The first museum exhibition of Jankel Adler’s works in Britain since the Arts Council memorial show in 1951 will open in London on 3 June.
It is presented on the seventieth anniversary of his death, co-curated by Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall of the Ben Uri Research Unit for the Study of the Jewish and Immigrant Contribution to the Visual Arts in Britain since 1900 (BURU).
Born into a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland, in 1895, Adler was a key participant in the development of 20th-century European modern and avant-garde art.
Known to German and Polish authorities as an active ‘cultural Bolshevist’, he was branded by the Nazis as a ‘degenerate’ artist. Adler’s work was included in the infamous1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich.
Like Paul Klee, he fled Germany in 1933. In Paris, Adler joined Atelier 17 under the tutelage of Stanley William Hayter and met and befriended Picasso. Adler’s relationships with Klee and Picasso were pivotal; both considered him a driving force of modernism.
Adler joined the Polish Free Army, escaping advancing German troops via the port of St. Nazaire in Brittany. He arrived in Scotland, penniless and in poor health. Discharged from an internment camp after a brief stay, he was befriended in Glasgow by Estonian-Jewish émigré sculptor Benno Schotz, through whom he re-engaged with the younger, fellow Polish-Jewish artist Josef Herman, who also found refuge in Glasgow.
They supported each other emotionally as they learned of Nazi atrocities and the loss of Herman’s entire family in the Warsaw ghetto. Separated from his wife and daughter throughout this period, Adler only heard that all his own siblings had perished after the war ended.
Adler and Herman were active in the New Art Club in Glasgow and Adler greatly influenced Scottish artists of the period, particularly Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. In 1941 there were two exhibitions of his work in Glasgow and in 1942 he lived in the Kirkcudbright Artists’ Colony.
In 1943 he moved to London where he befriended fellow German émigrés, including Kurt Schwitters, and English artists including Julian Trevelyan.
There he joined the Ohel Club of immigrant Jewish intellectuals, whose members included Herman, fellow immigrant artists Martin Bloch and Marek Szwarc, as well as David Bomberg, and the Yiddish poet Yitzhak Manger.
Between 1943 and his death in 1949, Adler was exhibited in London at the Redfern Gallery, Gimpel Fils and the Anglo-French Centre, as well as in the Waddington Galleries, Dublin; Galerie de France, Paris; Bezalel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Knoedler Galleries, New York.
Adler died from a heart attack in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, on 25 April 1949.
Ben Uri’s snapshot survey addresses Adler’s nine influential years in Britain with a range of paintings and works on paper which ably represent his diversity and creativity.
| Duration | 03 June 2019 - 08 July 2019 |
| Times | Exhibition open daily 11am to 5pm from 3 to 16 June and the following four Mondays 17 and 24 June and 1 and 8 July |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Ben Uri Gallery |
| Address | 108A Boundary Road, London, NW8 0RH |
| Contact | / info@benuri.org.uk / www.benuri.org.uk |