The Ben Uri Gallery - The London Jewish Museum of Art is delighted to announce the first exhibition for a decade of the work of the artist Mark Gertler (1891-1939).
The Ben Uri Gallery - The London Jewish Museum of Art is delighted
to announce the first exhibition for a decade of the work of the artist Mark
Gertler (1891-1939).
Born in Spitalfields to impoverished
Austrian-Polish parentage, Gertler was the first Jewish working-class student of
his generation to attend the prestigious Slade School of Art. (Though fellow
Eastenders David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer and the artist/poet Isaac Rosenberg would
soon follow in his footsteps, their studies, like Gertlers own was financed by
loans from the Jewish Educational Aid Society.) At the Slade Gertler mixed
with C R W Nevinson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer, won many prizes, and left
with a reputation as a draughtsman to equal that of Augustus John. There he also
met and fell in love with fellow student Dora Carrington, who became his
confidant and muse, and the object of his unrequited passion for the next ten
years. Gertler's early patrons included Winston Churchill's secretary Edward
Marsh and the indefatigable society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, who
introduced him to many members of the Bloomsbury Group. Gertlers highly
experimental work in the years of the First World War made an outstanding
contribution to British modernism.
His work was praised by fellow
artists including Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell and Henry Moore, and he so
fascinated his contemporaries that he was fictionalised in a variety of
portraits ranging from the sinister sculptor of D H Lawrence's Women in Love, to
the dashing Byronic hero of Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. During the 1920s
Gertler exhibited frequently and was a leading member of the London Group.
However, in the 1930s ill-health and financial worries exacerbated by the
responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, and uncertainty over the direction
and reception of his work led to his eventual suicide in 1939.
This
retrospective chronicles the many stages of Gertler's remarkably varied career:
from the carefully observed still-lifes and highly naturalistic family portraits
of his early years, to the highly experimental work of the war years -
reflecting his understanding of Post-Impressionism (particularly Cézanne) -
through to the Renoir-influenced female portraits of the 1920s, and finally, to
the neo-classical nudes and semi-Cubist still-lifes of his last years.
Highlights of the exhibition include the Ben Uri's newly-acquired Rabbi and
Rabbitzin (1914), shown here together with the British Museums companion
drawing Rabbi and Rabbitzin with Fish, and several paintings, including The Sari
(1938), exhibited here for the first time since the artist's death.
This exhibition also marks the opening of a series of forthcoming Ben Uri
exhibitions subtitled The Whitechapel Boys, which examine the lives and
paintings of those young Jewish East End artists, who often studied, worked and
exhibited together in the years immediately preceding World War One.
Curators: Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson.
Sarah MacDougall is
an art historian and the author of a new biography of the artist Mark Gertler,
published by John Murray. Rachel Dickson is a freelance curator and art
consultant, and has recently co-curated the exhibition of contemporary
site-responsive sculpture and installation 'Art in the Garden' at the Chelsea
Physic Garden.
Contact: Sarah MacDougall on 020 8654 4458
macseed@talk21.com or Rachel Dickson on 020 8741 9577 rsilman@aol.com
Ben Uri Gallery
The London Jewish Museum of Art
108a Boundary Road
London, NW8 ORH
T: 020 7604 3991
F: 020 7604 3992