Jankel Adler 1895-1949

Waddington Galleries, London.
Arnold H. Maremont, Chicago.
Jacob Schulman, Gloversville, New York.

London, Arts Council, Jankel Adler Memorial Exhibition, 1951, no. 26.
Wuppertal, Statisches Museum, Jankel Adler 1895-1949, June 1955, no. 9.
Zurich, Galerie Charles Lienhard, Jankel Adler, 1959, no. 7.
New York, Jewish Museum, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century, October 1975 - January 1976, no. 6.
Yorkshire, Manor House Art Gallery, The Constructed Space: Paintings, Sculpture and Verse commemorating the Poet W.S. Graham, April - June 1994
London, Phillips, The Ben Uri Story - from Art Society to Museum 1915-2000, January 2001, no. 3; Edinburgh, Phillips, August - September 2001.

Jankel Adler, 1895-1949, Wuppertal, Statisches Museum, 1955, p. 9, no. 9, illustrated (exhibition catalogue)
The Ben Uri Story - from Art Society to Museum 1915-2000, London, Phillips, 2001, pp. 68 and 78, no. 3, illustrated(exhibition catalogue)

Overall surface is in good condition. Work has been lined. There is some scattered hairline craquelure. Small spots of retouching are apparent (2 on bottom edge, 1 on the edge of the top left corner, 1 on the top of the left edge and 2 on the left of top edge) when viewed under UV light.
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Born in Lodz, Poland in 1895, Adler moved to Germany in 1913 where he established himself as a significant force in German painting of the 1920s, participating in every important Expressionist show. His studies with Gustav Wiethuechter, at the School of Arts and Crafts in Barmen influenced his persistent interest in the technique of painting and the exploration of new textures. He was also greatly influenced by Picasso and Klee, with whom he taught at the Düsseldorf Staatlich Kunstakademie and shared an adjoining studio. In 1933 he was forced to leave Germany and, after wandering through France, Poland, the Balkans and Spain, he finally settled in Glasgow in 1941, and then in London in 1943, where he exerted a major influence on postwar British painting.

Two Figures from 1944, the present lot, can be seen as the artist's reaction to the Holocaust as well as a reflection on his Hassidic Jewish past and how it correlates to his life as a modern artist.

Discussing Adler's work from this period Edouard Roditi writes: "...it was after 1940, in war-time Scotland, that [Adler] attained full maturity. Increasingly personal and creative in his philosophy, he now managed to fuse subject-matter, composition, draftsmanship, texture and color-harmonies in a single artistic phenomenon that fully expresses his unique personality. Like ideograms, Adler's figures no longer represent individuals or tell an anecdote, but signify basic human types. During the war years and after 1945, Adler thus began to exert, on younger English painters, Gentiles and Jews alike, a rare spiritual and artistic influence." (Edouard Roditi in "The Jewish Artist in the Modern World", Jewish Art: An Illustrated History (Cecil Roth, ed.), Tel Aviv, 1961, p. 289).