Today I want to turn away,
very deliberately, from this assault on the civilised values I treasure and
share something uplifting for the spirit, something that speaks en passant of creative responses to war
and terror and hatred. Every generation faces the challenge of making something
beautiful, and of lasting value, in the face of the upheavals and horrors that
are always with us.
If you haven’t already seen
it, can I recommend a gem of an exhibition that’s on right now in Somerset
House on the Strand in London? It is sponsored by the Ben Uri Gallery &
Museum, and closes on 13th December, and it’s certainly worth an
hour or so of your time. I want to say a few things about it because if you do
visit it I can guarantee (I think) that you will come out of it feeling, in
several ways, blessed. It’s called ‘Out of Chaos’ and celebrates a century of
Jewish émigré life through some of the key works of the Ben Uri collection.
The Ben Uri was founded as an
arts society in Whitechapel in 1915 – so it is 100 years old and they are
celebrating that through this exhibition. In just half a dozen smallish rooms you journey
through the last century of Jewish artistic engagement with British life and
European history - and the whole of what the 20th century brought
into being, for good and ill.
At the end of the 19th
century there were already Anglo-Jewish artists here in the UK, exploring the
themes of integration and identity; and they were joined at the turn of the
century by European Jewish artists, men and women who came as immigrants to the
East End of London and wanted to preserve and record Jewish traditions and
Yiddish-speaking identities within this new environment. Out of this rich mix
there arose the so-called ‘Whitechapel Boys’ – a group of Jewish artists who
were at the cutting edge of new developments in artistic modernism. Jacob
Epstein, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg (who was also a poet, and
died aged 27 in the trenches) were responding to the artistic and technological
revolutions that were going on throughout Europe (especially in Paris), an era
which overlapped with the traumas of the First World War.
I want to share with you a couple of paintings you can find in the exhibition in the second room which focuses on the themes of this period. One is Bomberg’s Racehorses (1913)
which was met with incomprehension and hostility
when it was first seen. The Jewish Chronicle, then as now an occasional bastion of unreflective prejudices, dismissed Racehorses as ‘opposed to all that is rational in art’
because it displayed ‘horses that could
never possibly win races’. That’s true: the subject is as conventional as you
can get, but the artist strips it of conventional detail and gives you the
animals in a mechanistic whirl of frozen movement, a rush of stiff-jointed
angles; these horses haven’t got four legs they have 20 legs.
Almost like a woodcut, one
sees the influence of Cubism and Futurism, and of those famous photographs of
horses in motion by Edweard Muybridge. What Bomberg produced here, as a
precocious 22 year-old, is a dazzling avant-garde experiment in an age coming
to be dominated by machines, the spirit of which suffuses the work.
Bomberg’s work influenced
that of a second of those Whitechapel Boys. Let’s look at Mark Gertler’s Merry-Go-Round (1916).
This work – now in the Tate Britain
- was originally owned by the Ben Uri until it was sold by them in 1984 to
guarantee the gallery’s future. It was completed in the third year of the War
and captures the nightmare of the conflict: the carousel (modelled on the one
on Hampstead Heath) is frozen in motion, the fairground horses carrying
uniformed soldiers and sailors and their sweethearts whirls round and round,
the mouths of the riders wide open in an unending scream. D.H. Lawrence called
the painting ‘horrifying and terrible’ – which it is: there is horror and
terror etched into the faces of these riders caught up in a dizzying endless
circuit – and thought it ‘the best modern
picture I have seen’; and said that Gertler had given us a ‘real and ultimate
revelation’.
It stands comparison with
Picasso’s Guernica as a defiantly anti-war protest – at the beginning of the
War Gertler registered as a conscientious objector, though he tried to sign up
later but was declared medically unfit - and in some ways it strikes me as even
more powerful that Guernica because it captures the glee and helplessness with
which the participants are caught up in the action. The carousel evokes both
the jauntiness of the mood in which soldiers set off to do their bit for King
and Country, but also the machine-like mechanical nature of the conflict. The
horses’ back legs are shaped like raised rifles, the clouds are like shells
falling from the sky, the red, white and blue of the British flag glow as the
excitement of the War becomes the fearfulness of war and the whirligig jollity
merges into the frozen screams from which no-one can escape.
As Lawrence intuited,
something new is being revealed here, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the
artist was Jewish. This has always been part of the Jewish ‘mission’ – to look
into a society from the margins and offer a commentary on what is seen. This is
not always, as you can imagine, a popular position to take up. Gertler’s
painting was still unsold at the time of his death in 1939. But now we can see
that it is a masterpiece.
One of the things this
exhibition does is to remind us of the enormous contribution Jews have made
over the last 100 years to the cultural life of the nation. At a time when
issues of asylum and the UK’s role in offering a welcome to refugees is at the
forefront of the political agenda, spending time with some of the glories of
Anglo-Jewish art , often created by Jewish immigrants and émigrés, is a salutary reminder of what so-called
‘outsiders’ can offer their host nation.
Further rooms at the
exhibition offer key works by a range of British and European Jews – from
Chagall to Frank Auerbach, Jacob Epstein to R.B.Kitaj, Leon Kossof and Joseph
Herman to Max Liebermann – exploring issues of identity and migration during
the era of Nazi Germany and the post-War period. And there is some very
powerful contemporary photographs by Israeli and British Jewish artists towards
the end of the exhibition.
Let me talk about just one
work from the middle section of the exhibition, Joseph Herman’s ‘Refugees’ from
1941.
Herman was born in Warsaw in 1911 into a poor, working-class family. He
became a graphic artist and in 1938 fled the rising tide of anti-semitism –
first to Brussels and then, when the Germans invaded, he was able to get to the
UK, to Glasgow where he learned quite quickly through the Red Cross that his
entire family had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. He’d already started a series
of works on Jewish themes and these portraits of a disappearing world darkened
to include pogroms and the destruction of the Ghetto. He moved to London in 1943 where he held his
first London exhibition together with a little known Northern artist called
L.S.Lowry.
This painting, ‘Refugees’,
was thought lost for over 60 years, and was re-discovered only after his death
in 2000. It’s a haunting work and although you can see the spires of a lost
moonlit snow-bound Warsaw it evokes a much wider east European story of
displacement and exile - and is of course utterly contemporary. A family is on
the move, carrying their bedding with them: father , mother, child and baby,
their eyes wide with fear and panic. A universal story of upheaval and flight.
The threatening nature of their unknown fate is symbolised by the huge cat
squeezing the life out of the bloodied mouse. The cold indifference of the
moon’s eye, picked up in the cat’s eye, looks down on one family - which stand
for so many, then and now. It’s powerful, poignant, frightening, moving –
Herman has created a deeply human work of identification with the oppressed, a
humanistic and of course deeply Jewish portrait of suffering and exile and
loss.
This capacity for human
fellow-feeling became a dominant motif in Herman’s work: he eventually made his
home in a Welsh mining village and made his name with his dignified and
empathetic portraits of miners, which remain some of his best-known works.
There are nearly 70 works on
show, taken from the Ben Uri collection, and each one deserves its own time and
space. The Ben Uri has recently re-defined its purpose: it recognises that
these Jewish themes of identity and immigration, of forced journeys and
necessary integration, are part of a larger conversation in this country in
which the rich contribution of immigrant cultures needs to be exhibited and
celebrated. They have hosted in recent years exhibitions by African, Korean and
Caribbean artists and they have a real vision of being (though they don’t put
it this way) a source of blessing to other peoples, using the special nature of
Jewish experience to enlighten, to educate, to inspire. If you go along to
Somerset House I think you will leave this current exhibition moved and
exhilarated, humbled and inspired. Don’t miss it.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue,
London on November 14th 2105]
