Dreams of Art in the Jewish East End:

The early history of the Ben Uri, 1915-1930

Dr. Lily Ford

Introduction

This paper aims to present the first chapter of a century-long history of Jewish, socially engaged art collecting in London. The Ben Uri Art Society was founded exactly one hundred years ago, and its recent centenary celebrations show it to be thriving, with a rich body of scholarship around many of its artists and patrons and a strong programme of events that includes art and wellbeing in the community. However there has been insufficient exploration of the early years of the society because much of the relevant archival material was inaccessible for the greater part of the twentieth century. Recent developments, including the re-accession of the society’s first minute book after some thirty years at New York’s YIVO archive, the appointment of an archivist to scrutinize and catalogue the Ben Uri’s quite large collection of papers, and the translation from Yiddish to English of much of the archival material dated between 1915 and around 1940, have facilitated new research possibilities for the English-speaking historian, enabling a fresh approach to the foundation and early life of this unique organization.1

As Ben Uri’s Researcher in Residence, I have spent several months consulting its archive and seeking to contextualize its personalities, organisations and ideas within broader histories – of London Jewry, Yiddishism, and wartime and interwar social and cultural life. My research is primarily driven by an interest in the protagonists of the society, rather than in the artists whose work it began to acquire. The Ben Uri’s own catalogues already offer substantial scholarship on many of its artists, including the Whitechapel boys, Alfred Wolmark and William Rothenstein, and work also exists on such notable figures as Simeon Solomon and Solomon J. Solomon.2 There is far less on those art-loving businessmen, shopkeepers and intellectuals who sustained the society through some tumultuous years in the 1910s and 1920s. As Professor Tony Kushner has pointed out, the Jewish East End was neglected by Jewish historians up until the 1970s, and although since then several key works have brought it more to the fore, there are very few accounts of the networks of groups and associations and their broader cultural impact . Several of these are by David Mazower, who through his own interest and extensive knowledge of the period, has made important contributions to the history of this community . It is to the research already undertaken by Mazower that I hope to add with this paper, which provides a chronological, archive-based, and contextualized history of the Ben Uri’s first fifteen years.

The first part of the paper establishes some background by addressing the wave of Jewish migration to London that resulted in the formation of the Ben Uri, and the centrality of Whitechapel and the East End for Eastern European Jews in London. Part 2 turns to the foundation of the Ben Uri and the profiles of its principal proponents. Although several pages are devoted to the society’s progenitor, Lazar Berson, I move on to focus on the groupings of individuals who dominated the society’s activities as the 1910s turned into the 1920s, reflecting on the broader cultural and ideological associations these brought into the organization, and its transformation from a society to a collecting and exhibiting body, which is described in Part 3 As the story of the Ben Uri Society unfolds from the minutes and cuttings of its archive, I pause to consider proceedings with a wider lens on London – of the geographical and cultural connotations of the east and the west for London Jews, of the city in wartime conditions, of what it was to be a Jew travelling through the metropolis, and of how far Yiddish culture reached any kind of mainstream media recognition in this period. Finally, as the Ben Uri settles into its first East End home in 1930, I revisit the changing dynamic of Yiddishism and Jewish East London, on the cusp of a new and quite different wave of Jewish immigration from Germany and Austria.