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David Bomberg’s ‘Englishwoman’ |
Home wanted for
brilliant artists
As it opens an Aladdin’s cave
of rarely seen art treasures, the Ben Uri Gallery is calling for help to house paintings in its collection,
writes Dan Carrier
THE paintings are by some of the finest artists Britain has produced in modern times and span nearly 100 years, but they have rarely been displayed and appreciated – until now.
The Ben Uri Gallery, the oldest Jewish cultural centre in the UK, has more than 1,000 pieces: a vast stock of work collected over the years. But, because of space, they spend much of the time either in storage or on loan to other galleries.
Now the Aladdin’s cave at the gallery in Swiss Cottage is the subject of a new exhibition called Hidden and Homeless – highlights of the Ben Uri Collection 1938-1998.
The gallery, also known as the London Jewish Museum of Art, was established in 1915 in the East End. It aimed to provide help for the area’s artists and craftsmen who were battling to create works while faced with poverty, anti-semitism and a dislocation from English cultural movements. It was first funded by a Lithuanian designer called Lazar Berson, and named the Ben Uri gallery after Bezalel Ben Uri, the craftsman who built the biblical Ark of the Covenant that held the stones on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed.
Berson’s early aims were noted as “...forming a permanent collection of works by Jewish artists that would enrich and ennoble the Jewish population” and to “offer a platform for Jewish artists, home and émigré to exhibit.”
It has succeeded: they have collated the largest body of work by Anglo- Jewish artists, and the exhibition aims to reveal a tantalising glimpse of what the gallery holds.
Hidden and Homeless includes works by the Berlin street scene painter Lesser Ury, Yankel Adler, who arrived in Glasgow in 1941, and David Bomberg.
But the Hidden and Homeless theme is a call for help: the Ben Uri gallery has more than 1,000 works kept in permanent storage because of the lack of space.
Operations director Suzanne Lewis said they hope by making the sheer scale of their collection apparent they will raise funds to enlarge their home. It currently sits on two floors in a shop in Boundary Road – a gallery that is far too small to do justice to such an exciting body of “homeless” art.
• The Hidden and Homeless exhibition is at the Ben Uri Gallery, 108a Boundary Road, St Johns Wood, NW8, until March 23.
020 7604 3991. www.benuri.org.uk/
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