Cosmopolis: Refugee Art Dealers in Twentieth-Century London

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Ben Uri Gallery is delighted to announce the upcoming exhibition Cosmopolis: Refugee Art Dealers in Twentieth-Century London. Following the rise of Nazism and chaos of global warfare in the 1930s and 1940s, over 50 art dealers, largely but not exclusively Jewish, were driven out of Continental Europe to seek refuge in Britain. Settling in London, they infiltrated existing British art networks and formed an important part of the artistic émigré network, working in existing galleries, as well as founding new ones. Their presence had a disruptive effect on the insular British art world of the 1930s, and over three decades they played a major, but still largely unacknowledged, role in transforming London from ‘artistic backwater’ to a world art capital to rival New York and Paris. This exhibition offers an episodic history, telling stories of selected individual art dealers, the artists they promoted, and the spaces they created for artistic exchange and dissemination. It also reflects on how their own experience of forced migration influenced their professional decisions and choices.

Focusing on the three decades from 1933 to the early 1960s, the exhibition identifies four key areas of activity or impact: the introduction of German modernism to a largely indifferent and Francophile British public (Carl Braunschweig and Alfred Flechtheim); the opening of new galleries and sustaining of Britain’s émigré artists in the culturally deprived but reckless atmosphere of the Blitz (Jack Bilbo, William Ohly, Lea Bondi and Paul Wengraf); the postwar rebuilding of London’s devastated art market in on an international footing (Erica Brausen, Gimpel Fils and Marlborough Fine Art); and the art dealer as philanthropist, supporting artists outside of the commercial gallery space (Henry Roland and Gustav Delbanco, Halima Nalecz and Mateusz Grabowski). Underpinning each story is the tireless networking and forging of personal relationships undertaken by refugee dealers, rendering them more visible in the structures of the art world and art history.

Many of these individuals were behind the careers of many of Britain’s most important and revered modern artists, as well as providing early support for artists arriving from the British Commonwealth in the wake of the 1948 British Nationality Act. Loan artists from both public and private collections include: Kenneth Armitage, Kofi Antubam, Frank Auerbach, Sandra Blow, Avinash Chandra, Alan Davie, John Heartfield, Paul Klee, Lucian Freud and Aubrey Williams. Ben Uri collection artists include Josef Herman, Peter Laszlo Peri, Kurt Schwitters, Willy Tirr and Katerina Wilczynski.

A fully illustrated online publication and series of events will accompany the exhibition.