From Local to Global: An obsession for Distinctive exhibitions,
1925 - 2025
2025 marks the 110th anniversary of the founding of Ben Uri in London’s Whitechapel, in July 1915, as an art society to support Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jewish artists and craftsmen, newly arrived from Eastern Europe, who had settled in the East End and were unable to access the cultural bastions of assimilated Anglo-Jewry. Just as significantly, however, this year also celebrates the centenary of its inaugural exhibition, which opened on 17 May 1925 at 68 Great Russell Street, London, WC1. In the interim one hundred years, Ben Uri has curated or presented almost 600 exhibitions in its physical spaces, and now, as the 21st century increasingly embraces digitization, it is proud to have pioneered and hosted around 80 exhibitions online.
Despite good intentions to host an inaugural exhibition soon after the Society’s creation, utilising Parisian artist contacts of founder, Lazar Berson (dates), early ambitious plans came to nothing. Exhibitions remained peripheral until the mid-1920s, as the core of a permanent collection was formed and the first of many galleries established, the peregrinations across the capital, in search of a forever ‘home’, reflecting the émigrés’ own journeys and arcs of settlement. The first venue (neither in the East End ghetto, nor the north London neighbourhood of early committee members, who moved outwards as they prospered, nor close to Berson’s west London studio in Notting Hill), was, perhaps, surprisingly, located opposite the British Museum (the nation’s own keeper of cultural heritages), where it confidently announced the arrival of Ben Uri and its fledgling collection, with its smart red-printed exhibition catalogue.
This first formal display presented 37 collection works and focussed on several artists who had sought refuge from the Russian Pale of Settlement, along with those born in the UK of migrant heritage. Exhibits included religious and biblical subjects, landscapes, urban genre scenes, portraiture, and a lone caricature. The opening painting was the monumental, recently acquired, Sabbath Rest by Polish history painter, Samuel Hirszenberg (1865-1908), followed by fifteen works by controversial homosexual painter, Simeon Solomon (18401905), and four by the young iconoclastic, ‘Whitechapel Boy’, David Bomberg, (18901957), including Ghetto Theatre. Only completed in 1920, it remains one of Ben Uri’s most important historic collection works – often requested for loan purposes. In a striking demonstration of continuing art historical relevance, more than 90 years later, in 201718, Ben Uri curated a solo show entitled Bomberg (in the continuing ‘Whitechapel Boys’ series, which commenced with Bernard Meninsky in 2001), which toured to Pallant House, Chichester, and in which this painting remained powerfully central.
Closing after only a year in Great Russell Street, the need for a permanent home was highlighted by Chairman Chechanover: ‘[…] the destiny of Ben Uri is like that of the Jewish people as a whole. Just as a people cannot exist without a home, so an institution cannot exist without a resting place.’
Ben Uri’s earliest exhibitions were defined mainly by collection displays and solo presentations by notable Jewish artists, often with eastern European heritage. Increasingly secular, catalogues engaged with various arguments around the concept of so-called ‘Jewish art’, as Ben Uri moved from a decorative arts-led agenda towards embracing art in the broadest terms, along with English rather than Yiddish. In 1927 Lena Pillico, wife of Vice-President, Leopold Pilichowski, held the first solo exhibition under the auspices of Ben Uri in her own St. John’s Wood studio – an early example of women playing key curatorial, exhibition, and organisational roles within the society (see PhD in progress by Emily Fuggle, QMUL). Unusually, for a UK art institution, Ben Uri has remained remarkably consistent in presenting both genders since its foundation, the roster of women exhibitors notably high (historically, much beyond the norm of most UK museums).
Ben Uri celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in November 1930 back in the East End, with a new ‘gratis’ space in the Jews Temporary Shelter at 63 Mansell Street, E1. The opening exhibition catalogue listed 77 collection works. Just three years before the rise of Hitler in Germany, in words that would become, once again, tragically prophetic, the ‘Introduction’ described Ben Uri’s foundation during ‘one of the darkest pages in the history of the world, [when] large numbers of people were forced to leave their homeland and seek refuge in foreign countries.’
The 1930s subsequently marked one of the most significant periods in Ben Uri’s chequered exhibition history. The sudden but crucial turn in mid-decade to support living artists, through the introduction of open contemporary shows (therefore, at a single stroke, immediately embracing newly arrived émigrés who were fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe), unintentionally shaped exhibitions, and laid the foundation for much of today’s collection, research and programming – and for Ben Uri’s enduring mission: to champion diverse communities in British art, while honouring the heritage and contributions of Jewish artists, both established and newly arrived. During this pivotal period, Ben Uri not only charted its own institutional path but was also directly influenced by broader currents of migration, cultural upheaval and shifting artistic identities. Every exhibition, in some way, reflected the dynamic interplay between the society’s roots in Jewish tradition and its openness to wider modernist (alongside more conventional) trends, mirroring the experiences of its artists who were navigating new lives in Britain.
Ben Uri thus found itself able to offer exhibition opportunities for the large cohort of recently displaced artists and designers fleeing Nazi persecution. Catalogues reveal that, post-1933, more than 50 Jewish émigrés, mostly German and Austrian, but also Hungarian, Czechoslovak, Polish and Romanian, exhibited with the Society, including a number of so-called degenerates, including Hans Feibusch, Jankel Adler and Ludwig Meidner. Many of these artists, whether established or lesser known, however, not only faced the practical challenges of daily life in a foreign country, but the additional problem that German art was entirely unfashionable. ‘[…To] the general public in Great Britain, modern German art is totally unknown’, observed critic Herbert Read in the publication, Modern German Art, accompanying the 1938 exhibition of the same name, held at the New Burington Galleries. ‘A hiatus in our knowledge of work done in contemporary Germany will now have a chance of being filled’ countered the Jewish Chronicle: ‘About 23% of the
men and women who have contributed so handsomely to the wealth of German painting and sculpture are Jews.’
Examples of Ben Uri’s handwritten exhibition entry forms, held in the archives, strikingly identify the predominance of these so-called German speaking Hitler émigrés in neighbourhoods clustered around Finchleystrasse (as local bus conductors referred to the Finchley Road, running from Swiss Cottage to Golders Green, and beyond. Notably, Finchleystrasse became the title of an exhibition curated by Ben Uri in the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, London in 2018, to acknowledge the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht and the Kindertransport, highlighting German émigré artists represented in the collection. For these artists, Ben Uri provided a safe exhibition haven, away from the mainstream British art world.
Annual Exhibitions of Works by Jewish Artists in 1934, the first of the annual contemporary open exhibitions, reveals the intertwining of the two cohorts of Jewish émigrés, with works by previous refugee artists from Eastern Europe, such as Alfred Wolmark (1877-1961) and Jacob Kramer (1892-1962), shown alongside The Sacrifice of Isaac by Hans Feibusch, only newly fled from Germany. The following year, with unintentional poignancy, a vanishing world was glimpsed in January 1935 in the Exhibition of Water Colours, Drawings and Sketches of Old Synagogues in Poland and Eastern Europe, XIV-XVIIIth Centuries by Russian-born artist and art historian, George Loukomski (1884–1952).
In early 1936, to further support living artists, Ben Uri formally agreed to display ‘one picture of every artist who submitted […provided] each picture should not have been exhibited the previous year.’ With this dramatic pivot to show contemporary art by Jewish artists in largely unrestricted, annual open shows, the profound and wider implication of Ben Uri’s role was identified in its Summer Exhibition 1944 catalogue, which declared: ‘In the view of the total ruin of Europe by the Nazis, the work of the Society has become of even greater significance.’ At this time, Ben Uri also provided the first/very early UK exhibition opportunities for many Hitler émigrés, including Hans Feibusch, Jankel Adler, Martin Bloch, Josef Herman, and Gustav Metzger.
From 1936–39 the Society held an uneasy tenancy on the third floor of the Anglo-Palestinian Club in Great Windmill Street, W1. Few events are recorded beyond annual exhibitions, and, with the outbreak of war, Ben Uri was again homeless, though it maintained a lecture programme at various venues in an attempt to ‘carry on its artistic and cultural work as far as war conditions would permit,’ in a similar spirit to the National Gallery. Crucially, however, in autumn 1943, ‘in the midst of flying bombs and worse’, it secured central, rentfree premises within a Georgian house at 14 Portman Street, W1, where it could display the collection (now around 150 pieces) alongside loans, and employ its first salaried Curator and Secretary, Fritz Solomonski (1899–1980). Solomonski was an art professional, a German émigré painter and art historian, recently interned in Hutchinson, the so-called ‘artists’ camp’ on the Isle of Man, with Kurt Schwitters, Ludwig Meidner and Erich Kahn. Under his tenure, the ‘magnificent’ re-opening exhibition was unveiled in January 1944 and an academic Hemann Struck exhibition was presented. However, his appointment was clearly unsatisfactory, lasting barely eighteen months, before his sacking in November 1945.
Clearly, his position as an émigré, outside the closeknit Anglo-Jewish community, did not serve Ben Uri well enough, as ‘it was essential to have an Organising Secretary, who knows the Community, for the future survival of the gallery.’
As the tide turned in the global conflict, the re-opening exhibition featured 173 collection exhibits, plus loaned works by Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Jozef Israëls and Max Lieberman. Then, as with Out of Chaos, the centenary exhibition held more than 70 years later, Ben Uri demonstrated its high-profile role, exhibiting international masters, alongside recent émigrés, who accounted for more than a quarter of the participants.
In the postwar period, with new secretary, Sadie Buchler, in post, and under Chairman, Ethel Solomon, Ben Uri continued to focus on solo and group exhibitions by the Hitler émigrés. 1949, notably, saw the joint exhibition for husband and wife, Ludwig and Else Meidner, the former’s only British show in twelve years of impoverished exile. Deeply observant, Ludwig had thrived in internment, surrounded by cultured, often Orthodox German-speaking Jews, sustained with kosher food, and able to draw. Jutta Vinzent suggests that on release Meidner and Polish émigré painter, Jankel Adler, attempted to establish a Jewish art organisation, where Orthodox artists could create and exhibit appropriate subject-matter. Since this initiative failed, Ben Uri was perhaps the most acceptable alternative. Ludwig presented portraits, biblical scenes and overtly Jewish subjects. However, as painter Leo Kahn reflected: ‘The refugee community, pre-occupied with material worries and eagerly trying to adapt itself to the English way of life, generally paid little attention to its own artists […] if Meidner hoped that his religious drawings would hold a special appeal to the members of Jewish congregations he overlooked that it was the spirit of the prophets and the Jewish mystics that lived in his work; a spirit that is all too often lost today.’ Although the exhibition was significant for Ben Uri, for the Meidners its ‘Jewish’ positioning meant limited exposure. Czechoslovak émigré, art historian and critic, Professor J P Hodin, recalled it was ‘practically unnoticed’; Ludwig himself described it as ‘a second class funeral.’
The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 did not immediately affect Ben Uri’s regular exhibiting activities. Cultural links continued, as they had with Palestine. As the 1950s progressed, Ben Uri sought to demonstrate a cultural alignment with its host nation, holding exhibitions which highlighted landmarks in British history and culture. The 1951 nationwide celebration, The Festival of Britain, was acknowledged by Ben Uri’s AngloJewish Exhibition, 1851-1951 Art Section, an adjunct to the main display at University College London. The catalogue introduction by Yiddish writer, Joseph Leftwich testified to ‘[…] the place and the importance of the artist in Anglo-Jewish life’ and ‘the contribution of Jewish artists living and working all or most of their life in Great Britain and the British dominions.’ 127 works from the collection were supplemented by loans. Perhaps wishing to present an assimilated profile and to avoid over-identification with Jewish ritual, subjects were mainly secular, including numerous British landscapes. Similarly, Ben Uri presented a Coronation Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture from the Private Collection of Friends of the Ben Uri Art Society in 1953 and a Tercentenary Exhibition of Anglo-Jewish Artists in 1956, celebrating 300 years of the return of Jews to England under Oliver Cromwell.
Following three years in Berners Street, W1, Ben Uri relocated in early 1964, immediately prior to its 50th anniversary, to a single room in the West End Great Synagogue building in Dean Street, Soho, where it remained until 1996, when the site was redeveloped. However, the move did little for Ben Uri’s profile outside the community. Alfons Rosenberg observed: ‘whatever the merits of Dean Street, it is simply not where the art lover looks for a gallery […] The Ben Uri is reminiscent of the (Jewish) closed shop, which surely is not at all intended.’
The decade 1971-80, nevertheless, represented a peak of exhibition activity (105) under Secretary, Barry Fealdman. This included seven exhibitions by Israeli artists, held in cooperation with the Cultural Department, Embassy of Israel during 1974-75, as the first generation of native-born sabras explored opportunities beyond their homeland, and as one of the Society’s priorities was ‘to promote the work of Israeli artists to British audiences’. However, the inaccessible fourth floor space was too small for the gallery’s needs and the former broad range of cultural activities shrunk to exhibitions and the occasional lecture. Security in Soho, a location which had by the 1970s changed from swinging to sleazy, increased access problems, meaning that income, even from an ever increasing exhibition programme, did not meet expenses and debts grew exponentially, culminating in 1984 when, not yet an accredited museum, Ben Uri sold Gertler’s Merry-Go Round, its most important work, to the Tate. Even this did not raise nearly enough money to facilitate a move to a more suitable building, as some members had demanded. Despite obtaining museum accreditation in 1995, with the demolition of Dean Street, Ben Uri was forced to retreat further within the community, first taking office space at the Jewish charity ORT in Albert Street, Camden, opposite the old Jewish Museum building and subsequently in the Sternberg Centre for Reform Judaism, in Finchley.
However, in October 2000 a new Board was elected, setting a radically different strategy, removing the museum from the community, both physically – in the sense of disassociating itself from an existing community building – and culturally, by introducing a mainstream programme where Jewish content was driven by an appeal to a wider audience. In January 2001 its most ambitious exhibition to date, The Ben Uri Story: from Art Society to Museum, with royal patronage, was launched at Phillips Auctioneers, determining the direction and calibre of future programming, showing a broad range of works by Jewish artists beyond the collection itself. In June 2002, Ben Uri reopened in the former Artmonsky Gallery in Boundary Road, St. John’s Wood, NW8 (an address known for Charles Saatchi’s first gallery) as the ‘London Jewish Museum of Art’, embracing the mainstream in all its activities. In its new home, Ben Uri continued its exhibition journey with the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ series, exploring the contribution of these pioneering, modernist Anglo-Jewish artists who emerged from or had connections with the East End, including Mark Gertler, Alfred Wolmark, Jacob Kramer and William Roberts (the two brothers-in-law), Isaac Rosenberg, and sculptor, Jacob Epstein. Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle (2008) also saw the publication of the first scholarly hardback catalogue to accompany a Ben Uri exhibition, a tangible step towards greater academic recognition for the institution and its co-curators, Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson. This cohort was followed by Ben Uri’s inaugural contemporary exploration of the so-called Hitler émigrés, Forced Journeys (2009-10).
A visit to the gallery in 2008 by distinguished art historian, Dr. Jutta Vinzent (1968-2021), from the University of Birmingham, who offered her personal collection of artworks to form the nucleus of an exhibition, resulted in the touring display, Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain c 1933-45 and its accompanying publication, held almost a quarter of a century after the important West German exhibition, Kunst im Exil, and its smaller UK iteration, held at the Camden Arts Centre in 1986. Forced Journeys substantially augmented Vinzent’s collection with works from Ben Uri and from private collections, and in turn, it became a teaching aid for an MA module at the Courtauld Institute, led by Dr. Shulamith Behr (19462023).
Scheduled to coincide with the 70th anniversary of internment in Britain, Forced Journeys manifested in three slightly different iterations, each dependent on location (Ben Uri Gallery: The London Jewish Museum of Art, London; Sayle Gallery, Douglas, Isle of Man; and Wilkinson Art Gallery, Birkenhead). Inevitably, each context, and the emergence of newly discovered artworks and ephemera, during the continuously evolving process of research and curation, impacted each exhibition. In Douglas, the show was extensively re-curated to focus on the work of artist internees, particularly those held in Manx camps who did not appear in the London leg. The Manx show also featured a rare work by a woman artist internee: a terracotta tile by sculptor/ceramicist Erna Nonnenmacher, inspired by the island’s Celtic Calf of Man carving. The third iteration, in Birkenhead, close to where internees embarked on the crossing to the Isle of Man, featured works by more than 20 artists not shown in London, with a small additional section with particular relevance to the northwest, including Kurt Schwitters’ portrait of Leonard Wild, made in the Lake District in 1947-48, perhaps his last commissioned work.
Forced Journeys paved the way for Ben Uri’s burgeoning interest in the Hitler émigré artists and designers, and its development of scholarly expertise and associated exhibitions within this area, particularly as it marked its own centenary with the aforementioned, Out of Chaos: A Century of Ben Uri in London, held at Somerset House, from July-December 2015. The importance of the exhibition was confirmed by receipt of a significant HLF grant and by Tate’s loan of Gertler’s Merry-Go Round – one of its very rare outings since its acquisition. The thematic display, which charted the institution’s history and the contribution of émigré artists, also provided the first opportunity to present newly translated and catalogued archive items, historical and contemporary collection works (the latter, encompassing film and photography), alongside recent acquisitions (such as Soutine’s La Soubrette, Chagall’s Apocalypse en Lilas and George Grosz’s Interrogation), with a number by non-Jewish artists. The display was reprised the following year at Christie’s South Kensington as 100 for 100: Ben Uri Past, Present & Future, with an enhanced contemporary offering. With its important new tag line, Ben Uri moved beyond the singularity of the Jewish émigré story, replacing Ben Uri: The London Jewish Museum of Art with Ben Uri: Art Identity Migration.
Since 2016, as Ben Uri’s scope of enquiry has broadened beyond the ‘Jewish’, to become a truly sustainable and relevant arts organisation into the 21st century, its focus has widened to embrace non-Jewish immigrant artists and communities, with a roster of survey shows spotlighting individual nation states, including Refugees: The Lives of Others - German Refugee Artists in the UK; Out of Austria: Austrian Émigré Artists to the UK; and Art Out of the
Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain (2017). The latter took place as the Polish population in the UK reached 1,000,000 – representing the largest émigré cohort -and featured more than 40 Polish-born artists and designers (both Jewish and non-Jewish), from Ben Uri and other collections, encompassing both first and second waves of migration, and presenting the double narratives of Polish Jewish and non-Jewish artists and designers within a single context. The display raised the profile of several neglected Polish artists, respected within their own community, but not necessarily known to outsiders, including naïve painter, Andrzej Kuhn (1929-2014); set designer, painter and gallerist, Jan Wieliczko (1919-98); Janina Baranowska (a pupil of Bomberg at Borough Road); Halina Korn (1902-78), second wife of fellow émigré artist, Marek Zulawski (1908-85), and Marthe Hekimi (18841950, née Marta Szostakowska), who had featured in a two-person exhibition at Ben Uri in 1948. The exhibition was celebrated with a catalogue publication in 2020, assisted by the Polish Cultural Institute.
Since its move to Boundary Road in the early 21st century, Ben Uri has presented over 80 exhibitions, with many touring across the UK. Regional venues have included: Gloucester Museum; Bushey Museum; Ferens Gallery, Hull; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-on-Tyne; Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle; Pallant House, Chichester; Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds and Manchester Jewish Museum. London locations have included 12 Star Gallery at the European Commission, and the Royal College of Music. However, in wake of the Covid19 pandemic, a further critical pivot occurred, resulting in a pioneering move away from a reliance on physical exhibitions. Consequently, since 2016 Ben Uri has embraced a new way of working and engaging with audiences, moving from the local to the global, by creating exhibitions that either exist solely online, or that represent a physical exhibition in digital form.
Mostly but not exclusively, and drawing on the continuously evolving permanent collection, the online exhibitions range from the thematic (with subjects including Internment, Holocaust, Self-Portraits, Degenerate art (Entartete Kunst), and Yiddish) to the single artist (such as: David Bomberg, Frank Auerbach, Shanti Panchal, Eva Frankfurther ) or a survey of a particular migrant community (such as: Out of Austria; Midnight’s Family: 75 Years of Indian Artists in Britain, and Czech Routes ) to Finchleystrasse and Thirty-Six Pounds and NinetyFive Pence, both specifically dealing with refugees and migration. Though the subjects of the latter two exhibitions are separated by almost a century, the principal narrative of seeking refuge and making art in a new homeland remains an unwavering constant. In the current 21st century context of unprecedented migration, these subjects have a particular and continuing significance and resonance within Ben Uri’s groundbreaking exhibition programme, as it continues into its second century.
Ben Uri’s online exhibitions can be found at: https://benuri.org/exhibitions
A full history of Ben Uri’s exhibitions from 1925 can be found at: https://www.benuricollection.org.uk/bu_exhibitions.php?_
Dr Rachel Dickson Consultant Editor
Ben Uri Research Unit
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