‘MEINE HEIMAT IS IN MY HEART AND MY HEAD’: WOMEN ARTISTS IN EXILE: SUSAN EINZIG (1922–2009) AND EVA FRANKFURTHER (1930–1959) SARAH MACDOUGALL
EXTRACT FROM This is the full, original essay. DATE 2014. SOURCE This paper was given at the Triennial International Conference of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, IGRS, University of London, 17-19 September 2014, and published in eds., C. Brinson, J. B. Buresova and A. Hammel, Exile and Gender II: Politics, Education and the Arts, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Vol. 18 (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2017).
‘Meine Heimat is in my heart and my head’: Women artists in exile: Susan Einzig (1922–2009) and Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Sarah MacDougall This paper explores the story of two women artists in exile in Britain from the younger generation of ‘Hitler émigrés’: Susan Einzig (1922– 2009) and Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959), both German Jews exiled from their native land as children, whose careers, in contrast to those of the older generation, were forged in their new host country. The profound dislocation they experienced as a result of exile, particularly around the loss of German national identity (and the implicit Enlightenment notions of Kultur and Bildung, which should have been their natural inheritance), had equally profound implications for both their lives and their work, affecting their artistic practice, choice of subject-matter and subsequent modes of living, despite their ultimately divergent individual paths. Moreover, they had also to negotiate these identities within both the wider debates of postwar British art, and within a climate in which the odds remained stacked against women, who were still expected to follow the usual path of marriage and motherhood – Frankfurther’s art school contemporary Sheila Fell (1931–1979), was warned early on that there was no future in art, especially for a woman.1 Yet Einzig and Frankfurther chose bravely to ignore these restrictions and to operate both personally and professionally outside conventional expectations, attempting to reconcile (with varying degrees of success) the fracture of their early loss with the realisation of their artistic ambitions against the austere backdrop of the postwar world. Susan (originally Suzanne) Einzig (in 1922) and Eva Frankfurther, eight years later (in 1930), were both born into comfortable, cultured, assimilated German-Jewish families in the Dahlem district of south-western Berlin:2 both families had strong cultural leanings towards music, literature, and the visual arts. Einzig recalled her father, Bernhard, introducing her to Berenson on the Renaissance – just one of the many books that lined his Herrenzimmer;3 an art-lover, he also bought pictures including a Max Liebermann (1847–1935), and was a regular operagoer, a Wagnerian, who enthusiastically followed the score from his libretto. Susan called him 1
‘a product of the 19th Century’ in which Germany had been ‘considered the centre of civilisation, of liberalism’; this, and the cultural milieu of the Weimar Republic that defined ‘his world’, were, she recalled, shattered by the rise of Hitler.4 Frankfurther had a similar background. Her father, Paul, was a talented amateur musician and composer, while her mother, Henriette, an economics graduate, who died of cancer only 18 months after Eva’s birth, had strong leanings towards the visual arts. Paul remarried in 1934 and his new wife, Nina, who shared the family passion for music, became a caring stepmother (‘Mutti’) to Eva and her two siblings. Despite the shadow of rising National Socialism, the Frankfurther children were shielded by a large close-knit circle of family and friends, and able to enjoy an early childhood relatively untroubled by the wider political situation.5 Einzig however, was old enough to recall attending the state Lyzeum before (following Hitler’s succession to power in 1933 and the subsequent enabling laws), Jewish students were first isolated within and then excluded from the official education system. ‘From there on’, she recalled, ‘things became harrowing, gradually more and more’.6 Forced out of school at the age of 15 and having already developed an interest in illustration, she enrolled in the private Breuer School of Design,7 encouraged by her father, who had commercial ambitions for her in fashion design. Einzig described herself as having no talent in this direction, but she did learn to draw and also loosed her imagination inventing illustrations for stories she had read.8 With the terrible events of Kristallnacht in November 1938 however, ‘all hell broke loose’:9 six months later, on the eve of war, she fled to England on one of the final Kindertransports, a label around her neck. She was sponsored by friends of her parents, German-Jewish neighbours who had already escaped.10 Her parents however, remained behind and although her mother, Eugenie, eventually escaped, her father subsequently perished in a concentration camp. The Frankfurther family was similarly divided: the children sent on alone to England in April to a school in Haslemere, Surrey, set up by a group of refugee teachers for refugee children, where they stayed for a year.11 Their parents followed on one of the last flights out of Germany in August 1939, three days before the outbreak of hostilities.12 In December 1941 the family was able to rent a flat in a 2
house in NW London owned by the Freud family, which also housed other mainly German-Jewish refugees.13 Indeed such was the concentration of émigrés in this area that they formed their own community and informal support network (which Frankfurther would later lose when, seeking personal and artistic independence, she went to live among a different community). A short time later, to escape the worst of the air-raids Eva and her sister Beate (two years her senior) were evacuated to Hertfordshire for four years – a further disruption in their young lives. Einzig’s war experience was similarly marked by a series of significant ruptures. Initially, she lived with her adopted family, the Goldschmidts, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, signing on with the Central School of Art. When it closed shortly afterwards because of the war, she moved with her adopted family to Yorkshire to escape the Blitz. However, after an amalgamation of the remaining art schools opened in Northampton under the banner of the London Art School, an ‘absolutely ecstatic’ Einzig moved there too, living ‘in digs’ for three years while she studied14 under a number of distinguished older artists, including Bernard Adeney and his wife Noel, Bernard Meninsky, William Roberts, John Farleigh, Gertrude Hermes and Morris Kestelman.15 Not only did she find this experience culturally ‘nourishing’, but among this close-knit group she gained admittance into the first of a number of small, supplementary family units. 16 On her return to London in 1942, Einzig was conscripted into war work, initially in an aircraft factory,17 an experience she described as ‘a complete nightmare’: suddenly separated from everything she loved, she wrote, it seemed that her ‘life [had] ended’.18 This experience of what she called ‘forced labour’ also politicised her; already a pacifist, she now became a confirmed Socialist. When she was sacked from this post, she obtained work through the influential German-Jewish graphic designer F H K Henrion (1914–1990),19 who after a brief internment, had been employed by the Ministry of Information, where he created a series of bold and visually compelling war posters. Henrion was one of a talented cohort of émigré designers and typographers (the others include George Him (1900–1981, represented in the Ben Uri Collection), Hans Schleger (1898–1976), Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) and Berthold Wolpe (1905–1989)) whose vital contribution radically altered the face of design in Britain during this period. Henrion also designed two of the pavilions (‘Agriculture’ and ‘The Country’) for the 3
1951 Festival of Britain, which notably included émigré participants. Their examples must have encouraged Einzig to continue within the graphic tradition, albeit on a different path. Probably through Henrion, she also became a member of the left-wing Artists International Association, and briefly obtained a research post assisting the English Jewish designer, Abram Games (1914–1996, represented in the Ben Uri Collection), 20 who also created a series of classic posters for the War Office and afterwards became one of the best-known names in British design. It was through Henrion that Einzig was also introduced to the painter and art teacher Carel Weight (1908–1997), and his partner Helen Roeder (1909–1999),21 and taken under their wing. As Secretary of the Artists’ Refugee Committee,22 Roeder helped a number of émigré artists both during and after the war and campaigned for the end of internment. She was also then private secretary to the highly influential Kenneth Clark, “K” – Director of the National Gallery (1934–45), Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (1934–44), and briefly in the Ministry of Information. Clark found Einzig a job with a film company in Mayfair (and later guaranteed her naturalisation papers), but she called the post ‘an unqualified disaster’. Eventually, she completed her war work in another factory near Victoria making dials for tanks.23 From Einzig’s account in a full, frank and moving interview conducted towards the end of her life by Marian Malet for the Association of Jewish Refugees project ‘Refugee Voices’, a more nuanced picture emerges than that given in official potted biographies. From this it is clear that, as a result of her profound early dislocation, Einzig found it impossible to experience any sense of belonging except in artistic circles and usually among small, close-knit alternative ‘family’ groups, where she found empathy and ‘cultural nourishment’. Her disastrous war work experiences seem to have resulted from this renewed separation from a ‘family’ environment and to have reinforced her sense of being an outsider – until eventually she declared herself suicidal and the factory released her just days before the end of the war. Einzig, who had always continued her own work at night, then commenced her freelance career, lugging her portfolio around advertising studios before finding work as an illustrator. During the war she had briefly exhibited with The London Group: in The Sixth Wartime Exhibition in autumn 1944 (her first name is listed retaining the German 4
spelling, ‘Suzanne’, as it is on the earliest books she illustrated). Towards the end of the war however, she met and worked with the forward-looking publisher Noel Carrington, the originator of Puffin Books. For her first commission to illustrate Norah Pulling’s Mary Belinda and the Ten Aunts (1945) Einzig produced lithographed plates in double-page spreads alternating monochrome and full colour; followed by Miss Richards’ Mouse (1948). After the war, Einzig recalled with characteristic modesty, ‘There was an upsurge in work and no one to do it, […] I didn’t feel that I could do it either but I was on the crest of a wave of optimism’.24 The influx of refugee book publishers from Central Europe, who brought with them and disseminated a distinct culture of beautiful, illustrated books, greatly enriched this period with significant graphic creativity, and Einzig became part of this renaissance.25 The following year, Einzig was commissioned to illustrate Edward Moerike’s classic Mozart on the Way to Prague by Londonbased children’s book publisher David Gottlieb, who had launched the dual publishing imprints of John Westhouse and Peter Lunn during the war and was himself a German-Jewish émigré.26 Nevertheless, the commission probably came about through Einzig’s English contacts (either the designer Robert Harling or the artist John Minton, whom she met in this period). Identity remained a complex issue for Einzig. She disliked ‘being pigeonholed’ as a Jewish artist and never exhibited within this context. In a preview of an unusual touring exhibition called the Story of Wool which opened at Charing Cross Station, district branch, in September 1946, and to which she contributed ‘a series of lively black and white drawings’,27 she was described simply as ‘a young Central European refugee’, with no reference to her Jewish origins.28 By contrast, Frankfurther (whose work entered the Ben Uri Collection posthumously) exhibited at the Ben Uri Gallery’s Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists in 1956, alongside a number of émigré contemporaries including Frank Auerbach (b. 1931, represented in the Ben Uri Collection) and Josef Herman (1911-2000, represented in the Ben Uri Collection). In this period, Einzig also began teaching at Camberwell School of Art, and it was here that she entered the orbit of the ‘charismatic, charming and generous but also melancholic and selfdestructive’ Minton.29 Invalided out of the army in 1943, Minton had seven one-man shows between 1945 and 1956 and had just begun to 5
achieve fame with his Neo-Romantic work before committing suicide in 1957. Einzig attributed the popularity of this nostalgic movement to the fact that during the war ‘England was so isolated […] that it turned in on itself and […] the young artists […] went back for their influence to […] William Blake, and Samuel Palmer and Englishness’.30 This was clearly not Einzig’s milieu but through Minton she would, for a time, become closely associated with it; and her illustrative style was initially much influenced by Minton’s. For several years Einzig was closely associated with Minton’s social, as well as artistic circle, haunting London’s Soho bars, particularly the infamous Colony Room and Gargoyle Club. Eventually, she realised how destructive this lifestyle was and made the brave decision to forge her own identity by choosing to have a child outside of marriage. Looking back, she explained, that with the Second World War having just ended and the Korean War (1950–53) having just begun, she felt the need for positive action: ‘I wanted to give life […] I needed to anchor myself to some reality’. Her daughter Henrietta was born in 1954; her son, Mark, in 1961. Einzig later used a similar analogy to describe the inspiration of her work, commenting, ‘I can only develop images which have their roots in experienced reality’. In 1946, Eva Frankfurther began her artistic training at St Martin’s School of Art at the age of 16, in the era of postwar austerity. A Self-portrait with Plait (1946, Private Collection) shows a wistfulness soon ruthlessly expunged from her work and from her later, more expressionistic self-portraits. Under the ‘semi-academic’ regime at St Martin’s she studied anatomy, life drawing and painting from the model underpinned by a rigid exam framework. Among her classmates was Frankfurther’s fellow Jewish classmate Frank Auerbach (another Berlin refugee), who found more satisfaction at David Bomberg’s less restrictive Borough classes. Auerbach, another assimilated Jewish middle-class Berliner, who recalled the ‘frantic coddling’ of his early childhood,31 learned in this postwar period that he was an orphan. ‘Years would pass’ Robert Hughes has observed, ‘before he would speak of his parents to anyone’.32 It is impossible not to view Auerbach’s rootedness – he has occupied the same studio for 60 years and constantly reworks the same subject matter – a series of local landmarks and a ‘family’ of sitters – as at least in part a reaction to his own displacement. Significantly, however, Auerbach’s loss could also be viewed as freeing him from the need to connect with and take on 6
board the German cultural heritage that so haunted Frankfurther and Einzig. During this formative period, Frankfurther evolved the concentration on people and on portraiture that afterwards became central to her practice. Never without a sketchbook, she made hundreds of vivid life sketches. She had an ‘astonishing memory for people’s faces and the unspoken language of their bodily attitudes’,33 were often captured in a few telling lines. A fearless traveler she made (and selffunded) many trips to the United States, continental Europe and latterly Israel, in her short life. Wherever she was she painted people: pilgrims, beggars and children; seeking local colour in the working-class districts. On one trip to the States after learning of segregation,34 she made a point of visiting the black-American population of Harlem, laying the foundation for her interest in depicting ethnic minorities.35 But these were merely refinements of a subject that she had already fixed upon: ‘Always, wherever she was, she drew and painted […] people: ordinary, working people’,36 putting the lives of others at the centre of her art. Upon her return to London, Frankfurther was already disillusioned by the London art scene, then riven by endless debates over abstraction versus figuration. The modern, existential figurative aesthetic favoured by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud contrasted with the politically aware social realism espoused by a number of strong individual painters including L S Lowry and Josef Herman. The latter attracted the attention of the critic John Berger, who organized exhibitions of their work under this banner, but the label was Berger’s and not their own and these painters never worked together as a homogenous group.37 Though choosing her own path, Frankfurther worked unconsciously within this tradition. Determined to earn her living by non-artistic means to support herself as a painter, she became a counter hand and washer-up at Lyons Corner House in autumn 1951 working the evening shift to concentrate on painting during the day. The physical work, long hours and noisy, busy atmosphere provided a helpful contrast to the solitary, searching, introspective studio experience. Even more importantly, Lyons provided her with ‘boundless material in the way of human beings’38 – enough to people her work for the next five years.
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Many of her fellow workers had been recruited from the new immigrant populations, so that this body of Frankfurther’s work has a documentary value recording the changing face of a new multicultural Britain. ‘West Indian, Irish, Cypriot and Pakistani immigrants, English whom the Welfare State had passed by, these were the people amongst whom I lived and made some of my best friends,’ she wrote. Employing loose brushwork and dry paint in a restricted palette, sparingly applied, she focuses on faces and postures in both single and small group portraits of chefs, waitresses, porters, cleaners and ‘characters’: playing cards, reading the paper, eating dinner, drinking tea, grasping mops, wringing out cloths; resting, or simply sleeping from exhaustion. They are observed with empathy and afforded dignity, but rarely smile or engage with the viewer simply allowing us to observe them. Although clearly individuals, they also serve as archetypes. Frankfurther made particular friends among the West Indian ‘Windrush’ generation, and there are many studies of her friend Catherine, often depicted with her young daughter, Helen, in mother and child tableau including Couple with Infant (c. 1956, Private Collection). Jutta Vinzent has suggested that Frankfurther’s depictions of the black community were both ‘a way of the refugee artist identifying with the Other as Other, but also to distance herself from such “otherness”’,39 but Frankfurther’s affirmative warm, palette used to evoke a feminine, feminized, and homely interior, I think, challenges this notion. Frankfurther also foregrounded women in her art, and the portrayal of Catherine contrasts with that of the ‘Lonely Londoner’40 in Black Man Seated (Private Collection) the classic impoverished, marginalized outsider for whom the walls of his bedsit are a prison. Indeed, the theme of the outsider pervades European postwar culture from Sartre, Camus and Beckett to Colin Wilson, whose non-fiction study of the same name, was published to great controversy in 1956. In 1952 Frankfurther moved from the comfort of the family home in Hampstead to a damp basement lodging in Whitechapel, determined to live independently and off her own meagre earnings.41 This decision however cut her off from the informal émigré network in N W London, compounding her isolation from her cultural roots. Her further decision to also exhibit outside the mainstream, primarily at the East End Academy at the Whitechapel Art Gallery between 1952 and 1957, and occasionally at the Bethnal Green Museum, necessarily 8
limited the audience for her work and meant that she also worked without the support of a peer group or network. These exhibitions were open, ‘without selection, to all from teen-agers to pensioners, who live or work in the East End’,42 and Frankfurther’s work as a trained painter stood out among them. The art critic and BBC broadcaster, Mervyn Levy43 consistently highlighted her work, describing her ‘Whitechapel Diary’ as displaying ‘remarkable insight into the character and destiny of her fellow men’. In it she brings the East End to life: mothers and children, market-stall holders and traders, barrow boys and old men queue, barter, buy and sell flowers, newspapers, fish and bread. In cramped interiors in the back streets, workers iron, sew, roll pastry, empty ovens, mop floors; young boxers fight their way out of the ghetto. In her paintings a cast of stoical characters, observed without sentiment against a spare background in a muted palette, conjure up the drab, grimy atmosphere of postwar London. This was not Frankfurther’s world, but she made it her own and her social conscience is also notable in compositions including Homeless (1954, Private Collection) and Newspaper Seller (c. 1955, Private Collection), where the old woman, waiting patiently with her bundle, is heroic in her endurance. These figures are not glorified by their labours but defined by them and by the ‘stark struggle’ of their daily lives.44 By the 1950s the East End was no longer a predominantly Jewish area but home to a mixed population, including an historic Irish community, also captured by Frankfurther: Woman with Two Children (Private Collection) as the Tablet noted, Frankfurther’s portraits, ‘always penetrating’, could be ‘both ruthless and delicate’.45 Further, in works such as Stateless Person (Private Collection) Frankfurther poignantly captures this sense of dislocation through ‘the predicament of the modern refugee; the politically displaced one, homeless and stateless’.46 Uprooted, displaced and dispossessed, emerging from mud-brown backgrounds, her refugees articulate the exilic experience within the postwar legacy. In this, Frankfurther’s work was instinctively more in keeping with the German Expressionist tradition prevalent among many German émigré painters of an older generation, but unlike them, she chose not to portray her own life but the lives of others. Her sympathy for women and children also recalls the work of Käthe Kollwitz, one of her favourite artists. Her portraits, as Frank Whitford later observed, are ‘concerned more with the inner lives of their sitters 9
than with their physical appearance. Their inner lives have been shaped by pain, changed by dark circumstances’.47 Many of the older generation of women émigré painters in Britain espoused this Expressionist style including Else Meidner (1901–1987), a former pupil of her husband Ludwig Meidner (1884– 1966), who felt her own career restricted by his greater fame, her own ambition, their difficult marriage, and separation during his internment. Afterwards their marriage broke down and he returned to renewed fame in his native Germany, while Else’s career in England faded into obscurity. Similarly, Hilde Hamann (1896–1987), a talented Breslauborn painter who had studied widely including under Léger in Paris, and exhibited critically-acclaimed work in the manner of Paula Modersohn-Becker, found her painting career terminated after restricting it to help her husband, Paul, and to raise their children, then, when in London, for economic reasons at the outbreak of war.48 Hamann’s early works are lost and later ones difficult to trace and it is difficult to disagree with an earlier assessment that her life story and career typify that of both the female artist in the last century and that of the émigré. However, by contrast, Bettina Ehrlich (1903–1985), wife of the well-known Austrian émigré sculptor, Georg Ehrlich (1897–1966), successfully launched her own career as an author and illustrator of children’s books during wartime exile. Using her first name ‘Bettina’ as a pen name, she wrote and illustrated her first children’s book, PooTsee, the Water Tortoise, in 1943, going on to write and illustrate more than 20 books for children.49 She also continued to assist her husband with his career. If Hilde Hamann’s story was more typical, Bettina’s, while taking nothing from her achievements, had the support – emotional and financial – of a happy, stable marriage. Frankfurther and Einzig had each to negotiate their chosen paths without these vital supports. Frankfurther’s focus on the mother-and-child image also links her back to her German heritage: during the war the child had often been used as a symbol of hope in the work of émigré artists ranging from Max Beckman (1884–1950) to Fred Uhlman (1901–1985), particularly during internment. This motif was widely evoked as an emotive image of suffering, particularly by Kollwitz, whose First World War memorial profoundly influenced the next generation of émigrés, among them painter Josef Herman and sculptor Ernst Müller-Blensdorf (1896–1976); but also used as a symbol of destruction and loss (see 10
Herman’s Memory of a Pogrom (1941, private collection)). In Frankfurther’s work however this trope is gendered – men, when included, are always marginal figures – her sympathy is with the women, particularly mothers: heroic, patient, enduring, but also nurturing. In 1957, needing a break and seeking new artistic hunting grounds, Frankfurther accepted invitations from friends and several family members (also German refugees) to spend eight months in Israel. There she experienced conflicting emotions. She loved the light, open landscape but strongly disliked its militarism. Although she appreciated the hospitality of friends and family, she longed for privacy and time alone with her work, much of which was stolen despite being misunderstood. The locals, she told her father, disliked her work because it was ‘sad’; the German expressionism which characterised it was then highly unfashionable, perhaps seen as a throwback to an earlier age and, her sister believes, at odds with the then current ethos to symbolise a strong, hopeful, youthful nation. 50 She had already planned to return to London, though dreading its ‘dirty grey’ skies. Once there, faced with another cold, drab winter and completely uncertain of her future (she had applied to become a social worker at LSE and was posthumously accepted), she succumbed to a deep depression, taking her own life in January 1959. Bravely and restlessly searching, living among one established but changing community, and working among another newly arrived, Frankfurther had been closely affiliated to both, but perhaps truly at home in neither. Her instinctive sympathy for workers, immigrants, and other people on the margins, is probably due at least in part to her own experience as a German-Jewish exile and an outsider; her sympathy for women to an acknowledgment of a shared fate. Shortly before Frankfurther’s death, Einzig received the commission for what remains her best-known work, her evocative illustrations to the children’s book Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, published in 1958 (under the anglicised spelling of her name ‘Susan’) and earning her the National Book League’s Illustration prize. This celebrated story, a narrative of love and loss, slips between fantasy and reality as the protagonist, Tom, attempts to lay to rest the ghosts of the past. Einzig is known to have visited Pearce and made careful notes in her preparation for this work, but it is hard not to recall the lost Eden 11
of her Dahlem childhood – a three-storey house, surrounded by a large tree-filled garden, where the gardener still cut the grass with a scythe – haunting these images. Beyond Einzig’s illustrative career, in her late paintings, a landscape motif of a path winding up and away between trees often recurs, sometimes two figures are included walking towards or away from us. As Frances Spalding and Hetty Einzig have observed, it is difficult not to interpret this motif as ‘as a return’, whether conscious or unconscious ‘to the core themes carried over from her childhood; attachment, separation and loss’.51 It could be observed of both Frankfurther and Einzig (as has been suggested of Herman’s generation of Polish émigrés) that they were both ‘rooted in a European culture more emotionally generous, more learned and more concerned with meaning than the one they found here’.52 Einzig, in later years, found recognition through her work as an illustrator, and satisfaction as a teacher helping to nurture the next generation (Frankfurther had also trained as a schoolteacher, but ultimately decided it was a profession for which she was temperamentally unsuited). In old age Einzig recognized the profound duality with which the exilic experience had left her: conscious of the loss of the wider Central European culture destroyed by the Nazi era, she had to painfully renegotiate her own identity, concluding ultimately that she was European,53 rather than German, English, or even Jewish. Having rooted herself primarily not through her work but through the creation of her own family, she could remark with satisfaction of her daughter, ‘I have achieved what I wanted which is, that she is English, she belongs into this society’. At the termination of her remarkable AJR interview, Einzig was asked whether she felt anywhere was her ‘Heimat’ (the concept of a physical and cultural homeland): ‘Not really, no’, she said. ‘But I feel, to copy Lucian Freud: “We are here because we are here because we are here”. I’m here.’ She continued, ‘I think, meine Heimat is in my heart and my head. I have no deep sense of belonging although I have two …’, here beginning to utter the words ‘countries’, she broke off and instead, said ‘two cultures […]’. These words could equally be applied to Eva Frankfurther and indeed the majority of exiled artists in exile in Britain in this crucial period – their careers, their art and their lives cleaved by their early enforced separation from the culture and country to which they belonged, causing a disruption which could never be fully repaired. 12
© Sarah MacDougall 2014/2021 Extract from: given in full Date: 2014 (revised 2021) Source: This paper was given at the Triennial International Conference of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, IGRS, University of London, 17-19 September 2014, organised by Professor Charmian Brinson (Imperial) and Dr Andrea Hammel (Aberysywyth) and published in eds., C. Brinson, J. B. Buresova and A. Hammel, Exile and Gender II: Politics, Education and the Arts, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Vol. 18 (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2017)
Notes Acknowledgments: I would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of Hetty Einzig and Beate Planskoy for interviews, access to family archives and permission to cite unpublished material. I would also like to thank Marian Malet for access to her interview with Susan Einzig. 1
Cate Haste, Sheila Fell (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2010), p. 15. Einzig remembered a gardener; the Frankfurthers had a chauffeur. 3 Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. 4 Susan Einzig, “Refugee Voices”: transcript of Interview by Association of Jewish Refugees”, the AJR Audio-Visual History Collection, tape 120, conducted by Marian Malet, 23 March 2006. 5 They were thus confined to an entirely Jewish environment after the Nazis began a policy of segregating and isolating Jewish children from state schools prompting the establishment of many Jewish schools. 6 Einzig, op. cit. 7 The school was run by a Bauhaus-trained artist. 8 Einzig, op. cit. 9 Ibid. 10 Julia Eccleshare, “Susan Einizg”, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2013. 11 The children were forced to pick up English quickly, soon becoming bilingual. Although they often later spoke (and wrote) German to their parents, they never did so during the war. 2
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Shulamith Behr and Sander L Gilman, “An Introduction”, Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain, c. 1933-1945 (London: Ben Uri, 2009), eds. Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson, p. 15. 13 Lucie Freud had been a school friend of Eva’s mother and she and her husband, Ernst, were very helpful to the Frankfurther family after their arrival in London. The other inhabitants also included a Norwegian sea captain. Paul Frankfurther remained living at the house for the rest of his life. 14 Einzig, op. cit. 15 Kestelman (1905–1998) was born of Jewish Eastern European immigrant parents and grew up in the East End. He has been described as ‘always [standing] well outside English tradition and […] best described as a true European both as an artist and a person’ (Agi Katz, Independent, 18 June 1998). He was also commissioned by Noel Carrington in 1937 as an illustrator and was a member of The London Group. 16 Eccleshare, op. cit. 17 There are some discrepancies between the official and unofficial accounts of what happened next and the exact sequence of events. 18 In a family memoir Einzig wrote of what she called the ‘forced labour’, recalling ‘I felt heart rending compassion for all those masses of people forced to spend their lives doing work of soul-destroying repetitiveness. It politicized me and confirmed me as a socialist’ (cited Eccleshare, op. cit.). 19 Einzig, op. cit. 20 Ibid. 21 Roeder was born in Richmond, Surrey to a German father; she and Weight bonded over their shared German parentage. 22 Henrion was also active in the Artists’ International Association, set up in 1933 to promote the ‘Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development’, supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and also helping resettle artists displaced by the Nazi regime. 23 Einzig, op. cit. 24 Martin Salisbury, “Susan Einzig”, obituary, The Guardian, December 2009. 25 See Frances Spalding and Hetty Einzig, Susan Einzig (London: Piers Feetham, 2014), p. 3. 26 The venture was an ambitious but short-lived one in which, between 1943 and 1948, he published 70 John Westhouse books for adults, and 120 Peter Lunn books for children. Einzig produced seven full-page illustrations some incorporating a single colour, and six half-page single colour illustrations (Peter Main, John Westhouse and Peter Lunn: Two Wartime Publishing Houses and Their Founder (Lomax Press: 2013)). 27 Its unusual premise was to show ‘the use of wool for human wear from the days of our remote sheepskin-clothed ancestors to the present day’. 28 The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Mercury, Thursday, 5 September 1946. 29 Einzig, op. cit. 30 Ibid. 31 Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London: Thames & Hudson), p. 17. 32 Ibid. 33 Beate Planskoy, “Remembering Eva, my sister”, in Eva Frankfurther 1930-1959 (London: Peter Halban, 2001), p. 7. 34 Ibid. 14 12
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Planskoy, op. cit., p. 8. Levy, op. cit, p. 5. 37 See Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry, ed. by Sarah MacDougall (London: Ben Uri, 2014). 38 Letter from Eva Frankfurther to Vera [Lachmann], 3.4.1956, family archive. 39 Jutta Vinzent, “The Other of the Other: Refugee Artists and Black Subjects”, in Forced Journeys, op. cit., p. 80. 40 See Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Allan Wingate, 1956; Penguin books, 2006), the classic account of West Indian postwar migration to London. 41 As a student, ‘Frankfurter’ (as she was listed in the catalogue) showed at least once in a group showing of St Martin’s students at the short-lived Coffee House gallery, near Trafalgar Square: exhibiting Harlem (£10) alongside Auerbach’s Music Hall (£10), Doig Simmond’s After Work (£5) and Joseph Tilson’s Trafalgar Square (£10), among others. 42 He was assisted by Bethnal Green Museum’s curator Charles Weekley and Head of Oxford House Alan Jarvis Hackney Gazette (4.13.1953). Other professional artists did exhibit, among them Rose L Henriques (1889–1972), known for her Stepney scenes, and David Fireman, a former fellow St Martin’s student of Frankfurther’s. 43 A schoolfriend of the poet Dylan Thomas, Levy studied at the Royal College of Art winning the Sir Herbert Read Prize for Drawing (1935). During the Second World he served as a Captain in the Royal Army Educational Corps, afterwards teaching and writing on art. During the 1950s he worked for the BBC, presenting the television series, ‘Painting for Housewives’, and interviewed artists for the BBC archives. He published three books on Lowry (1963, 1973 and 1975), and wrote his original Dictionary of National Biography entry. 44 Mervyn Levy, ‘The East End Academy’, Times Educational Supplement (6 January 1956); also cited in Levy, op. cit., p. 4. 45 The Tablet, 12.1.57. 46 Levy, People, introduction. 47 Frank Whitford, op. cit. 48 See Glass on Metal: The Enamelists Magazine, vol 13, no. 4. Aug 1994, 3rd Enamel Art Exhibition, Coburg, Germany – “The Enamels of Hilde Hamann”; and Die Judischen Maler der Hamburgisshen, 1989. 49 Her books included Show Me Yours (1943), Carmello (1945), Cocolo (1945), A Horse for the Island (1952), Angelo and Rosaline (1957), Piruwayu and the Rainbow (1958), Pantoloni (1959), Paolo and Panetto (1960), Trovato (1960), For the Leg of a Chicken (1960), Dolls (1962), Francesco and Francesca (1962), Of Uncles and Aunts (1963), The Goat Boy (1965), Sardines and the Angel (1967), Neretto (1969) and A Day in Venice (1973). 50 Beate Planskoy in conversation with the author. 51 Spalding and Einzig, ibid., p. 5, comment,‘Einzig preferred landscape that had been worked by human beings, so that these painting have both a homely and a haunted feel to them. Significant here is the fact that the German word for home – Heimat – carries with it connotations of lands, village, place. The figures, when they appear, are usually featureless and hugged into the landscape by shadows, all of which heightens the air of sadness, perhaps of loss.’ 52 Douglas Hall, Art in Exile: Polish Painters in Post-War Britain (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2008), p. 11. 15 36
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Einzig, op. cit.
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