SESSION: Jews and Heritage in Twentieth-Century Britain: Collections, Aesthetics, Narratives

This panel will interrogate the complex impact of Jews upon the making of national heritage in early twentieth-century Britain (c.1880–1950). It will reflect on how different members of this minority group simultaneously enriched national collections whilst also fostering organisations devoted to celebrating cultural difference. Through the prism of heritage, the panel will explore how Jews pursued both assimilationist and particularist strategies in relation to British society, past and present. With its focus on minority experience, the panel aims to reveal some of the complexity inherent in evolving ideas of ‘Britishness’, visually articulated and culturally performed.

Some papers may choose to explore art collecting and display as a vehicle by which Jews sought to project identity and cultural capital into the mainstream. Jewish collectors were actively involved with the art world in Britain through cultural patronage, sponsorship of contemporary artists, museum donations and the lending of artworks to public exhibitions. Other papers might choose to tackle the theme from the perspective of artists, art critics, curators, art dealers or designers, drawing out the role of migration of people and things in fostering new and unexpected expressions of the national character, the national past and the nation’s artistic inheritance.

While the speakers’ focus will be on the Jewish experience, the panel will invite comparisons from participants who have explored parallel issues in relation to other ethnic or religious communities. The session will thereby aim to refine our understanding of how forms of national belonging were predicated upon the assertion or elision of minority identities. This panel comes at a time of intense debate within Britain about the limits and supposed failures of multiculturalism, of intense fractures around Zionism and anti-Zionism as well as the continuing challenge of antisemitism. Interrogating the relationship between Jewish actors and experiences, and the production and/or problematisation of twentieth-century modes of Britishness, has rarely been so timely.

Session Convenors:

John Hilary, University of Nottingham

Tom Stammers, Courtauld Institute of Art

Session Speakers:

Sarah MacDougall, Rachel Dickson and Emily Fuggle, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum

Jewishness and Britishness at the Ben Uri Gallery: 1915–1953

Ben Uri was founded as an Art Society in London’s East End in 1915 by and for Yiddishspeaking, Eastern-European Jewish immigrant artist-craftsmen working outside the cultural mainstream. By the 1930s it had become a cultural nexus for a second cohort, the so-called‘Hitler émigrés’, who fled persecution on the continent and sought cultural refuge within its activities. This collaborative paper will explore Ben Uri’s evolution as a particularist organisation serving these two differing migratory cohorts while maintaining a distinct but changing Jewish identity via its collection, exhibitions and programming. The paper considers two pivotal exhibitions – the inaugural collection show in 1925, in premises opposite the British Museum, featuring artists ranging from founder, ‘Ostjude’ Lazar Berson to British-born, iconoclast David Bomberg and its 1944 grand ‘re-opening’ in a dedicated townhouse in London’s West End centred on recent Central European refugees, who brought fresh ideas of modernism and identity.

The presentation will explore the role and influences of key figures, such as Moshe Oved, Cyril Ross, and Fritz Solomonski, who shaped the early collection and exhibitions, as well as the important contribution of later women administrators, Ethel Solomon and Sadie Büchler,who created fresh directions for the institution postwar. It concludes by asking how far, by the 1950s, Ben Uri’s programming succeeded in interfacing with nationwide British celebrations, notably the Festival of Britain (1951) and the Coronation (1953), as it attempted to inscribevarying notions of Jewishness into Britain’s national heritage.

Hemdat Kislev, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Is there such a thing as Jewish Art? Jewish Identity and the Exhibition of Jewish Art and Antiquities, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1927

In May 1927, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London opened the Exhibition of Jewish Art and Antiquities. The opening address, delivered by Sir Herbert Samuel—former High Commissioner of Mandatory Palestine and a prominent British-Jewish politician—posed a question that has long haunted Jewish art: “This exhibition is full of works of Jewish artists, but the question arises whether there is such a thing as a Jewish art.” The absence of a Jewish visual tradition, he suggested, might stem either from a lack of “innate aptitude” or from the biblical prohibition of graven images. Yet Samuel also claimed that the Jewish spirit was undergoing a “renaissance” in both Palestine and England. The exhibition itself was proof that “the spirit of art is alive among the Jewish people of the present time.”

This paper will explore enduring assumptions about the possibility of Jewish art through Samuel’s opening address. To ask whether Jewish art exists was to ask about the state of Jewish identity, peoplehood, and politics. As a figure who moved between British, Jewish, and Zionist spheres, Samuel’s position reflected contemporary ideas about art’s role in shaping modern Jewish identity, making the exhibition an interesting instance in which Anglo-Jewish needs interacted with ideas characteristic of Cultural Zionism.

Drawing on materials from the Whitechapel Gallery archive, this paper explores how the 1927 exhibition negotiated Jewish identity, nationalism, and peoplehood. It analyses Samuel’s address, the artworks and artefacts displayed, and press responses, showing how the exhibition linked Jewish art from antiquity to modernity to function as a site for imagining cultural renewal and expressing complex national belongings.

Victoria Wiksén, Independent researcher

An exploration of Jewish identity within the context of the 1956 ‘Tercentenary exhibitions’

My initial starting point when I began working on this abstract was – as suggested in the ‘Session’ description – to focus on “the perspective of the artists” featured in the Tercentenary exhibitions’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Ben Uri. However, while reviewing the Whitechapel exhibition catalogue, authored by Charles S. Spencer, questions arose about how to interpret the terms “Jewish artists” and “Jewish paintings”: I especially began to reflect upon how to interpret ewish identity in relation to these terms; whether “Jewish artists” demonstrate a distinct artistic expression, and if so, how such characteristics might be identified in their work; and in what ways the identity and heritage of “Jewish artists” is reflected in their visual language.

With regard to the artists featured in the exhibitions, I particularly consider Chenoch Lieberman, Eva Frankfurther, and Josef Herman to be compelling case studies, but I will also reference other artists included in the exhibitions.

The theoretical framework will be grounded in identity studies. I especially find the duality that defines identity, as something imposed upon us by other people, as something that is given and self-evident and as something we as individuals actively emphasise and communicate, interesting and highly relevant in relation to this research paper. I believe it would be valuable to reference Peter Gross’ “discourse about the place of Jews in England” (Representations of Jews and Jewishness in English Painting) within this context.

For my methodology, I will employ archival research, visual analysis, close reading, and interviews.

Lucy Wasensteiner, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

A Dealer’s Collection for the Ashmolean Museum: European Drawings from the Collection of Grete Ring (1887–1952)

Grete Ring was a leading art dealer in Weimar-era Berlin, from 1926 co-owner of the Kunstsalon Cassirer with her business partner Walter Feilchenfeldt. After 1933, Ring and Feilchenfeldt were forced into exile on grounds of their Jewish heritage. Ring arrived in London in 1938. Ring took a private collection with her to England: around 100 mainly nineteenth-century French and German drawings. In exile her collection almost doubled in size, incorporating new French, German and British drawings. The collection was displayed in her London home, itself a favourite meeting point for her international network.Following Ring’s death, the collection was donated to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Though this decision was taken by her executors Walter Feilchenfeld and his wife Marianne Breslauer, Ring had already sold and donated to the museum and was in friendlycorrespondence with the then-keeper, Karl Parker. In Oxford the collection was celebrated as ‘of the highest quality’, without equal in Britain. When the catalogue of the museum’s German drawings was published in 1983, a portrait photograph of Ring – by her friend Breslauer – was reproduced in the book’s frontispiece.

Utilising materials from the Ashmolean archive, the Ring estate, contemporary accounts and the provenances of the donated drawings, this paper presents the first detailed exploration ofthis collection. What narratives were pursued in the construction of this dealer collection? How did it help Ring reestablish herself in exile? What motivated the gift to the Ashmolean? And what impact has this Jewish collection had on narratives presented by this Oxford museum?

Helena Cuss, Independent scholar

Roland, Browse and Delbanco on Cork Street (1945–1977): Jewish, British, Continental

In 1945 the German-Jewish refugee dealers Henry Roland and Gustav Delbanco joined forces with the English-Jewish curator Lillian Browse to open an art gallery on Mayfair’s abandoned Cork Street. Their opening exhibition – Reality and Vision in Three Centuries of English Drawing – declared their intention to become a destination for historic and contemporary British art. Simultaneously though, the gallery became a hub for London’s émigré artists through fruitful partnerships with artists of the so-called ‘Continental British School’ – most notably Josef Herman – founded on a shared Jewish cultural identity and refugee experience. The indefinably ‘Jewish’ atmosphere of the gallery also drew a new generation of art school graduates including Philip Sutton.

Over the next three decades, Roland, Browse and Delbanco synthesised these intersecting identities – British, Jewish and Continental – to occupy a unique position in London’s postwar art world, both highly assimilated and distinctly Jewish. Eschewing the international ambitions and fast-changing fashions of the postwar market, they remained resolutely grounded in their locale and their curatorial programme was inflected by each partner’s taste for the figurative forms of Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism or Expressionism, expressing their deep feeling for lyricism, humanism and nostalgia for the recent past.

This paper will trace their influence on the development of British public and privatecollections through their exhibition programme, relationships with museum directors, art teachers, collectors and artists including Kenneth Clark, Philip James, Lawrence Gowing, Peter Pears and Henry Moore, as well as the placement of art from their own personal collections at Tate, the Courtauld and the Fitzwilliam Museum.