Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art

An essay by Monica Bohm-Duchen

These days it is easy to take the diversity, cosmopolitanism, and global reach of the British art world for granted. For a long time, twentieth century British art, especially of the first half or so of the century, was widely perceived as inward-looking and provincial.  At a time marked by heated debates about national identity and the disturbing rise in racism and xenophobic sentiments, this exhibition serves as a salutary reminder of the important contribution to modern British visual culture played by artists who were born elsewhere.

From Hans Holbein the Younger onwards, British art has owed a great deal to the influx of foreign-born artists who made this country their home. As early as 1531, the courtier and writer Sir Thomas Elyot conceded that ‘If we wyll have anythinge well paynted, kerved or embrowdred, [we are compelled] to abandon our own countraymen and resort unto straungers.’ Until the late eighteenth century the majority of the most prominent artists in this country - from Holbein through van Dyck to Zoffany – were born in Europe. And in the nineteenth century, artists such as American-born Whistler and Sargent made a major, if sometimes controversial, mark on the London art scene. Yet with the notable exception of artists of Huguenot origin, such as miniaturist Isaac Oliver and sculptors Hubert Le Sueur and François Roubiliac, they came not as part of a wave of mass migration (in this case fleeing religious persecution in France), but as individuals seeking to further their professional careers.

This changed dramatically in the early twentieth century, with the arrival in this country between 1881 and 1914 of approximately 120,000 Jewish immigrants from Russia and eastern Europe, fleeing the discrimination and antisemitic pogroms of that part of the world.(1) Working class, poor, religiously orthodox and mostly Yiddish-speaking, they settled primarily in the East End of London, but also in other metropolitan centres such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Glasgow.

Artists who emerged from this culturally inauspicious milieu include Alfred Wolmark, Bernard Meninsky, Mark Gertler and David Bomberg, the latter two leading members of the group known as the Whitechapel Boys. Either brought over as young children or born in this country of recent immigrant parents, these artists found themselves exploring (both consciously and unconsciously) the creative tensions between a traditional Judaism wary since Biblical times of the power of the ‘graven image’ and their urge to make their mark in the wider British world. It would be the most prominent Anglo-Jewish artist of an earlier generation, William Rothenstein, whose affluent German-born textile merchant father had settled in Bradford in 1859, who did much to ease their passage, mainly in the form of lending financial support to their studies at the Slade School of Art.  

Not all the Jewish artists of this generation were men, however, as evidenced by the inclusion in Crossing Borders of the work of still under-rated Clara Klinghoffer. As has been the case in quite different contexts, even in the twentieth century women faced an array of gender-specific obstacles in their ambitions to be professional artists, but we are pleased that a diverse array of female artists (from Jewish communist photographer Edith Tudor-Hart, born in Vienna, to Singapore born abstract artist Kim Lim) are represented in this exhibition.

The tension between the work of Jewish artists being acknowledged and these same artists being identified as ‘other’ was borne out in a number of key exhibitions at the time. The first took place in 1887 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the second, entitled Jewish Art and Antiquities, at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1906 and, most significantly in artistic terms, a (necessarily problematic) ‘Jewish Section’ was included in the 1914 Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements exhibition at the same gallery. The latter was curated by David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein, the American-born son of eastern European Jewish immigrant parents who had settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and thus of a similar background to the Whitechapel Boys.

A substantial number of artists featured in Crossing Borders hail from a very different wave of Jewish immigrants, numbering some 80,000 in total, fleeing the racist and ultimately genocidal policies of the Nazi regime from 1933 onwards. Although predominantly educated middle-class individuals, they mostly arrived in the UK penniless having been stripped of their assets. These were largely from Germany and (after the 1938 Anschluss) Austria, but also in due course from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other parts of Europe occupied by the Nazis, who brought with them a sophisticated cosmopolitanism and deep knowledge of European avant-garde art movements.

The dominant style these artists - among them Jankel Adler, Josef Herman and Fred Uhlman - brought with them can be characterised as essentially expressionistic. Emphatic line and non-naturalistic colour, extreme tactility and strong if suppressed emotion prevail, even if the subject-matter makes no direct reference to their traumatic experiences. While today this style raises no eyebrows, it is important to recall that in 1930s Britain and beyond, it was for the most part entirely unfamiliar and therefore the object of suspicion, if not active antagonism. 

Interestingly, even when the artists came to this country as children (the most well-known examples are Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach), they seem to have imbibed something of the visual culture into which they were born – a point often commented on by the critics. But of course, and this is especially true of artists like Paul Feiler, associated with the St. Ives group (itself influenced by the presence there of Russian-born Constructivist Naum Gabo), they also learned much from American Abstract Expressionism, as mediated by their British-born colleagues. That more than a few artist members of the post-war diaspora also favoured a painterly, iconographically suggestive abstraction is another example of this fruitful cultural cross-fertilisation.

In 1976, American-born Jewish artist R. B. Kitaj, who settled in England in 1957, coined the influential term ‘School of London’(2) to designate a group of artists fiercely loyal to an expressive figuration despite the tide of fashion, a significant number of them Jewish. In 1989, he published his still relevant First Diasporist Manifesto, a short but intellectually dense text in which he convincingly defines the Diasporist as someone who ‘feels uneasy, alert to his new freedom, groundless, even foreign… the Diasporist pursues the phantom myth of nervous histories he claims for his own.’(3). Deeply preoccupied with his own European Jewish background and the legacy of the Holocaust, Kitaj was nevertheless adamant that ‘You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Diasporist; certainly not.’(4) In my opinion, this constructive and thought-provoking bringing together of diasporists of entirely different backgrounds too often gets overlooked. 

On the surface, it is true, the artists of non-European origin who came to Britain after the Second World War from countries with colonial ties to the UK represent a very different phenomenon. Most of the artists were young men  from the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia, who took up this country’s invitation to help rebuild its economy after the war, little anticipating the levels of racism they were to encounter. Some (like Rasheed Araeen, later organiser of the landmark exhibition The Other Story) began by studying more practical subjects such as engineering, but soon turned to study art instead. Unsurprisingly perhaps at first they embraced modernism with enthusiasm, but only later realised the importance of also finding artistic expression for the culture of their places of origin.

Again, the way in which the work of artists such as Aubrey Williams, F. N. Souza and Anwar Jalal Shemza was initially received in this country is telling. Most jaw-dropping of all is the comment made by Bryan Robertson in the wake of Guyana born Frank Bowling’s exclusion from the 1964 New Contemporaries exhibition that ‘England is not ready for a gifted artist of colour’; but even in less extreme cases, there was clearly a deeply double-edged preconception that their work should ‘naturally’ express their ‘exotic’ cultural origins. It is no surprise therefore that such artists found themselves obliged to turn to the only (non-mainstream) galleries that appeared to want them – notably, the Commonwealth Institute, Gallery One, run by Victor Musgrave and the New Vision Centre Gallery, run by Denis Bowen.

But as with the early twentieth century Jewish artists discussed above, the creative tensions between margins and mainstream, separatism and assimilation, isolation and integration remain evident. At one extreme, we have an apparently patriotic work like Cleveland Brown’s Jubilee Special of 1977 and at the other, Aubrey Williams’ Maya Matrix II (Olmec-Maya and Now) of 1984, with its references to the indigenous South American culture of Guyana, the artist’s place of birth. Then there are works like Dominica born Tam Joseph’s Spirit of Carnival, which both celebrates the Caribbean roots of Carnival as transposed to Notting Hill and elsewhere in the UK and exposes the latter’s deep suspicion of its apparently anarchic aspects.  

For the most part, however, it would be left to the next generation, the justifiably angry British-born and -raised children of the non-European diaspora such as Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid and Sutapa Biswas, who came to prominence in the 1980s, to make overtly political statements in and through their art. An indication of the strong ties between generations and the nature of intergenerational trauma is represented by one of the most recent works in Crossing Borders, Mother and I of 2006 by Algeria born Houria Niati.

In conclusion, then, many people now agree that transnationalism and cultural hybridity are concepts to be celebrated and would concur that ‘the migrant has turned from a figure on the fringe to a mobile player at the epicentre of our global world’(5). Yet as Robert Winder has astutely observed, ‘We do not always think of Britain as a country settled at a deep level by immigrants. We prefer to construct mythologies of the national character as something stable, as a still and virtuous point in an often unruly world.’(6) Moreover, as Frank Bowling commented in a recent BBC documentary, it is still the case that ‘in order for people to feel comfortable they have to put you in a box.’(7) My sincere hope is that Crossing Borders will stand as cogent proof of the need to resist the lure of the cultural pigeonhole and of the importance of cultural cross-fertilisation, past, present and future.

Monica Bohm-Duchen

London, September 2023