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Germany's artists in exile
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent20 Jan 2009
WORK made in Britain by artists who fled the Nazis has gone on show in London.
Ben Uri Gallery, the capital's Jewish museum of art, has brought together 90 pieces, including paintings, prints, ceramics and sculpture for the exhibition Forced Journey.
They include works created after the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933 but before the death camps. Some pieces were produced when German speakers were interned in Britain during the Second World War.
Citizens of Germany and her allies - as well as known British Nazi sympathisers - were rounded up as soon as war broke out in 1939. Thousands of Jews who had fled the Nazis were initially included, and some spent several years in internment camps.
As materials were limited, the artists had to be resourceful: using lino from the floor for print-making, and etching designs in windows that had been painted black.
The exhibition features work by Kurt Schwitters, who became famous for his collages but painted portraits of his fellow internees for a fee. "They are very beautiful, non-characteristic paintings," co-curator Rachel Dickson said.
"The issue of artists who were interned has been neglected, so it's timely to re-examine it. These were people who thought they'd escaped persecution."
Schwitters was born in Hanover in 1887 and studied at the Dresden Academy alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz. His work was well known when the Nazis took power - but they ridiculed it and some was confiscated and condemned.
When in 1937 the Gestapo asked to see him, he fled to Norway then to Britain.
Deemed an enemy alien, he was interned in Scotland and England before spending 18 months in a camp on the Isle of Man. He was released in 1941 after interventions by art historian Alexander Dorner, and lived in London before moving to the Lake District where he died in 1948, aged 60.
Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg have cited his work as an influence. Other artists featured include George Mayer-Marton, Ludwig Meidner, Hans Feibusch, Margaret Marks, Harry Fischer and Fred Uhlman. Ms Dickson, co-curator with Sarah MacDougall, said one or two went back to Germany after the war, such as Meidner, "but most of those we are showing stayed here for the duration of the war and after".
Feibusch became a graphic designer for major companies such as Shell. Marks worked as a ceramicist in the pottery industry of Stoke.
Others ended up as important gallery owners - such as Fischer who co-founded Marlborough Fine Art - or became teachers. The exhibition is being mounted in conjunction with the Courtauld Institute, which is introducing a module on arts in exile in its MA course.
Forced Journey: Artists In Exile In Britain 1933-1945 opens today and runs until 19 April, with admission fee.
Reader views (1)
My father, the painter, Dusemond (born Koln 1919, died Taunton 1998)produced a series of pictures during his time in the British Internment Camp at Kabele near Nairobi June 1940-January 1942. I have recently discovered a few of them. They are mainly portraits of fellow inmates.
- Dr Lavinia Braun, Cobham, Surrey, UK, 26/01/2009 15:47
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