JANKEL ADLER
A ‘Degenerate’ Artist in Britain 1940-1949
Private View, Tuesday 4 June
6.30–8.30pm
at Ben Uri, 108a Boundary Road, NW8 0RH

You are invited to the private view at Ben Uri for the first museum exhibition of Jankel Adler's works in Britain since the Arts Council memorial show in 1951.

The exhibition will be opened by Annemarie Heibel, author of the recent Catalogue Raisonné of the artist. 

It is presented on the seventieth anniversary of his death, co-curated by Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall of the Ben Uri Research Unit for the Study of the Jewish and Immigrant Contribution to the Visual Arts in Britain since 1900 (BURU). 
 

RSVP: admin@benuri.org.uk

Born into a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland, in 1895, Adler was a key participant in the development of 20th-century European modern and avant-garde art.

Jankel Adler: Mother and Child, 1941, Oil and sand on board,
Private Collection © DACS 2019

Like Paul Klee, he fled Germany in 1933. In Paris, Adler joined Atelier 17 under the tutelage of Stanley William Hayter and met and befriended Picasso. Adler’s relationships with Klee and Picasso were pivotal; both considered him a driving force of modernism. 

In 1943 he moved to London where he befriended fellow German émigrés, including Kurt Schwitters, and English artists including Julian Trevelyan.

Between 1943 and his death in 1949, Adler was exhibited in London at the Redfern Gallery, Gimpel Fils and the Anglo-French Centre, as well as in the Waddington Galleries, Dublin; Galerie de France, Paris; Bezalel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Knoedler Galleries, New York.
Adler died from a heart attack in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, on 25 April 1949.

Ben Uri’s snapshot survey addresses Adler’s nine influential years in Britain with a range of paintings and works on paper which ably represent his diversity and creativity.

This exhibition follows an expansive survey at the Von Der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, Germany last year, to which Ben Uri lent work and wrote extensively for the catalogue. 
 
Exhibition open daily 11am to 5pm from 3 to 16 June and the following four Mondays 17 and 24 June and 1 and 8 July. Also by prior appointment. Free admission.