Ben Uri Gallery at London Art Fair (18–22 January 2023)

As the official Museum Partner of the 2023 London Art Fair, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum is delighted to present the exhibition Art, Identity, Migration.

This exhibition explores – in reverse chronological order – three principal waves of migration to Britain, illustrating the history, width and breadth of both the institution and its collection, showcasing paintings, drawings, sculpture and collages by 32 artists of Jewish and/or immigrant origin from across the past century. The display reflects the museum’s distinctive academic and artistic focus on the study and recording of the Jewish and immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900, via the Ben Uri Research Unit’s digital database (buru.org.uk).

Ben Uri is a small, purposeful, scholarly institution that uses art and technology differently to deliver distinctive national programmes. Founded in Whitechapel in 1915 by Russian-Jewish artist Lazar Berson to support fellow Jewish immigrant artists working outside the cultural mainstream, it initiated its collection in 1918 and opened its first gallery in 1925, but effectively closed 70 years later in 1995. In 2002, it relaunched in a new gallery, widening its focus to embrace immigrant artists from all ethnicities, nationalities and religions, who have made a distinct contribution to British art since 1900.

In 2018 the Museum published a transformative Sustainability and Public Benefit Strategic Plan, making a prescient shift to create the first full-scale digital museum (benuri.org) and Research Unit (buru.org.uk) to complement Ben Uri’s vibrant gallery programming. The redefined, fully digitised Ben Uri Collection (benuricollection.org.uk) uniquely reflects the wider British immigrant contribution with some 880 works by 390 artists, 70%

(1933 Bombay [now Mumbai] India – 2010 London, England)

King Lear, 1964, Oil on canvas

Ben Uri Collection, Presented by the Estate of Lancelot Ribeiro 2022

Immigrated to Britain 1950 immigrant and 29% women, from 45 different countries of birth. Our Arts and Mental Health department develops researched art interventions and digital programming for the 70+ demographic, often living in social isolation and/ or with dementia.

The display opens with works by artists either from or representing richly diverse non-European backgrounds, who completed their art studies in post-Second World War Britain. It begins with a vivid portrayal of The Dancer (Agbogho Mmuo – Maiden Spirit Mask) , one of the characters from the Nigerian masquerade, by pioneering African modernist Ben Enwonwu, reflecting his Igbo heritage; flanked by a bold King Lear by Indian Expressionist Lancelot Ribeiro.

Born into a Catholic family from Goa (then a Portuguese colony) in Bombay (now Mumbai), Ribeiro is the subject of an upcoming exhibition at Ben Uri Gallery in 2024. His friend, Indian poet, translator and critic R. Parthasarathy, rightly observed that Ribeiro’s ‘true subject’ was his ‘origins – Goan roots, estrangement from India, and exile in London’.

Born into a Zoroastrian Indian household in Mumbai, some 46 years after Ribeiro, printmaker and sculptor Hormazd Narielwalla’s multi-panel collage, The Bands of Pride, references both Edward I’s forced expulsion of his Jewish subjects from England in 1290, and positive Jewish resettlement in the historic ‘Blue City’ of Chefchaouen in Morocco. While Eastern-Turkish artist Güler Ates, who is from a Zaza ethnicity, in Home Performance I, set in Lapa, Rio, centres on a veiled figure crossing the foreground pulling a house behind her, embodying the artist’s central belief that we carry our ‘mental home … wherever we go’.

Zory Shahrokhi

(1963 Tehran, Iran – lives in Middlesex, England) Revolution Street 2, 2019, Pen and ink and gold pen on paper Ben Uri Collection, Commissioned for the Ben Uri Collection 2018 Immigrated to Britain 1979

Two contemporary artists commissioned by Ben Uri highlight universal issues around experiences of displacement, exploitation, gender oppression and breaches in human rights. Iranian-born Zory Shahrokhi’s drawing, Revolution Street 2 , commissioned in 2018, depicts a swallow – a worldwide symbol of freedom and migration – contained within a diamond-shaped textile suggesting a headscarf. It commemorates ‘the Girls of Enghelab (Revolution) Street’ movement that started in Tehran after a woman removed her headscarf in protest against the compulsory wearing of the hijab.

The current civil unrest in Iran is in protest against exactly the same restriction of freedom of choice.

Edwin Mingard’s video, commissioned in 2015 to mark Ben Uri’s centenary, generously supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, narrates, Break , the story, based on real-life interviews, of Muslim Egyptian migrant Yousef as he struggles to survive in the big city. (Certain costumes, scenes and shots in the film were inspired by or responded to artworks from the Ben Uri collection including Mark Gertler’s Rabbi and Rabbitzin and

Emmanuel Levy’s Crucifixion.)

Dominican-born artist Tam Joseph, who migrated to England in 1955 at the age of eight, highlights the arbitrariness of national identities in his witty, prescient The Hand Made Map of the World, in which he playfully reorders conventional geographies, blurring boundaries and suggesting new and unexpected possibilities for the world political map.

Finally, from this ‘wave’ come an older group of artists, who also trained and built their careers in postwar Britain, and were brought together under the controversial label, ‘a School of London’, a term famously coined by AmericanJewish artist, painter, printmaker, and draughtsman R. B. Kitaj, to describe a group of British-based figurative painters including, among others, Frank Auerbach, Leon

TAM JOSEPH

(b. 1947 Roseau, Dominica – lives in London, England and Nîmes, France)

The Hand Made Map of the World, 2013, Acrylic on board Ben Uri Collection. Purchased with the kind assistance of the artist 2016 Immigrated to Britain 1955

Kossoff, and himself. Kossoff’s fluent and heavily delineated dark, charcoal portrait of Romanian refugee Sonia Husid, known by her nom de plume N. M. Seedo, conveys her strength through suffering. In contrast, Kitaj’s late selfportrait employs a hot palette and his favoured square format in reworking a detail from Masaccio’s Florentine fresco The Tribute Money (c. 1425).

Child refugee from Nazism, Frank Auerbach, completes this group with his vibrant depiction of Mornington

Crescent in Camden Town, north London, where he has lived and worked for more than 70 years; he transforms the choking London traffic into a vigorous surge of pigment capturing the transient beauty of a fleeting summer’s day.

His Royal College of Art contemporary, Joash Woodrow, a recluse who struggled with his mental health, also transforms an everyday suburban scene into a shimmering, tactile landscape, rich with possibility and colour.

Artists from the ‘Hitler émigré’ generation in flight from Nazi persecution, predominantly but not exclusively Jewish, represent the second wave of migration to Britain. They include Polish-born Josef Herman, whose Refugees (1941), draws strongly on his eastern-European Jewish heritage but also represents the wider displacement of

Frank Auerbach

(b. 1931 Berlin, Germany – lives in London, England)

Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II, 2004, Oil on canvas

Ben Uri Collection. Acquired in 2006 through the support of Art Fund, MLA/ V&A Purchase Grant Fund, Daniel & Pauline Auerbach, Frank Auerbach and Marlborough Fine Art London

Immigrated to Britain 1939

Josef Herman

(1911 Warsaw, Poland – 2000 London, England)

Refugees, c. 1941, Gouache on paper

Ben Uri Collection. Purchased with the kind assistance of the ACE/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, Art Fund and the vendor via Conor Macklin of the Grosvenor Gallery 2014

Immigrated to Britain 1940 all peoples uprooted and exiled by the upheavals of war. His fellow Pole and close companion Jankel Adler’s tearful Mother and Child II (1940), cradling her child protectively, recalls Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and represents the painful separation from family experienced by so many refugees.

Their postwar plight is reflected in Refugees (1947), by Orovida (a third-generation painter from the Pissarro artistic dynasty); herself the subject of a striking portrait by Clara Klinghoffer, an immigrant from an earlier generation,

Orovida

(née Orovida Pissarro, 1893 Epping, England – 1968 London, England)

Refugees, 1947, Oil on canvas

Ben Uri Collection. Purchased 2022 with the support of the Stern Pissarro Gallery who spent the war in New York.

Others who found refuge beyond Britain during the Nazi era include German caricaturist George Grosz, also exiled in New York, where he painted his savage Interrogation. While commemorating Communist-Jewish writer Erich Mühsam’s torture and murder, it also represents all victims of the Nazi regime. Similarly, in England, Emmanuel Levy’s 1942 Crucifixion was a cri-de-coeur against Jewish persecution in mainland Europe. Marc Chagall, exiled, like Grosz in New York, following the German Occupation of France, responded with his own crucifixion, Apocalypse

– Capriccio en Lilas , probably after seeing the Pathé newsreels uncovering the horrors of the concentration camps in April 1945.

Although fellow École de Paris juifs painter Chaïm Soutine remained in France, he was forced into hiding (dying in 1943 following a failed operation). He famously never made works relating to his Jewish background, but his anonymous maid, painted with typically expressive and tactile brushwork, was created in 1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to the German Chancellorship.

Other refugees from Nazism include German designer Elisabeth Tomalin, whose boldly coloured head, inspired by tribal masks and enamels, dates from her early studies at Berlin’s Reiman Schule, while Viennese émigrée MarieLouise von Motesiczky’s dramatically lit Circus composition demonstrates the looser, freer brushwork and softer, less angular style she developed in Britain after the war.

George Grosz

(né Georg Ehrenfried Groß, 1893 Berlin, Germany – 1959 Berlin, Germany)

Interrogation, 1938m Watercolour and ink on paper Ben Uri Collection. Acquired in 2010 with the assistance of Art Fund, the MLA/ V&A Purchase Grant Fund, Sir Michael and Lady Heller, Judit and George Weisz, Agnes and Edward Lee, and The Montgomery Gallery, San Francisco Immigrated to USA 1933

Emmanuel Levy

(1900 Manchester, England – 1986 London, England)

Crucifixion, 1942, Oil on canvas

Ben Uri Collection. Purchased through the generous assistance of members of the Board of Ben Uri Gallery 2004

West Indian Waitresses by Eva Frankfurther, like Auerbach, a child refugee from Nazism, depicts her fellow workers at Lyon’s Corner House, Piccadilly, also documenting the arrival of the postwar ‘Windrush generation’, depicting them with empathy and dignity. However, Austrian-Jewish concentration camp survivor, Ernst Eisenmayer’s satirically

Marc Chagall

(1887 Vitebsk, Russia – 1985 Saint Paul de Vence, France)

Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio, 1945–47, Gouache, pencil, Indian wash ink and Indian ink on paper

Ben Uri Collection. Acquired in 2009 supported by Miriam and Richard Borchard, Sir Michael and Lady Heller, and a donor who prefers anonymity, and benefiting from the advice of Lionel Pissarro and Art Fund entitled Law and Order, painted in 1962, reflects the racial discrimination endured by many.

Celebrated ‘Merz’ inventor Kurt Schwitters, whose pioneering collage technique repurposed found, frequently discarded materials, was also labelled ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. He sailed to Britain from Norway in 1940 and after

Ernst Eisenmayer

(1920 Vienna, Austria – 2018 Vienna, Austria)

Law and Order, 1962, Oil on Board

Ben internment as a so-called enemy alien’ on the Isle of Man (1940-41), found refuge in the Lake District. His work is dedicated to the German-Jewish refugee sculptor Else Fraenkel, who brought it with her into exile in England. Her head of Chinese architecture student, Chungsen Chou, has much in common with the work of Latvian émigrée sculptor Dora Gordine, and her sensitively modelled head

Eva Frankfurther

(1930 Berlin Germany – 1959 London, England)

West Indian Waitresses, c. 1955, Oil on paper

Ben Uri Collection. Presented by the artist’s sister, Beate Planskoy, 2015 Immigrated to Britain 1939 of an African woman, made in Paris in the 1920s.

Fellow sculptor Jacob Epstein, an earlier immigrant from an American-Russian Jewish background, presents two contrasting portraits: a smoothly rendered head of fellow artist Augustus John’s two-year-old son, Romilly, and a craggy bust of Leeds-born painter Jacob Kramer, capturing his famous nervous restlessness and energy.

Kurt Schwitters

(1887 Hanover, Germany – 1948 Kendal, Lake District, England)

Untitled: für Frau Fränkel, 1927, Collage on card

Ben Uri Collection. Purchased from the family of Else Fraenkel 2019 with reallocated proceeds from the sale of a deaccessioned work by David Bomberg previously purchased by Ben Uri

Immigrated to Britain 1940

Epstein represents a link to the first generation of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants and their children, the loose, informal group of ‘Whitechapel boys’, associated with London’s East End Jewish quarter, who studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, and engaged with early British modernism. David Bomberg’s radical Racehorses of 1913, made in an era of heady pre-First World War

Else Fraenkel

(née Elsa Rothschild, 1892 Bensheim, Germany 1975 –Bangalore, India)

Head of Chungsen Chou, 1928, Bronze Ben Uri Collection. Presented by Leighton House Museum 2018 Immigrated to Britain c. 1933 optimism, demonstrates his understanding of European avant-garde movements including Cubism and Futurism, while Romanian-born Clare Winsten (née Clara Birnberg), the only ‘Whitechapel girl’, signals her own modernist affinities with her colourful, pared-down Vorticist Figures (c. 1911-12). Mark Gertler’s double portrait, Rabbi and Rabbitzin, evokes the wider Jewish diaspora, but also capture a

David Bomberg

(1890 Birmingham, England – 1957 London, England)

Ghetto Theatre, 1920, Oil on canvas Ben Uri Collection. Purchased 1920 specific moment when the tension between traditional Jewish life in London’s East End was threatened by the incipient violence of the First World War. Poet-painter Isaac Rosenberg was fatally caught up in the conflict. His final, poignant Self-portrait in a Steel Helmet, drawn on cheap, crumpled, brown paper, probably salvaged from a parcel sent from home, was made while he was serving at the Front in Northern France in 1916, prior to his death, while

Mark Gertler

(1891 London, England – 1939 London, England)

Rabbi and Rabbitzin, 1914, Watercolour and pencil on paper Ben Uri Collection. Acquired in 2002 by private treaty through Sotheby’s with the assistance of Art Fund, HLF, V&A/MLA Purchase Grant Fund, Pauline and Daniel Auerbach, Sir Michael and Lady Heller, Agnes and Edward Lee, Hannah and David Lewis, David Stern, Laura and Barry Townsley, Della and Fred Worms and donors who prefer anonymity on patrol, in 1918. Bomberg’s savage Ghetto Theatre, made after his own devastating war service, encapsulates his personal disenchantment, symbolised by the hunched male figure leaning wearily on his stick.

Finally, their forerunner, Alfred Wolmark, representing Ben Uri’s founding generation, closes the display with his monumental painting, The Last Days of Rabbi ben Ezra, showcased at his first solo exhibition in London in 1905,

Isaac Rosenberg

(1890 Bristol, England – 1918 Fampoux, France) Self-Portrait in Steel Helmet, 1916, Black chalk, gouache, and wash on paper Ben Uri Collection. Acquired in 2009 with the assistance of Art Fund, the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and donors who prefer anonymity

Clare Winsten

(née Clara

Birnberg, 1892

Romania – 1989

London, England)

Untitled (Vorticist Figures), c. 1911-12, Oil on canvas Ben Uri Collection. Presented by Liss Fine Art 2008

Immigrated to Britain 1902 the year of the British ‘Aliens Act’, designed to stem the tide of Jewish immigration at source. This remarkable painting can be seen as an act of cultural identity, reconciling his Polish, Jewish and English roots, but it also brings us full circle to today’s contemporary stories of art, identity, and migration.

Sarah MacDougall, Director