Introduction
B
etween 1933 and 1945, whether for
religious, political or artistic reasons,
over 300 painters, sculptors and graphic
artists fled into exile or immigrated
to Great Britain from Nazi Germany. Following
the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German
Chancellor in January 1933, the introduction of
anti-Semitic legislation and the foundation of
the Reichskulturkammer (the Reich Chamber of
Culture) – to which all professional artists and
designers had to belong – Jews, Communists, Social
Democrats and ‘avant-garde’ artists were effectively
banned from working in Germany.
This exhibition, ‘Finchleystraße’: German artists
in exile in Great Britain and Beyond, 1933–45
brings together paintings, drawings and graphics
by a number of primarily German-Jewish artists
who made these ‘forced journeys’, mostly to Great
Britain, but also further afield – to Australia, China,
Palestine and the United States – during this era.
There are two notable exceptions: Max Liebermann,
the celebrated German Impressionist, who did not
leave Germany but was forced to resign as Head
of the Prussian Academy. His experience however
shows the early consequences of the Nazi regime; and
Oskar Kokoschka, Austria’s best-known Expressionist
artist, who was neither German nor Jewish, but
whose defence of Liebermann first brought him into
opposition with the Nazi authorities. As a teacher,
Kokoschka had nurtured many other artists’ careers
(including that of Hilde Goldschmidt), and was at
the heart of the German-speaking émigré network in
England during the Second World War.
Other featured refugees include Frank Auerbach
and Lucian Freud, among Britain’s most respected
and best-known artists today, but the exhibition also
includes many lesser-known figures, whose fractured
careers and loss of reputation often resulted from
their forced migrations, some travelling through
more than one country of transit, often leaving art
works and family behind.
The exhibits have been drawn principally from
the Ben Uri Collection – indeed, Ben Uri’s own
exhibiting culture changed profoundly in this
period, in response to what Chairman Israel Sieff
termed the ‘Nazi philosophy’, with German names
dominating exhibitions from the 1930s onwards,
and often entering the collection both then and in
subsequent decades. These works are supplemented
by important external loans from private lenders,
supported by archival material and oral testimonies
from three generations of German migrants
(available on iPads).
The exhibition seeks to unfold a number of
exile narratives, arising from both the artists’ own
biographies and the work that they produced,
mostly post-migration, although Ludwig Meidner’s
Expressionistic Portrait of a Girl (1921), and Dodo’s
Finchleystraße 9