SARAH MACDOUGALL
From Local to Global:
An obsession for qualitative collecting, 1915 - 2025
Ben Uri’s 110th birthday marks an auspicious moment in the development of its collection – the most comprehensive and important collection of works by late 19th to present day immigrant artists in the UK and the international museum sector. The Collection’s early years were shaped by Polish-born jeweller Mosheh Oved, a key influencing figure, who always maintained that its main goal should be to collect pictures and open a gallery. The earliest acquisitions were diverse and often opportunistic: the Collection was inaugurated in 1918 by the purchase of a portfolio of works by Pre-Raphaelite Simeon Solomon, followed in 1920 by David Bomberg’s Ghetto Theatre (1920), purchased direct from the artist and set in the Yiddish-language Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel. In 1923 Polish master Samuel Hirszenberg’s Sabbath Rest (1894) was the first work acquired by public subscription. Its narrative of not just Jewish religious observance but also of identity and migration, reflects the history of Ben Uri’s founders, fleeing pogroms and economic deprivation in the Russian Pale of Settlement to settle in London.
At Ben Uri’s Opening Exhibition in 1925 (see Rachel Dickson’s essay in this volume), the collection numbered 37 works by nine artists, rising to 77 works by 31 artists in 1930. Upon the publication of a printed catalogue in 1987, this had reached 450 works by 221 artists and with the reprinted and expanded 1994 edition, this increased to 638 works by 301 artists. Since 2001, under a broader remit, in line with the academic focus of our Research Unit, the collection has expanded to include relevant works by immigrant artists to the UK from all national, ethnic and religious origins who have helped to enrich British visual culture. Following a rationalisation in 2018, then a further expansion, the Collection currently comprises more than 1,000 works by some 416 artists from 48 countries of origin, three-quarters of them immigrants and 29% women. This essay outlines selected Collection highlights since 2001, by both distinguished and overlooked artists, that have enriched and enhanced the original collection while also unfolding poignant, often interlinked and ever relevant stories of identity and migration. Works acquired with substantial support from national funding bodies are marked with an asterisk (*); full credits are given on https://benuricollection.org.uk.
Works by the ‘Whitechapel boys’ have always had an important place in the Collection. All first- or second-generation immigrants and direct descendants of a shared EasternEuropean Jewish heritage, they trained together at the Slade School of Fine Art training (the majority assisted by the Jewish Education Aid Society) and came together uniquely in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s so-called ‘Jewish Section’ in 1914, co-curated by David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein. Among the exhibits was Bomberg’s radical Racehorses* (1912-13), purchased for the Collection in 2004, demonstrating both his pre-war ambition and connections to the European avant-garde. The tension between traditionalism and modernism with which he – and many of this group – struggled, is reflected in Mark Gertler’s Rabbi and Rabbitzin* (1914), purchased in 2002, in which the couple yoked
together at the centre of the composition also evoke the broader history of the Jewish diaspora.
Poet-painter Isaac Rosenberg’s final Self-portrait with Steel Helmet* (1916), purchased in 2009, was drawn on rough brown paper, possibly salvaged from a parcel sent from home to the Front in Northern France, where he was then serving in the army and from where he would never return. His Portrait of Sonia Cohen, presented by Joan Rodker (the sitter’s daughter) in 2008, tenderly portraying the object of his unrequited love as a Renaissance Madonna, was completed on his only leave from the army in 1915. In the same year, Rosenberg’s contemporary, French-born Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, was also killed in the trenches; his head of another Whitechapel boy, Horace Brodzky (c. 1913), a study for a sculpture, was purchased in 2018 through the support of three great friends of Manya Igel in her honour. Romanian-born ‘Whitechapel girl’ Clare Winsten’s portrait of another Whitechapel boy, journalist and poet Joseph Leftwich* (1919), purchased in 2015, draws on both her knowledge of Vorticism and of Bloomsbury textiles. Bequests in 2019 by both Ernest Hecht OBE, publisher and philanthropist, of Bomberg’s landscape Mount Zion and the Church of the Dormition, Jerusalem (1923), and by Luke Gertler with Art Fund support, of a series of Gertlers including Coster Woman (1923), demonstrate these artists’ change in focus as part of the general rappel à l’ordre in the following decade.
Two notable acquisitions have filled longstanding gaps of significant works by prominent L’Ecole de Paris Juifs painters Marc Chagall and Chaïm Soutine, both Eastern-European immigrants who settled in Paris before being displaced by the Second World War. Soutine famously never made works relating to his Jewish heritage but Jeune Servante *(c.1933), purchased in 2012, the last of his anonymous female, working-class figures in uniform, was painted in the year that Hitler acceded to the German Chancellorship. Forced into hiding in Touraine, following the German occupation, Soutine returned to Paris for a failed operation and died shortly afterwards. Chagall’s crucifixion, Apocalypse en Lilas: Capriccio* (1945), purchased in 2009, was painted during his wartime exile in New York as he emerged from mourning for his late wife Bella, compelled to document his horror at the unfolding reports of concentration camp atrocities. By contrast, Emmanuel Levy’s Crucifixion (1942), purchased by members of Ben Uri’s board in 2004, was painted in wartime Britain and mounts a powerful protest against Nazi persecution of Jews in mainland Europe.
Three works by German-born satirist George Grosz, an excoriating critic of the Nazi regime, were created during his period of exile in New York. Both Interrogation* (1938), purchased in 2010, and The Lecture (aka Letter to an Anti-Semite) (1935), presented by Sally, Richard and Andrew Kalman in honour of their late father, refugee gallerist Andras Kalman, in 2013, commemorate the brutal death of Grosz’s friend, the radical Jewish writer and anarchist Erich Mühsam. A long-time critic of successive German political regimes, Mühsam was tortured and murdered in Oranienburg concentration camp; for Grosz, his fate symbolised that of all victims of the Nazi regime. In a third work, purchased in 2025, Final Solution (1941), the title is ironically applied to Hitler himself as, with astonishing prescience, Grosz anticipates the Nazi leader’s suicide by shooting in his Berlin bunker, beneath a map of the USSR.
Among more than 300 artists of the ‘Hitler émigré’ generation who made forced journeys to Britain was German Jewish graphic artist Dodo (Dörte Bürgner). Her agonised self-
portrait, Verkündigung (Annunciation), presented by the Dodo Estate, Athens in 2012, was made in 1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to the German Chancellorship and three years prior to her own departure. Presented by his estate in 2023, Czechoslovakian Jewish painter Ernst Neuschul’s defiant Double Portrait, a self-portrait with his protégée Mimi, was painted the same year; dismissed from his position as Professor of Fine Arts at Berlin’s Academy and labelled a ‘degenerate’ artist, he fled to England from Prague in 1939.
Polish painter Josef Herman’s poignant painting, Refugees* (1941), painted in Glasgow, draws strongly on his own Eastern European Jewish heritage, but the refugees also represent all those uprooted and forced into exile by the upheavals of war. Depictions of refugees form a small sub-theme in the Collection with a further watercolour by Herman (purchased in 2023), a drawing of a single male figure by Eva Frankfurther (purchased in 2020), and an oil depicting a group of recent arrivals by Orovida (purchased with the support of the Stern Pissarro Gallery in 2022), reflecting a heightened sense of community in the wake of the widespread displacement caused by the war.
With the very recent purchase of a significant collection of rare, early works by Herman, executed in Norwood internment camp in 1940 and in Glasgow between 1940–43 (many exhibited at the gallery in 2011), Ben Uri has become the custodian of the largest, single collection of his work. Since the exhibition, Forced Journeys in 2008, which drew attention to the mass internment of so-called ‘enemy aliens’, works by refugee artists made in and referencing internment both in Britain and abroad, have become a further strand within our collecting. They illustrate the resilience, adaptability and commitment to artmaking displayed by the artist internees. Among them, are three Austrians: Ernst Eisenmayer’s drawing Internment in Douglas (1940), purchased and presented by David and Eva Wertheim in 2013, depicts an armed sentry in front of a barbed wire fence at Central camp on the Isle of Man, where he was first held in October 1940. A companion drawing (formerly attributed to Eisenmayer) featuring 29 internees’ signatures, including the artist’ own, shows a youthful figure breaking free of these constraints. Hugo Dachinger’s Portrait of a Man: Wilhelm Hollitscher (1940), purchased in 2016, was painted in Huyton Internment Camp, Liverpool using thinned watercolour applied to a copy of The Times newspaper. Michael Schreck’s Internment Camp, Warth Mills: Agony, purchased in 2023, that records the appalling conditions endured in a hastily converted factory outside Bury, Greater Manchester, was supported by a gift in memory of fellow internee Hans Felix David, also interned at Warth Mills at the age of 18.
To these, most recently, has been added German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ surprisingly lyrical Douglas, Isle of Man (1940), purchased in 2025, executed on a rough, cracked panel – its fragility a testament to the conditions in which it was made. Painted at Hutchinson Internment Camp in Douglas on the Isle of Man – known as the ‘artists’ camp’ because of the high number of artist internees – it provides a contrast to his better-known Merz practice. Moldovan émigré and Prisoner of War at Stalag XC at Nienburg-on-Weser, near Bremen in Germany, Grégoire Michonze also drew on his own experience in his drawing of a group of exhausted Polish soldiers enclosed by barbed wire (c. 1940-42), purchased in 2020.
Further works created during wartime show various aspects of the refugee experience: German painter Walter Nessler’s Boarded-up London (1940), presented by the artist’s
estate in 2022, symbolises the curtailing of artistic opportunities during wartime. Prussian-born graphic artist Katerina Wilczynski’s artworks, presented by her estate on behalf of the descendants of Arthur and Tamara Kauffmann in 2023, document her friendships among the émigré network with refugee art dealers including the Kauffmanns. They offered Wilczynski and fellow dealer Grete Ring wartime refuge and Wilczynski recorded Ring’s bombed-out premises; a contrast to William Ohly’s kitchen interior, filled with objets d’art. While the pre-migration friendship between fellow German refugee sculptors Kurt Schwitters and Else Fraenkel is documented in the tiny, dedicated collage of ephemera (1928), purchased from her family in 2019, and brought with her during her own flight to England. Viennese émigré cartoonist Joseph Otto Flatter’s portrait of Nigerian law graduate Simeon Alex Chima Onyejiako (1962), on longterm loan to the Collection since 2023, records his postwar friendship with his north London neighbour. and his wife Elsa (née Jones), a young opera singer from colonial Trinidad and Tobago, tutored by Flatter’s wife Hilde. As fellow émigrés, the Flatters gave the Onyejiakos courage to face uncertainties and to pursue their ambitions as new arrivals in a hostile, often discriminatory environment. Flatter’s portrait of Simeon, created in 1962, captures their close friendship. Viennese sculptor Georg Ehrlich’s classical bronze, Two Sisters (1945–46), purchased in 2020, is a portrait of intimate family ties and of loss; depicting his artist wife Bettina and her sister Mira as children, it commemorates Mira’s death in exile in England in 1944.
Commemoration and loss are also powerfully conveyed in postwar works by many refugee artists including Hungarian sculptor and Ravensbrück survivor Edith Kiss; her Untitled: Figurative Group (c. 1949), a portrait of suffering, was presented to the Collection by Dr Sylvia Goldwyn in memory of her husband Mr Leslie Goldwyn in 2016. Hungarian painter and, later mosaicist, George Mayer-Marton’s The March of the Parents (1956), on long-term loan from the artist’s estate since 2022, painted in the year of the Hungarian Uprising, both commemorates this event and also marks the loss of his parents and brother in the Holocaust.
Works referencing the aftermath of war and its long shadows include Dame Laura Knight’s chalk and watercolour drawings, Nuremberg Trials 1946: Study no. 1 and Study no. 2 (1946), on long-term loan to the collection since 2022, preparatory studies for the Imperial War Museum’s commissioned painting of the trial of 19 major Nazi war criminals by the only woman to depict this momentous event. Works by child survivors include those by Polish Jewish ‘Windermere Boys’ Shmuel Dresner, whose Pages from the Diary of David Rubinowicz (2005), presented by the artist in 2015, references the Naziauthorised book burnings, and Roman Halter’s idyllic studies of the Dorset countryside (2008) overlaid with horrific memories, presented by the Halter family in 2014. Halter also worked substantially in stained glass, the same medium in which another child survivor, Moshe Galili, honoured Raoul Wallenberg (2005), the man who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews (presented by the artist’s son Rafael Galili in 2019). Later depictions include Anthony Sher’s dark, introspective Self-portrait as Primo (2008), presented by the artist in 2021, and Peter Howson’s large scale Holocaust Crowd Scene II (2011), purchased in 2020.
London in all its variety – its people and its streets – provided rich subject matter for many artists postwar including Eva Frankfurther, whose empathy for workers, immigrants and other people on the margins, was probably due at least in part to her
own experience as a German Jewish child refugee to Britain. Her West Indian Waitresses (c. 1955), presented by the artist’s sister Beate Planskoy in 2015, depicts her fellow workers at Lyons Corner House, Piccadilly, and also documents the changing landscape of postwar Britain including the introduction of self-service cafeterias with counter staff portioning out standardized food from open bains-marie. In Mornington Crescent: Summer Morning II* (2004), fellow German Jewish child refugee Frank Auerbach foregrounds the area of north London where he lived and worked for more than 70 years, and which became a significant and distinctive motif within his oeuvre. By contrast, Chicago-born postwar immigrant Alfred Cohen’s View from Panton House (1962), presented by the Alfred Cohen Foundation 2022, takes an oblique rooftop view across the city towards a London landmark – Nelson’s column rising from Trafalgar Square. Austrian émigré, Oskar Kokoschka’s fine signed limited edition lithograph from 1967 of the Houses of Parliament from the Thames was added to the Collection earlier in 2025.
Three Polish-born artists worked in widely differing styles and media: Halina Korn’s Bus Stop (c. 1950s), presented by Maria Zulawski in 2019, likely observed in Kilburn, exemplifies her preference for everyday subject matter, also to be found in the bold still life arrangements (c. 1950s) of Guta Vardy, presented by her estate in 2025. By contrast, Franciszka Themerson’s The Family at Home (1960), presented by Jasia Reichardt in 2024, is one of a series of witty, inventive drawings, examples from which were published under the title Traces of Living by the avant-garde Gabberbochus Press that the artist established with her husband and creative partner Stefan Themerson.
The sixties was a time of great experimentation for many artists. In Circus Scene (1964), purchased in 2020, Viennese refugee painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky presents an arresting and dramatically lit composition, as carefully composed as one of her still lives.
In King Lear (1964), presented by the artist’s estate in 2022, Indian-born painter Lancelot Ribeiro draws on the Christian imagery that informed his religious upbringing to explore concepts of power and evil, and personal and artistic identity. Painted in 1964, the year of the British General Election, which followed the 1962 Act controlling the previous liberal postwar immigration policy, and his own response in co-founding the Indian Painters’ Collective, UK (IPC) in 1963, King Lear, could also be read as one of a series of selfportraits.
Migration is also referenced in works by contemporary artists including Dominican-born Tam Josef: The Hand Made Map of the World (2013), purchased with the kind assistance of the artist in 2016, draws on his childhood recollection of the map of the British Empire and the divisive legacy of colonialism to playfully reorder conventional geographies and arbitrary territorial divisions. Both Iranian-born Zory Shahrokhi and Guler Ates, born in Eastern Turkey and from a Zaza ethnicity, investigate issues of displacement, identity, oppression and gender. In Ates’ Home Performance (2014), presented by the artist in 2017, a veiled figure crosses the foreground pulling a house behind her, while Shahrokhi’s Revolution Street 2 (2019), commissioned by Ben Uri in response to Liberators: 12 Extraordinary Women Artists from the Ben Uri Collection (2018), features six fabric swallows made from scraps of Persian cloth sent to the artist from friends and relatives in Iran. Indian-born Hormazd Narielwalla’s multi-panel collage Bands of Pride (2017), presented by the artist in 2018, uses pattern and collage to explore the expulsion of Jewish people from England in 1290. Nasser Azam, the first artist of Pakistani heritage to
enter the collection, who came to England with his family at the age of seven, explores close family relationships in The Newborn (1981) and The Contrast (1982), presented by the artist in 2023. Julie Held’s Shoe Shop (2004), presented by the artist in 2008, Sarah Lightman’s It’s OK (2006), presented by the artist in 2006, and Jacqueline Nicholls’ Maternal Torah (2008), presented by the artist in 2009, all respond to aspects of their Jewish heritage and identity. More recently, Indian-born Gerry Judah’s sculpture Bengal Cloud (2018), purchased from the artist in 2025, is part of a series of sculptures that reflect on his roots and engage with climate change. After revisiting Bengal, rickshaws overloaded with structures, including power stations, pylons, temples made from ash, and polluted materials, became a composite symbol in his work.
Important long-term loans exploring personal and artistic identity include leading German Jewish impressionist Max Liebermann’s Self-portrait (1927), painted when the artist was in his eighties, six years prior to this cancellation by the Nazi regime; it has been on long term loan from the Zondek Legacy through the good offices of the Board of Belsize Synagogue in 2002. In USA-born R. B. Kitaj’s Red Self-portrait after Masaccio (2005), on long term loan from a private collection since 2022, the artist explores his relationship with the Old Masters and his Jewish identity amid his continuing experiments with colour. Similarly, Nigerian Ben Enwonwu’s The Dancer (Agbogho Mmuo - Maiden Spirit Mask) (1962), also on long term loan from a private collection since 2022, and currently featured in Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern, reveals a strong identification with his Igbo heritage and took on new meaning in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Our mission is to share the Collection, digitally and physically, as widely as possible. Today, Collection works are loaned both nationally and internationally. This includes partnerships, such as that with St. Bonifatius Church, London, with the assistance of the German Embassy, London, to place on long-term loan German Jewish émigré Hans Feibusch’s Five Stories from The Old Testament (1973) panels, commissioned by Rabbi Hugo Gryn for the West London Synagogue and purchased by Ben Uri in 2013, after their removal from the building. In recent years, our Loans Out programme has lent to various exhibitions works by Soutine (The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2017; Hastings Contemporary, 2023), Chagall (The Jewish Museum, New York, 2013; Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2014; Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2015; The Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2023; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway, 2023; La Piscine, Roubaix, 2023, Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, 2024), Gertler (Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2009; Tate Britain, 2018), Bomberg (Museo del Novecento, Milan, 2023; Centro de Arte Moderna, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 2025), Enwonwu (Venice Biennale, 2024; Tate Modern, 2025), Ribeiro (Sainsbury Centre, Norwich), Frankfurther (The Barbican, 2022; The Towner, Eastbourne, 2024; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, 2026); Knight (Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth, 2025), and Nicholls (Two Temple Place, London, 2026), to name but a few. We look forward to the next 110 years of building, shaping and sharing the Collection.
Sarah MacDougall, Head of Collections & Special Projects
November 2025
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