent career closed with a remarkable series of small, spare, inventive painting of real distinction’, in which he ‘achieved the late style he had been striving for’.
The Artist
Painter, printmaker and draughtsman R. B. (Ronald Brooks) Kitaj was born to a Hungarian father and an American mother (of Russian-Jewish immigrant parentage) in Cleveland, Ohio, USA on 29 October 1932. After his parents divorced, his mother married Walter Kitaj, a Viennese-Jewish refugee and research chemist, and Kitaj took his stepfather’s name. Following an early career as a merchant seaman, he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at Cooper Union in New York. He served in the US army for two years, travelling widely in France and Germany, before moving to England to complete his training at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford (1958-59) and the Royal College of Art, London (1959-61), alongside David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield, among others. His first solo exhibition was held at Marlborough Fine Art, London in 1963 and his early work, executed in bright, flat colours was associated by some critics with the Pop Art Movement, a label he rejected. In his later years (particularly after his second marriage to fellow painter Sandra Fisher), he made numerous works exploring his Jewish identity. During the 1960s Kitaj taught at Ealing Art College, Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, and latterly, at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968. In 1976 he selected work by a group of British figurative painters, whom he famously described as representing a
‘School of London’ for an important exhibition entitled ‘The Human Clay’, organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain and held at the Hayward Gallery, London. This much-debated term has come to apply to a fixed group including Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, as well as Kitaj himself, although the term was not accepted by many of its so-called members.
In 1982 Kitaj was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and he became a Royal Academician in 1985. Following a sharply critical response to his 1994 Tate exhibition however, and the sudden death of his wife, Sandra, only weeks after its opening, Kitaj relocated permanently to Los Angeles in 1997. Debilitated by Parkinson’s disease in his later years, he committed suicide in Los Angeles, USA on 21 October 2007. In 2001 an important exhibition of his work was held at the National Gallery, London. His work is represented in numerous UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the British Council Collection, Pallant House Gallery, Tate, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Whitworth, as well as international collections including MoMA, New York.
Guidance notes on Jewish Artists
Mark Gertler
Daffodils in a Blue Bottle, 1916 by Mark Gertler (1891-1939)
Oil on canvas, 68.5 x 56 cm
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Gertler began this bold, experimental still life of daffodils in May 1916, during a period of respite away from his major canvas, Merry-Go-Round, in an effort to relieve his ‘penniless’ state by painting “some small saleable things”. After an uncertain start, he wrote to fellow artist Richard Carline that he had “got really interested in it, which means, probably, that it will be too good to sell!” Though keen to try “new notions for colour”, he longed to get back to “my Merry-Go-Round”. Roger Fry included this painting in his New Movement in Art exhibition in Birmingham, then the Mansard Gallery at Heal’s, London, in 1917.
The Artist
Mark Gertler was born the fifth and youngest child of Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents in Spitalfields, London, England in 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 Louis sent for them and 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 was included in the so-called ‘Jewish Section’, co-curated by David 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. His work was included in group shows at the Ben Uri Gallery in 1934 and 1937 and 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. 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 Tate room display in 2018.
Guidance notes on Jewish Artists
Marc Chagall
Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio, 1947 by Marc
Chagall
(1887-1985)
Gouache, pencil on paper, 51.2 x 36.3 cm
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This apocalyptic gouache, ink and pencil study in grey and lilac was executed in April 1945 when Chagall was in exile in New York due to the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War. Meret Meyer Graber, the artist’s grand-daughter and representative of the Comité Chagall, has identified and translated Chagall’s lightly written pencil titles in Cyrillic as ‘Apocalypse’ and ‘Capriccio’.This was probably the first work that Chagall produced after coming out of mourning for his late wife, Bella (who had died suddenly in September 1944), and was created in direct response to seeing the horrors of the concentration camps revealed through newspapers and Pathé newsreels. Chagall biographer Jackie Wullschlager has described it as ‘the bleakest of Chagall’s many crucifixions’: combining symbolism with realism and incorporating factual information about the Holocaust for the first time. The naked figure of Christ wearing phylacteries on his head and arm and a tallith (prayer shawl) flowing behind him, also combines male and female attributes in an hermaphrodite figure symbolizing both the male and female victims of the Holocaust; a bestial Nazi crouches at the foot of the cross. The grandfather clock in the top right of the study is missing its minute and hour hands, casting this moment in history as the end of time - the apocalypse. Below, a series of complex and horrific scenes uncover the extent of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, among them another crucifixion, a hanging, skeletal victims of the camps amid burned buildings, and a boatload of refugees.
The Artist
Artist Marc Chagall was born into a Jewish family in the town of Vitebsk, Russia (now in Belarus) in 1887. He moved to St Petersburg in 1907, to study at the Imperial School for the Protection of the Fine Arts, and later at the Zvantseva School, led by Léon Bakst. In 1910, 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, includ-
ing Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine. 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 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’Avigdor-Goldsmid at Tudeley chapel in Kent (1968-85). Marc Chagall died in Saint-Paul-deVence, France on 28 March 1985.
Guidance notes on Jewish Artists
David Bomberg
Racehorses, 1913
by David Bomberg (1890-1957)
Black chalk and wash on paper, 41x66 cm
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This radical chalk-and-wash drawing was among Bomberg’s five exhibits in the so-called ‘Jewish Section’ that he co-curated with Jacob Epstein at the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s exhibition Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements in May 1914. Bomberg’s friend John Rodker (a racing enthusiast) also reproduced the drawing as a frontispiece in The Dial Monthly, explaining that it was set in a paddock at a race meeting, that the two figures on the front right of the composition were bookies, those to their left spectators, and that the style was ‘cubist’; adding ‘It is not intended to be comic’. Executed in 1913, when Bomberg was only 22, Racehorses is a key transitional work, which demonstrates his absorption and understanding of the contemporaneous European avant-garde, skilfully reworked into a drawing of startling power and originality.
Even before he became a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, Bomberg had begun to employ a shallow picture space and to simplify his forms. By 1913 he was producing ‘Cubist compositions’ including one featuring the wooden ‘donkey’ on which students sat to sketch in the Slade life class (which bears a close resemblance to Bomberg’s stiffly-jointed racehorses).
His understanding of Cubism was enhanced by his visit to Paris in 1913 and he was also aware of the 1910 Futurist Manifesto with its explanation that ‘a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular’. He shared a fascination with mechanisation with the nascent Vorticist movement, reflected in his manifesto accompanying his first solo show at the Chenil Gallery, London, in July 1914, where he explained that his object was ‘the construction of Pure Form’. However Bomberg also combined modernist techniques with allusions to older processes: the close-grained texture of the picture is reminiscent of woodcuts, and the monochrome colouring akin to that in photography of the day.
He would have been familiar with Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographs of the ‘animal in motion’, and his racehorses also neatly illustrate what Muybridge himself noted in
his Prelude to Analyses, that ‘during very rapid motion by a good horse, the aggregate of the body preserves a nearly horizontal line’. Like Bomberg’s other innovative works, Racehorses was generally viewed with hostility and incomprehension when first exhibited with the Jewish Chronicle calling his racehorses ‘Opposed to all that is rational in art’.
The Artist
David Bomberg was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Birmingham, England in 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 Modernism. Initially apprenticed as a chromolithographer, he later studied 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. 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.
After a series of disappointments in the 1930-40s Bomberg concentrated on portraits of friends and family, as well as a series of searching self-portraits. 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. 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, in 1957.
Guidance notes on Jewish Artists
Frank Auerbach
Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II
by Frank Auerbach
(1931- )
Oil on canvas, 51 x 51 cm
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This vibrant landscape is one of a number by the artist depicting Mornington Crescent, the area in Camden Town, north London, where he has lived and worked in a studio since 1954, when it was vacated by his artist friend and contemporary Leon Kossoff (and before him the German-Jewish artist Gustav Metzger). It is painted with the distinctive heavy impasto which characterises Auerbach’s work. In his portraits and nudes, as well as urban landscapes, Auerbach frequently returns to the same subject. Here, using a lively yellow and blue palette that contrasts with the earthy tones of his earlier urban scenes, he transforms the choking London traffic into a vigorous surge of pigment.The date ‘2004’ scratched into the paintwork suggests the urgency and transience of both life and art.
A German-Jewish émigré with a focus on a particular ‘home’ location and a ‘family’ of familiar sitters, Auerbach’s work has a particular resonance for the exploration of issues of identity and migration. As Auerbach himself has commented of his background: ‘I wasn’t British born, […] I didn’t have a family and I didn’t have anything to anchor me to whatever was going on’. Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II combines the artist’s focus on familiar architectural structures together with a sense of place. Auerbach deliberately restricts his landscape motifs, concentrating especially on London locations and foregrounding the area around his studio and its distinctive features, which include the landmark chimney.
The
Artist
Painter Frank Auerbach was born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Germany in1931 and, following the rise of Nazism, was sent to England in 1939; his parents, who remained behind, subsequently perished in concentration camps. Auerbach spent his childhood at Bunce Court, a progressive boarding school in Kent for Jewish refugee children. He attended St Martin’s School of Art (1948–52) and studied at David Bomberg’s evening classes at Borough Polytechnic together with Leon Kossoff, as well as at the Royal College of Art (1952–55). In 1956, he 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. He was for many years represented by the Marlborough Galleries in London, and is now represented 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 has stated that he does not feel part of this or any group.
Auerbach has 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 is a frequent subject in his painting, executed in a characteristic vigorous impasto, for which he makes often hundreds of preliminary drawings. He focuses 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 has 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). His work is included in collections throughout the UK including Abbot Hall, the Arts Council, the British Council, Pallant House Gallery, the National Gallery, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Royal College of Art, and Tate, as well as numerous international collections. Frank Auerbach lives and works in London.
Guidance notes on Jewish artists
Issac Rosenberg
Self Portrait in a Steel Helmet (1916)
by Issac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
Black chalk, gouache and wash on paper, 24 x 19.6 cm
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Isaac Rosenberg’s Self-portrait in Steel Helmet (1916) is a rare and poignant artefact of the First World War, uniting the visual and poetic sensi-bilities of one of the era’s most distinctive voices. Rendered on a humble brown ground with pen-cil and restrained touches of gouache or water-colour, the work captures the stark immediacy of selfperception in wartime. Rosenberg’s helmeted figure emerges from the paper with quiet defiance, his expression alert yet introspective, eyes fixed outward in what feels like a moment of solitary reckoning. The crude texture of the paper and the economy of materials evoke both the scarcity and urgency of trench life.
Unlike the heroic or sentimentalised portraits common to war art, this image is marked by psy-chological restraint and modernist abstraction. The helmet looms large, a symbol of both protec-tion and alienation. Rosenberg’s use of minimal colour —reserving yellow and white highlights for buttons and facial features—serves to heighten the figure’s spectral presence.
Rosenberg, trained at the Slade and shaped by Whitechapel’s émigré milieu, fused Jewish iden-tity, class consciousness, and avantgarde aes-thetics in both his poetry and visual art. This self-portrait stands as a powerful visual ana-logue to his verse: intimate, unvarnished, and profoundly human in the face of industrialised warfare.
The Artist
Isaac Rosenberg was born into a Jewish immi-grant 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 appren-ticed 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 af-ford models, his oeuvre includes many self-portraits as well as landscapes and works on literary themes. In 1914 his work was included in the so-called ‘Jewish Section’ co-curated by Bomberg and Jacob Epstein as part of ‘Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Afterwards Rosenberg visited his sister in South Africa where he paint-ed, 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 collec-tions 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 con-text 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.
Guidance notes on Jewish artists
Solomon J Solomon
The Breakfast Table (1921)
by Solomon J Solomon (1860-1927)
Oil on canvas (69 x 50.5 cm)
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This richly detailed interior scene by Solomon Joseph Solomon encapsulates the artist’s late-ca-reer preoccupation with the domestic and the intimate, rendered with technical virtuosity and a warm, observational tone. The painting pre-sents a moment of quiet familial leisure: two figures, possibly Solomon’s wife Ella and one of their children, absorbed in reading within an opulently decorated drawing room. The floral upholstery, heavily framed paintings, gleaming silver objects, and gilt accents evoke the refined tastes of the Holland Park artistic circle, to which Solomon belonged. This setting— likely his own home—reflects both the material culture of the late Victorian and Edwardian bourgeoisie and the cultivated aesthetic of artist-intellectuals of the period. Solomon, celebrated for his biblical composi-tions and society portraiture, often turned his technical prowess toward scenes of family life in later years. While his historical paintings were admired for their theatrical grandeur, works like this reveal a subtler psychological insight. The composition’s quiet symmetry and soft, diffused lighting suggest a mood of contemplative repose, while the attention to texture—particularly the interplay of fabric, paper, and light—demon-strates Solomon’s painterly sophistication. As a Jewish Royal Academician and influential cultural figure, Solomon shaped both institu-tional and communal artistic discourse. This painting testifies to his dual legacy as a master technician and chronicler of modern domestic life.
The Artist
Painter Solomon Joseph Solomon was born into a Jewish family in London, England on 16 Sep-tember 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 Alexan-dre 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 mod-els. He painted numerous informal pictures of his own family life and ‘wedding portraits’ of his relatives. Celebrated for his historical and biblical works, as well as his society portraiture, in 1906 he be-came only the second Jewish Royal Academician (his contributions to the annual RA exhibition were hung in what came to be known as Solo-mon’s corner) and President of the Royal Society of British Artists. An extremely influential fig-ure in Jewish circles, he was a founder and the first President of the Jewish cultural and philan-thropic organisation known as the Maccabeans and the main art adviser to its offshoot, the Jew-ish 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 Brit-ish Academy, the Imperial War Museum, Leight-on House, the Museum of London, Tate and the Walker Art Gallery.
Guidance notes on Jewish artists
Katerina Wilczynski
Liège (1946) by
Katerina Wilczynski (1894-1978)
Pen and india ink on paper, 46 x 33 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 finely rendered architectural drawing by Katerina Wilczynski, titled Liège and dated 1946, exemplifies her enduring commitment to the observational precision and lyrical clarity that marked her postwar European travels. Executed in delicate pen lines, the work captures the intricate Gothic architecture of a civic or ecclesiastical structure—likely one of Liège’s historic build-ings—highlighting its ornamental columns, ribbed vaults, and pointed arches with an elegant restraint that recalls the artist’s early training in Berlin and Leipzig and her subsequent immer-sion in classical architecture during her Roman sojourn in the 1930s. Wilczynski’s architectural studies balance documentary intent with poetic sensibility. The composition is meticulously constructed, yet the open areas of the page and the feathered quality of the line suggest a transient, almost dream-like atmosphere, where history and ruin quietly converge. Drawn in the immediate aftermath of World War II, this image not only documents European architectural heritage but also testifies to cultural continuity amidst loss. Having contributed to wartime exhibitions in London and recorded bomb-damaged buildings, Wilczynski approached architectural form with a deep awareness of vulnerability and resilience. This drawing, produced during her travels across postwar Europe, stands as both a topographical study and an intimate reflection on survival, reconstruction, and memory within the European landscape.
The Artist
Graphic artist Katerina Wilczynski was born into a Jewish family in Posen, Prussia (now Poznań, Poland) on 7 July 1894. She spent much of her early life in Berlin and studied art in Leipzig (1916–17), then Berlin (1918), before moving to Paris. In 1930, Wilczynski travelled to Rome on a Prix de Rome scholarship, where her work in-cluded drawings of churches and monuments in the city. She remained until 1938 when the new racial laws in Italy stripped many Jews of their rights, and in 1939, she moved to England, set-tling in London. During the Second World War, she drew London buildings and landmarks damaged by bombing and contributed pieces to the war artists exhibition held at the National Gallery, c. 1941
(toured to Somerville College, Oxford in 1942). Examples are held by the Imperial War Museum and the V&A, and at least one of these works was purchased by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, headed by Kenneth Clark. In 1942 she held a solo exhibition of drawings and watercolours at William Ohly’s Berkeley Galleries in London (later portraying his kitchen interior in watercolour).
Wilczynski spent part of the war staying in Richmond with the Old Master dealer Arthur Kauffmann (1886–1983) and his doctor wife Tamara (recording their son’s wedding menu in watercolour). They also offered refuge to the émigrée art dealer Grete Ring, whose Cleveland Row branch of Gallery Cassirer she depicted in 1941, after it was bombed out in the Blitz. She also drew Ring’s subsequent gallery-home at 30 South Molton Street, London, for invitations and greeting cards in the late 1940s. She exhibited with the AIA (Artists’ International Association) in exhibitions including For Liberty (1943). Wilczynski participated in annual group exhibitions of works by Jewish artists at Ben Uri Gallery in London in 1944, 1945, 1946 and 1949 and also exhibited with the Women’s International Art Club between 1944 and 1966.
Postwar she travelled widely including in Greece and Italy; holding two solo exhibitions at the émigré run Roland, Browse & Delbanco Galleries: ‘Drawings of Rome and Petits Riens’ (1946) and ‘Mediterranean Fantasies’ (1949), at émigrée Erica Brausen’s Hanover Gallery (1955), as well as the Trafford Gallery (1962), and at the Ansdell Gallery, London (1970). A.A.M. Stols published ‘An artist’s Diary in Pictures: Pen and Ink Draw-ings of a Continental Journey’ in the Hague in 1949 and she illustrated several books including ‘Rome’ (1946), ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ (1946), ‘Homage to Greece’ (1964) and ‘The Love Songs of Sappho’ (1966).
Katerina Wilczynski died in London, England on 12 November 1978. Her work is held in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collec-tion, the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, as well as in German collections in Dresden and Cologne.
