Dr Lily Ford: Dreams of Art in the Jewish East End: The early history of the Ben Uri, 1915-1930

Part 2: The People behind Ben Uri Ben Uri begins The Ben Uri Art Society is by no means a society of millionaires and wealthy art patrons, but then, in place of money, it has a wealth of idealism. 41 The list of Ben Uri’s committee and founder members was printed as part of its first published output, a Yiddish art album produced in July 1916. 42 This is, in fact, the earliest surviving evidence of the society’s participants and constitution apart from an article in the Yiddish daily newspaper Di Tsayt on 25th July 1915, although the minute book dating from January 1916 shows that the committee was meeting every fortnight. Later accounts dated the society’s foundation to July 1st, 1915 43, and at some point, the recollection that this took place in a restaurant in Aldgate East called Gradel’s slipped into the story, though it has recently been discovered that these premises were not open until 1919. 44 Given that many of the early member meetings were conducted over dinner in another Whitechapel restaurant, the ‘American’, it is very plausible that this hosted the inaugural meeting. 45 The apocryphal foundation story is worth retaining for the very clear links it establishes between the Ben Uri, the East End, and the social lives of its members, indeed, we might permit further embellishment of the tale by quoting once more from Sholem Aleichem’s Wandering Stars, which begins the second half with a description of the (fictional) Whitechapel restaurant, the ‘National’: In fact, it was more like a Jewish club than a restaurant. No matter what time of day or night you went there, you would find a collection of Jews of every type that your heart desired: stockbrokers, doctors of philosophy, traveling salesmen, missionaries, peddlers, actors, diamond merchants, office workers, journalists, chess players, clerks, Zionists, Territorialists looking for a piece of land even in Africa where Jews could settle, and young people from who knew where, shouting and blustering, laughing and smoking, taking up most of the chairs and tables. 46 Aleichem’s picture is probably not an inaccurate indication of that night of July 1st – we know from Ben Uri minutes that meetings often took place late at night, and around dinner, and it is clear from the archives that the membership encompassed a range of professions and political persuasions. The liveliness that Aleichem describes is certainly consonant with the mood of subsequent meetings in the society’s first year. It was founded in a spate of energy and goodwill and its functioning was sustained by regular ‘socials’ in hired halls or the members’ own houses and gardens. Balls, fetes, outings, and banquets formed the backbone of the society’s activities, with lectures and exhibitions attracting far lower attendance; though the former were intended as fundraisers for the society’s acquisitions of artworks, it was consistently in debt throughout the 1920s. 12