Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art Catalogue

Co-curated by Colin Gleadell and art historian and author Monica Bohm-Duchen, Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art was an exhibition championing artists, from all over the world, who came to live and work in Britain during the 20th century and contributed significantly to its culture.

The pieces below were displayed at British Art Fair from 28th September - 1st October 2023.

For any purchasing queries, please contact office@britishartfair.co.uk


Read Monica Bohm-Duchen's essay below


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20th Century British Jewish Artists 

*This life drawing of a standing nude was carried out during Auerbach's student years at the Royal College of Art and shows the beginning of his distinctive vigorous and heavily worked style. The model is June Furlong (1930–2020), who modelled at the Royal Academy and the RCA and whose autobiographical account, June - a life study,  recalls her sittings for many artists including Auerbach’s contemporary Lucian Freud.

On average only 3% of all British museum’s collections are displayed. This work was deaccessioned in 2018 as part of Ben Uri's published Sustainability and Public Benefit Strategy focusing on a smaller body of work that will be more regularly exhibited. To be sold for the benefit of the Ben Uri Acquisition Fund and the Ben Uri Research Unit for the Study and Recording of the Jewish, Refugee and Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

**The still-life was a constant in Gertler’s oeuvre from the Dutch-inspired still lives of his early student years through to the elaborate, semi-cubist architectural compositions of his late years. In the 1920s he painted still lives with a fluency and ease, reflecting an assured paint handling and a love of colour. This painting is one of a pair using the same composition centred on a red gladiolus and a pink rose. Another version was in the collection of Gertler’s friend, patron and society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell.

On average only 3% of all British museum’s collections are displayed. This work was deaccessioned in 2018 as part of Ben Uri's published Sustainability and Public Benefit Strategy focusing on a smaller body of work that will be more regularly exhibited. To be sold for the benefit of the Ben Uri Acquisition Fund and the Ben Uri Research Unit for the Study and Recording of the Jewish, Refugee and Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Artist Biographies

  • Jankel Adler (b Poland 1895 - d England 1949). Settled in Germany in 1920s establishing himself as a significant figure in the European avant-garde. As both a Jew and a so-called ‘degenerate’ artist, he was forced to flee Germany in 1933 and moved to Paris. Serving in the Polish Army he was evacuated to Scotland in 1940, and became close to Benno Schotz and Josef Herman as well as exercising a profound influence on Scottish-born artists Robert Colquhoun and MacBryde. Adler remained in Britain thereafter, becoming an important figure in the émigré artistic community and beyond.

    The Arts Council mounted a memorial exhibition in 1951. Further posthumous exhibitions include a joint exhibition with Mark Gertler and Bernard Meninsky at Ben Uri Gallery in 1957, a major survey exhibition in Wuppertal, Germany (2018), and a survey of his British years at Ben Uri Gallery (2019). Adler's work is held in UK collections including Aberdeen Art Gallery, the Ben Uri Collection, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, Pallant House Gallery, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery and Tate Britain, as well as in international collections in Australia, Germany, Israel and the USA. Extensive materials relating to his time in Britain are held in the archives of the National Galleries of Scotland, as well as the Tate Archive.

  • Frank Auebach (b. Germany 1931) Sent to England from Germany by his Jewish parents as a refugee in 1939 (he never saw them again) Auerbach became a British citizen in 1947. He studied in London at St Martin's,1948–52, the Royal College of Art, 1952–5, and at evening classes under David Bomberg, whom he found an inspiring teacher. Auerbach's paintings are notable for their use of extremely heavy impasto, so that the paint at times seems modelled rather than brushed. His favourite subjects include: portrait,- particularly of people he knows well, nudes, townscapes, and the building site.

    In 1956, he received his first solo show at Beaux Arts Gallery, and by 1978, had a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. He represented Britain at the 1986 Venice Biennale. He is considered one of the leading names in the School of London, alongside Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud

    Auerbach is notoriously private. He rarely goes beyond a few miles of his Camden studio and house and does not often consent to interviews. According to his wife, Julia, “he has two haircuts a year, wears his clothes until they disintegrate and is not interested in material possessions. He works seven days and five evenings a week and takes one day off a year.

  • David Bomberg (b Birmingham 1890 – d London 1957) Although born in England, Bomberg’s family milieu was one of newly arrived Jewish immigrants from Poland. His art education was influenced by another émigré, Walter Sickert, who taught him at the Westminster School of Art from where, with the assistance Jewish Education Aid, he went to the Slade School of Art alongside Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Paul Nash. After a visit to Paris with Jacob Epstein in 2013, he developed a form of radical abstraction for which he was expelled from the Slade. This period in which he was associated with the Vorticists, was a major contribution to British modernism, a direction which changed, however, after his experiences of war led to a distrust of machinery which can cause death and destruction. A new kind of figurative expressionism practised on trips to Spain which he later termed as exploring ‘the spirit of the mass’, led to a new era of influence as a teacher notably of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff in the postwar era. But his reputation was not widely acknowledged until after his death when, in 1988, Tate staged a major retrospective.

  • Bill Brandt (b. Germany 1904- d. London 1983) was an enormously influential photographer whose legacy lives on through his social documentary images of British life in the 1930s and 1940s, high-contrast, distorted nudes and landscapes

    Born in Hamburg, Brandt grew up during World War I. He later disavowed his German heritage and claimed to be born in South London. Brandt began as a photojournalist in the streets of Paris and then in London following his move to England in 1933. He published two books of these sociological studies soon after: The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). He was a regular contributor to magazines such as Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper's Bazaar. In 1940, the Ministry of Information commissioned him to document the Underground bomb shelters during the Blitz.

    Marking the end of the Second World War in 1945 he began a celebrated series of nudes later publishing Literary Britain (1951), and Perspective of Nudes (1961), followed by a compilation of the best of all areas of his work in Shadow of Light (1966). Brandt became Britain's most internationally admired British photographer of the 20th century, capturing British society and his individual subjects with poetic resonance.

  • Rolf Brandt (b. Germany 1906- d. London 1986) was born in Hamburg, Germany and moved to London in 1933 where he remained for the rest of his life, as did his brother, the photographer Bill Brandt.

    In the 1920s, Rolf became interested in Dada and Surrealism, and in 1929 was drawn into the orbit of the Bauhaus when he lived in Dessau and visited Paul Klee's studio. His

    career as an artist encompassed early surrealist works; haunting drawings and book illustrations, subtle and sophisticated abstract paintings, inventive drawings and collages, and his final series of painted wooden constructions exploring colour theory and optical art.

    In London, the Brandt brothers were part of the intellectual and artistic milieu in Hampstead of the late 1930s and '40s. Rolf influenced generations of students when he taught at the London College of Printing from the 1950s to 1970s. The last significant exhibition in his lifetime was at the Lisson Gallery in 1970. A solo memorial exhibition was held at the Royal Festival Hall in 1988. England & Co held a comprehensive retrospective of his work in 2004, and in 2005 exhibited Rolf’s drawings alongside photographs by his brother, Bill Brandt: the first time their work had been shown together.

  • Horace Ascher Brodzky (Brodsky) (b Australia 1885 – d London 1969) Brodzky moved to London in 1908, where he studied at the City and Guilds Art School in Kennington. In 1914 his work was selected for inclusion in the 'Jewish Section' of the Whitechapel Art Gallery's important exhibition Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements. From 1914 he was also involved with the progressive New English Art Club (NEAC) and the London Group, gradually developing a loose amalgam of fauve and post-impressionist painting techniques. Brodzky became a close friend of émigré sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and, following his untimely death fighting in the First World War in 1915, he published the artist's biography.

    In the postwar period Brodzky worked in New York but in 1923 returned to London, where he showed regularly, including with Ben Uri from 1935 onwards. Throughout his later life Brodzky continued to paint and work with printmaking, exhibiting with London commercial venues including the Belgrave Gallery, Boundary Gallery and the Mercury Gallery, as well as in survey shows of Jewish artists. In 1946 he published a biography of émigré artist, Jules Pascin, associated with L'Ecole de Paris.

    His work is held in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, British Museum, Manchester Art Gallery, National Gallery of Scotland, Tate, and Victoria and Albert Museum.

  • Avinash Chandra. (b India 1931 – d London 1991) came to London in the 1950s after he received a scholarship from St Martin’s School of Art and in 1962 featured in a BBC Monitor documentary. When the famous tenor, Peter Pears bought one of his works, his fame spread far and wide through mass media coverage. In 1965 he became the first British artist of Indian origin to exhibit at Tate. 1989 he was included in The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery. Sadly he died two years later. In 2018 Chandra was remembered in another BBC film, Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History which testified to the new wave of interest in artists of colour that has characterised the art world in recent years.

  • Magda Cordell McHale ( b Hungary 1921 - d New York 2008) Born Magda Lustigova to a prominent family of grain merchants in Hungary, Magda fled to Egypt and then Palestine as a refugee during World War II to escape Nazi persecution. Here, she found work as a translator for British intelligence and met her first husband, composer Frank Cordell, who was also working for British intelligence, and from there moved to London where, influenced by the art brut of Jean Dubuffet, she became a rare female presence amongst the avant-garde exhibiting at the Hanover Gallery in the 1950s with the likes of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and a core member of the Independent Group of artists which challenged the traditional distinction between high and low culture. Not surprisingly, she was closely involved with the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, a multi-disciplinary show retrospectively credited with launching British Pop art. In 1961 she left the UK for America with her second husband, the artist and ecologist John McHale, where she stayed until her death. Her work is included in the collections of Tate Modern and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

  • Paul Feiler (b. Germany 1918- d. England 2013) Born in Frankfurt, Feiler moved to London with his parents in 1936. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art 1936-1939, but when war broke out he was classified as 'an enemy alien' and interned on the Isle of Man and later sent to Canada. On his return to England he began teaching at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, where he became head of painting and formed a lasting association with the St Ives School. In 1975 he and his wife, the artist Catharine Armitage, bought a disued chapel in Kerris, just outside Newlyn, where they lived until his death.

  • Lucian Freud (b. Germany 1922- d. London 2011) was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the grandson of Sigmund Freud. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939.

    His early career as a painter was influenced by surrealism, but by the early 1950s his often stark and alienated paintings tended towards realism. Freud was an intensely private and guarded man, and his paintings, completed over a 60-year career, are mostly of friends and family. They are generally sombre and thickly impastoed, often set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. The works are noted for their psychological penetration and often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model. Freud worked from life studies and his subjects, who needed to make a very large and uncertain commitment of their time, were often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. He said, "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really."

  • Naum Gabo (b Russia 1890 – d USA 1977) A Russian Jewish avant-garde artist, Gabo travelled Europe from 1910 onwards but in the 1930s escaped from Nazi Germany where he taught at the famous Bauhaus, and left for Paris and then the UK, settling in 1936 in St Ives – where his innovative use of space in reliefs and constructions influenced the direction of British artists John Wells and Peter Lanyon, and the development of British constructivism. After the war he moved to America where he began working in prints, preferring the monoprint (such as the early example exhibited here) to the editioned print. An important retrospective exhibition was staged in 1966 by Tate which holds the largest single collection of Gabo’s work anywhere.

  • Mark (né Max, also known as Marks) Gertler (b London 1891 – d London 1939) Born to Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents in Spitalfields, London, the family was repatriated the following year to Przemyśl in Galicia and lived in extreme poverty after Gertler's father, Louis, left to search for work in America. In 1896, they were reunited in Whitechapel.

    Gertler studied at the Regent School Polytechnic (1906–08) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1908-11) with a loan from the Jewish Education Aid Society, the first and youngest Jewish working-class student of his generation to do so.

    In 1914 seven of Gertler’s works were included in David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein’s so-called ‘Jewish Section’, part of a Review of Modern Movements at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

    Following a trip to Paris in 1920, he enjoyed his commercially most successful decade but the failure of his marriage to fellow artist Marjorie Hodgkinson, with whom he had a son, Luke, in 1932, together with financial contributed to his later depression.

    Mark Gertler committed suicide in his London studio in 1939. Memorial exhibitions were held at the Leicester Galleries, London (1941), Ben Uri Gallery (1944) and the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1949), with further solo shows at the Minories (and tour, 1971), Ben Uri Gallery (1982, 2002, and 2019), and Piano Nobile (2012), and a Tate spotlight display room in 2018. Gertler is represented in 45 UK collections including the Arts Council, the Ben Uri Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, Southampton City Art Gallery, and Tate.

  • Josef Herman OBE RA (b. Poland 1911- d. London 200 )was a highly regarded Polish- British painter who influenced contemporary art particularly in the United King dom. He was born in Warsaw Poland in 1911 and died in West London in 2000. He lived largely in the Welsh mining community and mainly painted the working men in the area. His work is represented in public collections across the world including the Tate, the Vand A in London Scotland, New Zealand, Canada and many more.

    In 1981 he was awarded an OBE for services to British Art and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1990

  • Kurt Hutton, born Kurt Hübschmann (b. France 1893- d. England 1960), was a German-born photographer who pioneered photojournalism in England and was one of the most influential photographer's in twentieth century Britain.

    Hutton begun his career with the Dephot agency in Germany before he moved to England in 1934 where he worked for Weekly Illustrated. Hutton was one of the founders of the most famous British pictorial weekly news magazine of the twentieth century, Picture Post. His early features for Picture Post over 1938-39 were a pioneering form of photographic story-telling, which would deeply impact post-war Picture Post photographers such as Bert Hardy, Thurston Hopkins and Grace Robertson.

  • Henry Inlander. (b Austria 1925 – d London 1983) Inlander’s family fled Nazi Germany in 1935 for Italy and then Great Britain in 1938 enrolling at St Martin’s School of Art in 1939. After the war he became a British subject and continued his art education at various London art schools until 1952. Inlander is predominantly known for his playfully expressionistic landscapes that blur the line between reality and imagination. A member of the London Group, he exhibited regularly with Roland, Browse and Delbanco and the Ben Uri gallery. In 1956, the 300th anniversary of the readmission of Jews to England under Oliver Cromwell, Inlander featured in Jewish Artists in England, 1656–1956, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. His paintings are represented in multiple public collections worldwide, including the Arts Council Collection, Government Art Collection, Tate, Yale Center for British Art and the Ben Ui Gallery and Museum. He died of a heart attack after partying vigorously at Camberwell Art School’s 1983 Christmas party.

  • Peter Kinley, (b Austria 1926 – d 1988) Born Peter Schwarz, Kinley was evacuated by his parents from Vienna to England on Kindertransport aged 12. After serving in the British Army during the war he attended St Martin’s School of Art where he went on to teach under the surname Kinley, before moving to the Bath Academy in 1970. Influenced by Nicolas de Stael who had a major show at the Royal Academy in 1953 he exhibited frequently with Gimpel Fils in London and Paul Rosenberg in New York. In 1982 a retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Artwork by Kinley features in public collections including the Tate, Arts Council, Albright-Knox, Buffalo, and Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

  • Clara Klinghoffer, (b Poland 1900 – d London 1970) Klinghoffer arrived in England as a small child in 1903. At her first exhibition in 1919, her work was compared to Rembrandt, Hals and Raphael, and she went on to exhibit with numerous galleries including Redfern, Leicester and Goupil. She was much admired by luminaries such as Walter Sickert, Jacob Epstein, and J.B Manson, a curator at the Tate, which acquired her work. Her work is also represented in the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

  • Leon Kossoff (b. London 1926- d. London 2019) was born in 1926 to Russian-Jewish immigrants in the East End of London. He trained at the Royal College of Art and Saint Martin's School of Art. He took evening classes under David Bomberg between 1950 and 1952, which were also attended by fellow student Frank Auerbach with whom his work has natural affinities. Throughout his career, Kossoff has been drawn to London as his primary subject matter alongside figure paintings of friends and family. Cityscapes of railways, demolition sites, local monuments and Underground stations painted in dense, heavily worked impasto, emphasising light, form and structure are among his most iconic works. Kossoff was elected to the London group in 1962. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and held major solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel in 1972, the Tate Gallery in 1996, and the National Gallery, London, in 2007.

  • Jacob Kramer (b Ukraine 1892 – d Leeds 1962) Kramer was born to cultured Jewish parents who moved from Ukraine to St.Petersburg, before emigrating to Leeds in 1900 where they found themselves in impoverished circumstances.

    A precocious talent, Kramer studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1913-14, associating both with the group of young Anglo-Jewish artists known as the Whitechapel Boys and the Vorticist group, centred around Wyndham Lewis. In the postwar period, his work (often on Jewish themes) veered between a strikingly reductive modernism and a relative naturalism. Kramer returned to Leeds for the last three decades of his career, where he remains something of a local hero, dying there in 1962.

    A major retrospective of his work was held at Leeds Art Gallery in 1960. Posthumously his work was supported by several commercial galleries in London, including Belgrave and Parkin, and he was included in survey exhibitions of 20th century Jewish artists, in the UK and USA. His works are in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art, Leeds Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate, and the University of Leeds.

  • Meninsky (b. 1891 Ukrain - d. 1950 London) was born in Ukraine and came to England in his teens. He studied at The Royal College of Art and subsequently taught at the Central School of Art. A versatile painter and draftsman he is part of the generation of 20th Century Anglo Jewish artists alongside Bomberg ,Gertler and Kramer working between The Wars.

    This picture has always been in the same family collection. It is un-lined and in its original frame

  • Sir William Rothenstein, (b Bradford, Yorkshire 1872 - d Stroud, Gloucestershire 1945.)

    Painter, printmaker, draughtsman, teacher and writer on art, Rothenstein was born in into a prosperous Jewish mercantile family which had settled in England in the mid-nineteenth century. Having studied at the Slade and also at Académie Julian in Paris, he established himself as a major figure in the late 19th century British art world and was thus in a position (mainly through the Jewish Education Aid Society) to offer crucial practical and financial support to a younger generation of Jewish artists from an impoverished immigrant background.

    His own work ranges widely in subject matter, from portraits, domestic interiors and landscapes to images of orthodox Jewish men at prayer. Influenced by his friendship with Alfred Wolmark in the early part of the 20th century, these were inspired by visits to the East End of London, a very different milieu to the one in which Rothenstein had grown up.

    Rothenstein served as Principal at the Royal College of Art from 1920 to 1935 and was knighted in 1931 for his services to art.

  • Peter Schmidt (b Berlin 1931 – d Spain 1980) was just seven when he fled to England from Germany with his Jewish mother in 1938. After art school education at Goldsmith’s College and the Slade School of Art he was given his first exhibition in 1960 at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery, the launch pad for Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff and home to the Kitchen Sink School. In 1961 he was featured in BBC documentary, Cubism and Beyond, but then expanded his repertoire beyond painting into more experimental multimedia art forms with a particular interest in music. His exhibition at the Curwen Gallery in 1966 consisted of abstract paintings inspired by music and in the following year he conducted an electronic music performance at the ICA leading to his becoming musical director of the groundbreaking Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in 1968. He collaborated frequently with artist/musician Brian Eno and Mark Boyle, who created psychedelic light shows for Pink Floyd, as well as artists Dieter Roth and Tom Phillips. Schmidt was one of the first artists to show at the groundbreaking new contemporary art gallery, Lisson, in 1968 and 1970, but by 1975 an exhibition at the Whitechapel showed he had returned to a more figurative style of painting. His work was said to be collected privately by film stars Julie Christie and Terence Stamp and is in the Arts Council, Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert and Government art collections.

  • Benno Schotz (b Estonia 1891 – d Glasgow 1984) Schotz came to Glasgow in 1912 to study engineering at Glasgow Royal Technical College and took evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art.

    His first one-man show took place at the Reid and Lefevre Gallery in Glasgow in 1926, Lefevre giving him his first one-man show in London four years later. He was head of the sculpture and ceramic departments of the Glasgow School of Art from 1938. Schotz was elected RSA in 1937 and appointed HM Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland. He exhibited widely, including the RA, RSA, Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Owners of his work include the House of Commons, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv Museum of Art.

    A life-long Zionist, Schotz also had the opportunity to model busts of Israeli prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. During the Second World War, he helped Jewish artists who had escaped to Glasgow from the continent. In 1942, he and Josef Herman organised an exhibition of Jewish art which included work by modernist artists such as Marc Chagall, Ossip Zadkine and Chaim Soutine. He followed this with a Festival of Jewish Arts coinciding with the Festival of Britain in 1951.

  • Walter Richard Sickert (b. Germany 1860 - d. England 1942) , born in Munich, Germany, was a painter and printmaker who was recognised during his own lifetime as an important artist, and in the years since his death has increasingly gained a reputation as one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century British art.

    Starting out his career as a pupil and assistant to James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Sickert later met Edgar Degas whose use of pictorial space and emphasis on drawing would have an influential effect on Sickert's work. Sickert developed a personal version of Impressionism deploying sombre colouration. He was fascinated by urban culture and consequently worked from studios in working-class areas in London. He furthermore was a founding member of the Camden Town Group, a group of British painters influenced by Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, concentrating on drab daily domestic scenes.

    Scenes of Venice, music halls, theatre scenes and portraits were also important parts of his body work. Sickert was universally acknowledged as a colourful, fascinating and charming artist, who championed progress and modernity in painting, but who remained an independent figure who was difficult to catagorise under the major movements in British art.

  • Edith Tudor-Hart, née Suschitzky, (b. Austria 1908- d. England 1973) was one of the most significant documentary photographers working in Britain from the early 1930s to the early 1950s.

    Born in Vienna, she grew up in radical Jewish circles. Edith married Alex Tudor-Hart, a British doctor, and the pair moved to England. There she worked as a documentary photographer, closely associated with the Communist Party, compiling a remarkable archive of images of working people in London and later, the south of Wales.

    Tudor-Hart destroyed most of her photographs and negatives, as a result very few vintage or lifetime prints exist.

  • Fred Uhlman (b Germany 1901 – d UK 1985) Leaving Germany in 1933 aged 32 with no money, Social Democrat lawyer Uhlman, learned to paint in Paris where he was legally prevented from working as a foreigner. In 1936 he left for London to meet up with and marry wealthy British heiress, Diana Croft (daughter of Lord Croft). Appreciated for a kind of sophisticated naivety characterised by unpopulated, mystical, slightly escapist landscapes, he was given one man shows at the Zwemmer and Redfern galleries in London and retrospectives at Bangor in Wales in 1960 and the Camden Arts Centre in 1973. His work is held by the Fitzwilliam, Victoria & Albert and Imperial War museums and by the Government Art Collection.

  • Hellmuth Weissenborn (b. Germany 1898- d. London 1982) Born in Leipzig in 1898 into an artistic family, Weissenborn had to leave Germany in 1938 as he was married to a Jewish woman and was no longer employable. He arrived in London but was sent to Hutchinson internment camp on the Isle of Man for six months, along with other refugee artists, including Kurt Schwitters and Fred Uhlman. Returning to London, Hellmuth joined the Auxiliary Fire Service in 1941 and sketched scenes of bomb damage in a small notebook while out on watch duty. These became a series of 16 London Bombsite linocuts – his best known works. After WWII he taught at Ravensbourne School of Art in Bromley for many years, and founded the Acorn Press with his second wife Lesley Macdonald in 1946. For this he supplied many wood engravings and illustrations, making over 60 books in all, ranging from Shakespeare to Enid Blyton.

  • Karl Weschke (b Germany 1925 – d 2005) Weschke did not arrive in the UK from Germany until 1945 when, aged 20, he was interned as a Prisoner of War. Slowly, after his release, he began to rebuild his life as a painter, though the inhumanity and horrors of the war never quite left him. He made his home in Cornwall not far from the artist’s colony of St Ives, where he stayed for the remaining fifty years of his life, exhibiting his tough, deeply felt expressionist paintings of the Cornish landscape with the Grosvenor, Matthiesen and Redfern galleries in London. Tate bought their first works by Weschke in 1994 and staged a retrospective exhibition for him in St Ives in 2004. Examples of his work are held by Tate Britain , the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery and the Government Art Collection amongst numerous other institutions.

  • Alfred (né Aaron) Wolmark (b Poland 1877 – d London 1961) Wolmark immigrated with his Jewish family to Devon, England in 1883. The family later moved to the predominantly Jewish area of Spitalfields in London. In 1895 Wolmark enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools in London. In 1911, influenced by French Fauvism, he abandoned his early naturalistic style and mostly Jewish subject matter in favour of strong, non-naturalistic colour and for the most part more mainstream subject matter.

    Hailed both as a pioneering painter of orthodox Jewish life in London’s East End and as an early British modernist, Wolmark was the only artist to have work included in both the 1906 Jewish Art and Antiquities exhibition and the ‘Jewish Section’ of the 1914 Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements, both held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. In 1915, he was one of the prime movers in setting up the Ben Uri Art Society.

    A gifted portraitist, Wolmark was also active as a graphic designer, producing book illustrations and posters, as well as costume, stage and stained-glass designs.

    While his reputation fell into decline long before his death in 1961 it was revived in the 1970s by a new scholarly and critical appreciation of his work.

Immigration and Diversity in the Post-War British Art World

Artist Biographies

  • Rasheed Araeen (b Pakistan 1935). Trained as an engineer and self-taught as an artist, Araeen arrived in Britain in 1964. He pioneered minimalist sculpture in Britain with his geometric cube like sculptures such as the example in this exhibition (4rS, 1970-2016). He has also been influential as a curator and polemicist, encouraging debate on the relationship between modernism and colonialism. He is the founder of the radical magazine, Third Text which has disseminated information on neglected African and Asian artists in Britain who contributed to the development of post-war British art, and was curator of the seminal exhibition, The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. Araeen recently had the run of Tate’s Turbine Hall with an interactive version of his most significant early work, Zero to Infinity (1968-2007) .

  • Sadanand K. Bakre (b. India 1920 – d. India 2007) was a founder member in 1947 of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group and went to Britain in 1951 where he worked as a hospital porter while painting and sculpting in his spare time. In 1957 he was given an exhibition at Victor Musgrave’s Gallery One and in 1961 at the Commonwealth institute in 1961 . He subsequently exhibited with the controversial Nicholas Treadwell gallery in Chiltern Street, but after the breakdown of his marriage in 1975 he returning to India where he became a reclusive gardener.

  • James Barnor's (HonsFRPS) (b. Ghana 1929) career has spanned more than six decades of continual development, working as studio portraitist, photojournalist and Black lifestyle photographer-at-large. Since the 1950s, Barnor’s striking photographs have documented many of the major social and political changes occurring both in the UK (London) and Ghana (Accra).

    Barnor set up his Ever Young studio in Accra in 1953 and worked as the first photojournalist for the Daily Graphic before his career flourished with South Africa’s Drum magazine, the influential anti-apartheid lifestyle and politics journal. After moving to the UK, in 1959, Barnor studied photography at Medway College of Art, while continuing to work on commission for Drum in London, shooting models of all nationalities for its covers. He returned to Ghana in 1969, as a representative for Agfa-Gevaert, to pioneer colour photographic processing, before returning to London in the 80s, where he now lives and works.

    While international recognition arrived late, Barnor’s meticulous recording of a newly-Independent Ghana and London’s “swinging Sixties” is now recognised as an unparalleled, historic documentation of those times. His work has been exhibited internationally; between 2010 and 2016 his monumental touring exhibition Ever Young with Autograph ABP, toured the UK and USA. In 2021 a major retrospective of his work opened at The Serpentine Gallery, London, which travelled to MASI Lugano, Switzerland, and the Detroit Institute of Art, USA. In 2022, the LUMA Foundation, Arles, presented Barnor’s first retrospective in France as part of Les Rencontres d’Arles’ annual Summer Photography Festival. The exhibition was inaugurated with the launch of the James Barnor Foundation, which advocates for the preservation of African cultures and focuses upon developing African cultural talent.

  • Denis Bowen (b. South Africa 1929- d. London 2006)

    was a South African artist, gallery director and promoter of abstract and avant-garde art in Britain. He was founder of the New Vision Group and the New Vision Centre Gallery, London, both of which played an important role in the post-war British art scene.

    After being orphaned at a young age, Bowen moved to England where he was raised by his aunt in Huddersfield. He enrolled at the Huddersfield School of Art in 1936. After serving in the Navy in World War II, Bowen resumed his art studies at the Royal College of Art in London in 1946. Between 1940 and 1986, Bowen taught art at numerous institutions including: the Kingston Institute of Art, Hammersmith School of Art, Birmingham School of Art, the Central School of Art and Design, the Royal College of Art and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

    In the early years of his artistic career, from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, Bowen formed part of a small group of UK-based artists who were associated with Tachism and Art Informel. Between 1969 and 1980, he produced a series of 'psychedelic works' that incorporated lighting effects (including the use of UV lights), music and live music performances. From the 1980s onwards, Bowen explored cosmological and planetary themes in his work.

  • ​Cleveland Brown (b. 1943 Jamaica- d. 2011) was born in St Catherine, Jamaica. Part of the Windrush generation, in 1961 aged just 18 he emigrated to London, where he worked as a master carpenter. In 1973 he started work as a carpenter at Sotheby's where he began seriously to look at art, and Brown was inspired to make his own paintings.There is a repeated political element to Brown's work - he painted the Grunwick pickets clashing with the police (1977) and The Spaghetti House siege (1975), subjects no other artist in Britain chose to depict. Jubilee Special (1977) is both celebratory and satirical, it's position ambiguous. Brown is represented in the Arts Council collection.

  • Paul Dash (b. 1946 Barbados) Born in 1946 in Barbados, when he was 11 years old, Paul Dash travelled to the UK to live with his family in Oxford, where he completed his secondary education. Dash excelled at art in school. He completed a Foundation course at Oxford Polytechnic before being admitted in 1965 to study for the Dip. A. D. at Chelsea School of Art as he had a desire to attend art college. In his second year there, Dash met John La Rose of Caribbean Artists Movement who invited him to become a member of the group. As a member of CAM he met many of the leading painters, authors and intellectuals of Caribbean heritage of the day. On leaving Chelsea Dash worked odd jobs before going into part-time teaching, developing a successful career first in schools then as a lecturer at London University, where he acquired an MA and a PhD. Throughout his period in education Dash continued to paint. In 1979 while teaching at Haggerston School, he painted his much-celebrated Self Portrait in the kitchen of the North London flat he shared with his wife Jean. Other important artworks were made in similar circumstances. Dash was a participating artist in ‘Life Between Islands, Caribbean – British Art 1950s – Now’, the ground-breaking Dec 2021 to Apr 2022 exhibition held at Tate Britain. Dash has also shown in other key exhibitions and venues, including The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2023 (invited by David Remfry RA, Convenor of the Summer Exhibition); The London Open at Whitechapel Galleries, 1984; No Colour Bar, Guildhall Art Galleries, Jul 2015 – Jan 2016; The Colombia Threadneedle Street Prize, Mall Galleries, 2014; The Arrivants Exhibition, Barbados Museum, November 2018. Dash was one of three participating artists in ‘Paint Like the Swallow Sings Calypso’ exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Nov 2022 – Feb 2023.

    Notable achievements in education:

    Dash co-directed the Centre for Arts and Learning and oversaw an MA module on the Goldsmiths MA Artist Teacher degree for three years, with a focus on programming. Yinka Shonibare, Grayson Perry, Faisal Abdu' Allah, Professor Sonia Boyce, Professor Leonard McComb (Keeper of the Royal Academy), Linton Kwesi Johnson, Professor Paul Gilroy, Hew Locke, Gary Stewart, Ingrid Pollard, Julian Perry, Julia Farrer, Susan Pui san Lok, David A. Bailey, and Raimi Gbadamosi were among the renowned academics and artists Dash worked with in his capacity. Contributions to a number of books, such as Addison and Burgess' Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School (Routledge).

    Educational Awards: 2000, Goldsmiths University - Awarded the Peake Award for Innovation and Excellence in University Teaching; 2002, Windrush Award for Outstanding Achievement in Education; 2000, Listed in Jacqui MacDonald’s Portraits of Black Achievement.

  • Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. Sudan 1930) Born in Sudan in 1930, Ibrahim El-Salahi is one of the most important living African artists and a key figure in the development of African Modernism.

    El-Salahi grew up in Omdurman, Sudan and studied at the Slade School in London. On his return to Sudan in 1957, he established a new visual vocabulary, which arose from his own pioneering integration of Sudanese, Islamic, African, Arab and Western artistic traditions.

    Tate Modern’s 2013 retrospective of El-Salahi’s work was the Museum's first exhibition dedicated to Africa Modernism. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The British Museum, London; Tate Modern, London; The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, UAE; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Newark Museum, Newark; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; The National Gallery, Berlin and many others

  • Tam Joseph ( b. 1947 Dominica) -born (1947) British painter, sculptor and graphic designer Tam Joseph emigrated from the Caribbean to London in 1955 at the age of eight. He studied at the Central School of Art and Design London (1967), followed by a short period at the Slade School of Fine Art before leaving to travel in Europe and the Far East. Joseph subsequently graduated in Typographic Design from the London College of Printing. While working for the magazine Africa Journal in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he travelled extensively in Africa, commenting: ‘I have never felt any tangible difference between me and the peoples of Africa south of the Sahara.’ In the 1970s, Joseph worked with the Keskidee Centre Collective North London, a hub for African and Afro-Caribbean politics and arts. Joseph’s practice often combines humour with serious political narratives to challenge contemporary realities and their inherent contradictions. Awareness, diaspora, identity, and World history remain recurrent themes. Selected exhibitions include Caribbean Art at the Crossroads, El Museo del Barrio, Studio Museum in Harlem and Queens Museum (2012), No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990, Guildhall Art Gallery, London (2015-16), and Life Between Islands, Tate Britain (2021-22) and Art Gallery of Ontario (2023-24). Tam Joseph’s work is represented in many public collections including the Arts Council Collection, Tate and V&A.

  • Balraj Khanna (b India 1940) came from India to read English Literature in 1962 but taught himself to paint instead staging a one man show at Denis Bowen’s New Vision Group Gallery in 1965. He did this despite the warning his compatriot, F.N.Souza gave him of the “pitiless prejudice, indifference, and scorn” he would meet. According to Art UK he ‘made a notable impact with colourful, kaleidoscopic, abstract works, witty and original, which have been compared to those of Klee and Miró but which are unique.’ Khanna was sufficiently established by 1979 to be granted a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery. In 1989 he was included in the Hayward Gallery’s The Other Story, and in 1994 the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Wales. His work in public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

  • Trinidad-born painter and poet, John Lyons (b.1933) arrived from Trinidad in 1959 to study at Goldsmiths College School of Art and Design, London. Graduating in 1964, he went on to the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1965 to study for an Art Teachers’ Diploma. During a 27-year teaching career Lyons continued his painting and writing with dedicated enthusiasm. John Lyons retired as a college lecturer in art and design and was then able to devote himself not only to his writing and painting, but also to be involved with a number of art organisations for the promotion of visual arts in the UK: He was a member of the purchasing panel for the Arts Council Collection, an adjudicator for a number of art awards, among them the Whitechapel Young Artist Award; he was also an exhibition selector for Cartwright Hall, Bradford; Nottingham Castle Museum and Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. In 1998 Lyons was co-founder and Director with Jean Rees, playwright, poet and arts activist, of the Hourglass Studio Gallery and its charity funded-arm, HEADS (Hourglass Educational Arts Development Services) for the promotion of the arts in the community in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. John Lyons has taken part in numerous group exhibitions. The most notable being Paint Like the Swallow Sings Calypso, Kettle's Yard, Nov 2022 - Feb 2023, Life Between Islands, British-Caribbean Art The 50’s -Now, Tate Britain Dec 2021 – 2022, Super Black, Firstsite Art Gallery, Colchester 2019, No Colour Bar, Black British Art in Action, Guildhall Gallery, London 2016, The Hayward Annual 1982 British Drawing South Bank Centre London. There have been fourteen solo exhibitions of Lyons’ work nationally, two of which were, Mythopoeia a touring exhibition from Wrexham Arts Centre 1997, and Behind The Carnival, from Huddersfield Art Gallery 1992-94. As a prize-winning poet, John Lyons’ poems are numerously anthologised; and he has seven full published collections of poetry. In 2016 his collection for children, Dancing in The Rain was shortlisted for the CLiPPA Award; and he was on the judging panel for the 2022 of the CLiPPA Award. His contribution to Arts in the UK was acknowledged with the Arts Council sponsored Windrush Arts Achievement Award in 2003.

  • Houria Niati (b. Algeria 1948) was born in Khemis Miliana, French Algeria in 1948 where she lived through the war of independence (1954-1962). Niati was 6 years old when she heard the first explosions launching the war which lasted 7 years and costing the lives of over one million Algerians resisting the French occupation. At the age of 12, Niati and three classmates were arrested and briefly jailed for painting anti-colonial graffiti and demonstrating against the French authorities. Her experiences during this time greatly influenced the art produced later in life. Niati’s passion for art started at a young age. Following in the footsteps of her father, a self-taught landscape painter inspired by the art of the impressionists, she initially trained in Community Arts in Algiers. In 1977, Niati moved to London enrolling on a fine art course at Croydon College of Art, followed by an MA in Fine Art at Middlesex University. Niati has been exhibiting her work internationally since 1983. Her practice consists of painting, drawing, installation, video, digital art, poetry and singing performance. Niati is perhaps best known for her powerful painting installation No To Torture (After Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, 1834) made in 1982 and consisting of 5 large panels – this work played a major role in launching Niati’s career in 1980s London. Niati was included in the 1983 exhibition Five Black Women (Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Houria Niati and Veronica Ryan) organised by Lubaina Himid and held at the Africa Centre, London. Several of Niati’s installations including To Bring Water From The Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It explore oriental images and colonial postcards. These works have further established her reputation as an international artist whose work is intimately self-referential, documenting her own multicultural history. Family photos and snippets of the past are hidden behind a veil of whimsical calligraphy written in English, French and Arabic text and selected from the artist’s own poetry, questioning the process of integration and what it means to live with several cultures simultaneously.

    Houria Niati has taken part in group and individual exhibitions in the Clinton Foundation, USA; University of Southern Mississippi; Kennedy Center, Washington DC; British Museum; Museo di Storia Contemporaria Milano, Italy; CCCB Barcelona International Art Festival; Modern Art Museum, Valencia; Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, London; Museum of Porte D'Amboise, Rhodes; UNESCO Galerie, Paris; SOAS, London; Museum of the African Art, Florida; Contemporary Art Museum, Florida; Herbert Johnson Museum, USA; Cornell University, New York; Third International Biennial of Arts, Sharjah, UAE; Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, Florida: Walnut Creek Civic Centre, California; Gwinnett Art Centre, Duluth; Giorgia Nexus Contemporary Arts Centre, Atlanta; Wolson Galleries, Florida; Chicago Cultural Centre; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; Harris Museum, Preston; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Cartwright Hall Museum, Bradford; Barbican Centre, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Fruitmarket, Edinburgh; Galerie Issiakhem, Algiers; Riverside Studios, London; Brixton Art Gallery, London; Battersea Arts Centre, London; La Galerie de CCWA, Algiers; Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield; The Castle Museum, Nottingham; Galerie Bretesche, Paris; The Africa Centre, London; Maison de la Culture, Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria; Le Centre Cultural, Ain Defla, Algeria La Bibliotheque, Chlef, Algeria.

  • Charlie Phillips (b Jamaica 1944) travelled to London aged twelve and acquired a Kodak Brownie camera from a serviceman. From his temporary home in Notting Hill he began documenting the lives of the local community and the birth of Carnival. He also recorded student protests and took paparazzi style shots of celebrities for a variety of magazines during the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Each photograph,’ writes curator Paul Goodwin, ‘ tells 'other' stories...about the rise of modern multicultural London and the migrant experience in the city.’ Cultural broadcaster Simon Schama has described him as "a visual poet; chronicler, champion, witness of a gone world ... one of Britain's great photo-portraitists." One of his best-known series is of West Indian funerals made in the 1980s, to be shown by James Hyman’s Photography Centre in October 2023. Phillips’ work is represented in the collections of Tate Britain, The Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.

  • Douglas Portway (b. South Africa 1922- d. England 1993 ) This striking oil was exhibited at the Drian Galleries in London in 1961.

    Douglas Portway’s style was characterised by layers of oil paint built up on canvas, sometimes scratched

    back to reveal the layers underneath.

    He studied at the Witwatersrand Technical Art School and in 1952 gained a travel grant, spending several

    months in America. He emigrated to Europe - from 1959–66 living in Ibiza, and finally in 1967 settling in St Ives,

    Cornwall. Portway had important one man shows with the Drian Galleries in London and took part in

    international art fairs in Basel, New York and Chicago, winning the European Painting Prize Bronze

    Medal,1969, and the Gold Medal in 1971. He gained the Cornelissen Prize in 1992.

    The Tate Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum and the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art all

    hold examples of his work

  • Lancelot Ribeiro (b India 1933 – d London 2010) arrived in London in the 1950s as a teenager to study accountancy and drawing, went back to India, and then returned to the UK in 1962 to work as Souza’s studio assistant. At this time he co-founded the Indian Painters Collective, a group of young Indian artists living and working in London who organised exhibitions of South Asian artists throughout the 1960s and 1970s. His own brand of vibrant expressionism resulted in several exhibitions held at institutions such as the Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Camden Art Centre in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2021, his work entered the Tate collection and he is currently the subject of an exhibition at Burgh House & Hampstead Museum.

  • Anwar Shemza (b India 1928 – d UK 1985) came to London in 1956 from Pakistan on a British Council scholarship to study at the Slade School of Art, but found the school’s professor, E.H Gombrich, regarded Islamic art as purely functional and therefore inferior. Shemza sought inspiration instead in the Islamic rooms of the British Museum and V&A where he evolved his own fusion of Islamic and modern western art, becoming an ‘Asian diaspora’ artist influenced to a degree by Paul Klee. In the 1960s Shemza exhibited mainly at the outward looking New Vision and Gallery One galleries in London. In 1989, four years after his death, he was included, like Souza, in The Other Story. Currently, Shemza is the subject of a display at the British Museum. Of it, the British Museum Magazine writes....’it is a reminder of the role of South Asian artists in British art history and the incalculable impact of migration on British art and culture up to the present day.’

  • Francis Newton Souza (b India 1924 - d India 2002). Souza was been expelled from art school for supporting Mahatma Gandhi’s anti-British ‘Quit India’ movement and in 1947 became a founding member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group which reacted against traditional Indian art styles. But in 1949, the hostile reception he received led him to emigrate to London where he pursued a vigorous, expressionist style of figurative painting becoming known as ‘the Picasso of India’ (Julian Hartnoll, 1990; Hugo Weihe Christies, 2006, quoted in the Grosvenor Vadhera Gallery Picaso Souza exhibition catalogue, December 2011 – January 2012)

    During the 1950s and 1960s he showed and sold at Victor Musgrave’s Gallery One, increasingly recognised as a home to progressive artists of the day. Here, his work was admired by critics such as Edwin Mullins, the poet Stephen Spender, and not least, the artist Francis Bacon who became a friend. In 1989 he was included in the seminal Hayward Gallery show, ‘The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Postwar Britain’, which was curated by the Pakistan born artist, Rasheed Araeen, highlighting the work of racially and aesthetically marginalised artists in theUK. Since his death in India in 2002, Souza’s work has been in high demand in the auction rooms reaching £1 million and more on several occasions.

    Francis Newton Souza’s half-brother, Lancelot Ribeiro (b India 1933 – d London 2010) arrived in London in the 1950s as a teenager to study accountancy and drawing, went back to India, and then returned to the UK in 1962 to work as Souza’s studio assistant. At this time he co-founded the Indian Painters Collective, a group of young Indian artists living and working in London who organised exhibitions of South Asian artists throughout the 1960s and 1970s. His own brand of vibrant expressionism resulted in several exhibitions held at institutions such as the Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Camden Art Centre in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2021, his work entered the Tate collection, and he is currently the subject of an exhibition at Burgh House & Hampstead Museum.

  • Aubrey Williams ( b. Guyana 1926- d. London 1990) was born in 1926 in Georgetown, Guyana. He began drawing as a child.

    Williams trained as an agronomist and in 1944 started working as an agricultural field officer. He encouraged the exploited farmers to claim their rights against the British owned sugar plantations. Seen as a troublemaker, he was banished to Hosororo. Here he met Warao Amerindians whose history and culture came to greatly influence his artistic work.

    Williams fought for Guyana’s independence and was seen as a political agitator. He migrated to Britain in 1952 and won a scholarship for an agricultural course but disappointed with the teaching standards he dropped out and travelled across Europe.

    In 1954 Williams studied at St Martins School of Art. He attended and exhibited at art galleries across the city. Among the many artists that influenced Williams, Arshile Gorky had a profound effect on him.

    In the late 1950’s, Williams met Denis Bowen, the founder of the New Vision Group and Gallery which played an important role in post war British art. Williams exhibited a number of paintings with the gallery in 1958 and had solo shows there in 1959 and 1960. His work sold well with positive reviews from art critics. However, success lasted a mere two years and he then felt marginalised from the British art world, feeling that it was indifferent, institutional and hostile.

    In 1963 he exhibited 40 paintings at the Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art at the Commonwealth Institute.

    From 1966 – 1972 Williams played a leading role in founding the “Caribbean Artist’s Movement”.

Artist Biographies

  • (b. Poland 1906- d. England 1988) In 1966 Caziel had his first one-man show at the Grabowski Gallery in London but remained a resident in Paris. Adhering to Abstraction since 1951, Caziel had shown at the Salon de Mai alongside Vasarely, Manessier and Hartung. His Abstraction developed spontaneously from his 1940s investment in Cubism. In 1951 there was no turning back, despite the protestations of his friend Picasso and his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

    Caziel would strive to paint works which bring about a spontaneous rush of emotion and the intageable feeling of the senses. Not unlike an alchemist, Caziel combined colours and shapes in order to evoke a confrontation with the essence of being; his works do not defy description, but should ideally be used to bring one into a transcendental state.

    With his abstract works, Caziel demonstrated that his goal was to understand experience by describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. As such Caziel's abstract paintings are inscribed into the contemporary French philosophical debate.

    Caziel's works are present in the collections of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Vatican Museum, Rome and the National Museum, Warsaw.

  • Peter de Francia (b. France 1921- d London 2012) initially established his reputation in the 1950s with his powerful politically and socially engaged paintings and drawings. There may be precedents for Peter de Francia's work in that of Goya, Beckmann, Grosz, Picasso and Guttuso, but his is a distinctly personal vision, as relevant today as it was half a century ago. One of his major painting of the 1950s, The Bombing of Sakiet, has for many years been on display at Tate Modern and another large-scale political work, The Execution of Beloyannis was included in the publication, 1001 Pictures to See before You Die (2017). Whether de Francia's subjects are real or imagined, whether he uses the language of myth or fable, what always comes through is the artist's engagement with people and above all his intense humanity. Perhaps most famed for his drawing, de Francia was also a powerful painter, whose influence on future generations was also spread through his teaching at the Royal College of Art and his writing, from early days as a critic to a major monograph on Fernand Leger. The Estate of Peter de Francia is represented by James Hyman Fine Art.

  • Jules de Goede (1937 – 2007) arrived in England in 1965, a raw and untested yet cosmopolitan 28-year-old artist, via a circuitous route. Born in Rotterdam to parents who were part Dutch, French and German, de Goede, his two brothers and four sisters were raised in Nijmegen and lived through the Nazi occupation and subsequent liberation of Holland.

    Early memories of the flat Dutch landscape were as influential as the pressing example of the indigenous de Stijl "school" on de Goede's future artistic development. A Dutch resourcefulness came increasingly to play in the reductive and logical geometric language that de Goede later fashioned in London.

    De Goede studied at Arnhem and later Eindhoven. The family moved to Australia after the early death of his mother. Finding Australia too stifling he moved back to Europe settling in London in 1965. Here de Goede set off on the uncompromising mission of becoming a full-time artist intent on exploring the fundamental spatial dynamics of pure form on the flat surface of pictorial art.

    De Goede's reputation in London was established through three biennial solo exhibitions with Grabowski Gallery between 1967 and 1971, and two at Jenny Stein's House Gallery during the late 1970s.

  • Jacob Epstein (b New York 1880 – d London 1959) The son of Polish Jewish emigres, Epstein showed an early aptitude for art and moved to Paris as soon as he had sufficient funds and then to London in 1905 where he quickly made his name as a prominent, if controversial public sculptor. His 18 stone figure carvings made in 1908 for the British Medical Association exterior betray the influence of the classical Indian sculptures he had seen at the Musee Guimet in Paris. In London he was drawn by the African and Polynesian sculptures he saw in the British Museum and was to exercise a profound influence on both Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. After flirting with modernism and the Vorticist movement, he turned to a more figurative mode focussing on portrait busts such as one of his lovers, Isabel Rawsthorne (included in Crossing Borders c/o Simon Hilton), the glamorous model who had hob knobbed with Derain and Giacometti in Paris in the 30s, and then Francis Bacon in the 50s. Also figurative and expressionistic were the nude drawings and coloured landscapes he made in the latter half of his life until his death in 1959.

  • Susan Hiller (b America 1940 – d London 2019). Hiller studied and then pursued a career in anthropology, but soon decided to ‘relinquish factuality for fantasy’ and became an artist. Settling in London in late 1960, one of her earliest works to create an impression was Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–76) - an installation of over 300 postcards of rough sea images of waves breaking dramatically on the British coastline, now part of the Tate Collection and considered a classic work of conceptual art. Hiller often reworked her ideas into ongoing series, Rough Version, 2012-14 in our exhibition being an example.

    The use of postcard imagery was characteristic of Hiller’s interest in mundane and devalued cultural artefacts arranged as if in defiance of the anthropological technique of categorisation for scientific study. She also focussed on the mystical, the subconscious and the paranormal, and used an array of media from slide projections to video and tv screens. Regarded by some as one of the most influential artists working in Britain, she was recognized by mid-career survey exhibitions at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (1986) and Tate Liverpool (1996), and a major retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain (2011).

  • Frances Mary Hodgkins (b. New Zealand 1869 - d. England 1947) is arguably New Zealand’s leading expatriate artist, and one of the most remarkable women painters of her day. She left New Zealand for the UK and at the outbreak of the First World War, she became a frequent traveller to Europe. Her works capture the spirit of an era greatly influenced by Impressionism and the beginnings of 'plein air' painting, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and two World Wars. With a professional life that spanned fifty-six years, Hodgkins was one of the foremost artists of her generation.

    During her time in Britain she became one of the leaders of the English avant-garde movement. Following her establishment with the avant-garde in the Seven and Five Society in 1929 with artists Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood and Ivon Hitchens, the 1930s were an important time for the artist, beginning her long-term relationship with the illustrious Lefevre Gallery in London. She travelled extensively and evolved her style from impressionistic watercolours to striking twentieth-century modernist paintings.

    Hodgkins' works are in the following museums: British Council Collection; Glasgow Museums Resource Centre; Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds; Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Tate, London; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester

  • Charles Howard (1899 - 1978) was an American born self-taught artist who took part in the first surrealist exhibition to be staged in America, held at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932. After marrying the English surrealist painter Madge Knight, the pair moved to London in 1933, becoming associated with the historically significant Unit One group formed by Paul Nash. Howard took part in London’s International Surrealist exhibition in 1936 and exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s London gallery, Guggenheim-Jeune, in 1939. After retreating from the war to America in 1941 where he enjoyed some success in California, Howard returned to England in 1946, and was exhibited by the McRoberts & Tunnard Gallery while teaching at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, from 1956 until the 1970s when he retired to Italy. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1942 and 1951, and at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. A similar work to the one exhibited at Crossing Borders is in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.

  • R.B. Kitaj ( b. USA 1932- d .USA 2007) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. He studied at the Cooper Union Institute in New York, the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, the Ruskin School, Oxford, and the Royal College of Art, London. His first solo exhibition - Pictures with Commentary. Pictures without Commentary - was held at Marlborough Fine Art, London, in 1963.

    In 1976, Kitaj was invited by the Arts Council of Great Britain to select a group of British works connected by a common theme. His selection formed the basis for the seminal exhibition The Human Clay. The show included works by Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff, Moore, Hodgkin, Hockney, Kitaj himself, and many others. In his essay for the catalogue, Kitaj referred to 'a School of London', an influential concept which has shaped perceptions of art in post-war London ever since. Kitaj has been consistently identified as one of the leading artists in this milieu and was included in the 2016 Getty Museum exhibition, London Calling, and the 2018 Tate Britain exhibition, All Too Human.

    Alongside his art, Kitaj was a profound thinker capable of penetrating self-analysis and cultural commentary. In 1989, he published the First Diasporist Manifesto, the longest and most impassioned of his many texts discussing the Jewish dimension in his art and thought. From the beginning of his career, his interests in history, politics, philosophy and identity supercharged his art with a rich array of connotations.

    His various honours include election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. In 1984, he became the first American since John Singer Sargent to be elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy of Arts. Numerous retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held, including those at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1997 he left London and moved to Los Angeles, where he died in 2007.

    Writing in 2017, his great friend David Hockney wrote of his respect and admiration for Kitaj. ‘Ron was a great influence on me, far more than any other factor’. Kitaj was admired for his seriousness, which distinguished him from an early age. Combined with the visual and intellectual clarity of his work, it is that seriousness which assures Kitaj of his place in art history.

  • Liliane Lijn (b USA 1939 ) Born to Russian Jewish émigré parents, Lijn has described herself as a 'New Yorker by birth, a European by education, and a Londoner by choice.’ She arrived in London in 1966 already classified as a kinetic artist working with light and industrial materials. Five years earlier she had married the Greek kinetic artist, Takis, in Paris. A pioneer in exploring the interaction between art, science and technology her twin interests in physics and Buddhism led the critic Jasia Reichardt to remark: ‘There is an intersection (in Lijn’s work) at which science fiction, religion and quantum physics converge.’ Her work was first exhibited in London by John Dunbar’s Indica Gallery and she was given her first solo show by the Hanover Gallery in 1970. Institutional recognition came with her first solo show which was held at the Serpentine Gallery in 1976. Her work is represented in many public and corporate collections in Britain, including Tate; the British Museum; and the Arts Council of Great Britain. .

  • Kim Lim (b. Singapore 1936- d. 1997 London) was born in Singapore and spent much of her early childhood in Penang and Malacca. After her schooling in Singapore, Lim knew that she wanted to become an artist, and at eighteen, she enrolled at St. Martin's in London, where she spent two years concentrating mainly on wood carving. She then transferred to the Slade, where taught by the etcher Anthony Gross and lithographer Stanley Jones, she developed a strong commitment to print making.

    On journeys back to Singapore she stopped off in Europe and India, soaking up the art 'like a sponge'. These were the experiences that confirmed in her a lifelong predilection for things archaic, and for the flow and rhythm of Indian and South East Asian sculpture: " I found that I always responded to things that were done in earlier civilizations that seemed to have less elaboration and more strength." In Greece she was entranced by Cycladic sculpture. Of Chinese art she was moved most by early Shang bronzes, Han sculpture, Sung pottery: things characterized by formal and decorative simplicity.

    Kim Lim exhibited widely after leaving the Slade in 1960.From 1980, she turned to stone-carving, whilst continuing to make prints and fill sketchbooks with drawings from nature. With her husband, the sculptor and painter William Turnbull, she made journeys to China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Egypt, Malaysia and Turkey, always alert to art and nature alike, and with a sharp eye to human diversity.

  • Richard Lin (b. Taiwan 1933 - d. Taiwan 2011) Born in Formosa, Taiwan, Richard Lin (1933 - 2011) was educated in England at Millfield School, Somerset, before going on to study architecture at Regent St Polytechnic during the fifties. This experience undoubtedly influenced the structured, minimalist style in which he worked, as well as his predilection to work using plastic and metal.

    Early in his career he worked under the name Lin Show Yu, however, by 1959, and his first solo show at Gimpel Fils, London, he was exhibiting as Richard Lin. After this, a series of exhibitions at Gimpel Fils followed, as well as shows in the Netherlands, America and Germany amongst others.

    His wall pieces reveal a connection with the work of Donald Judd and more broadly, American minimalism, whilst his drawings and more painterly work point back to Chinese, Taiwanese ink drawings.

    Lin's work can be found in the public collections at the Tate Gallery, London, Arts Council, London, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and several public institutions internationally.

  • Li Yuan-Chia (b. China 1929- d. Engl 1994) was one of Taiwan's earliest pioneers of abstract and conceptual art. One of only a few Taiwanese artists to gain acclaim in the international art world, his creative scope encompassed ink painting, oil, monochromatic painting, conceptual art, photography and mixed media, including sculpture, environmental art and participatory installations. Li saw himself as a philosopher, photographer, a mathematician and a poet. Largely regarded as China’s ‘first conceptual artist,' Li was born of humble beginnings in Guangxi, China. Given up for adoption at a young age, he travelled through a succession of orphanages and ended up in Taiwan. A student of art education at the Taipei Normal College for Teacher Training, Li quickly fell in with the revolutionary Ton-Fan group, where he became known as one of the ‘8 Great Outlaws' – the first abstract artists of Taiwan. Through his association with the group, and to escape martial law in the country, Li travelled to Bologna, then London, eventually finding his home in Cumbria in a house he purchased from the artist Winifred Nicholson in 1972. The house became the site of his life’s work – the LYC Museum and Art Gallery – a place for showing innovative art by over 300 artists, exhibited alongside Roman artefacts, traditional Cumbrian crafts and Li’s own experimental artwork, which included paintings, ink drawings, sculpture and photography.

    Li participated twice at the São Paulo Biennale, and had important solo shows, including 'Li Yuan-chia: Unique Photographs,' The Whitworth, Manchester (2019); 'Li Yuan-chia,' Sotheby's S|2 Gallery, London (2017); Tate Modern: Display, London (2014); 'View-Point: A Retrospective Exhibition of Li-Yuan-chia,' Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2014); and a solo exhibition at Camden Arts Center in London (2001), which subsequently travelled to Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, UK and Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Most recent group shows include 'Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition', Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester (2018); and 'SIGNALS', S|2 Gallery, London, UK (2018).

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