Ben Uri Gallery
The London Jewish Museum of Art
108a Boundary Road
London, NW8 ORH
T: 020 7604 3991
F: 020 7604 3992
E: info@benuri.org.uk

The Ben Uri Gallery - The London Jewish Museum of Art is delighted to announce the first
exhibition for a decade of the work of the artist Mark Gertler (1891-1939).

Born in Spitalfields to impoverished Austrian-Polish parentage, Gertler was the first Jewish
working-class student of his generation to attend the prestigious Slade School of Art. (Though
fellow Eastenders David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer and the artist/poet Isaac Rosenberg would
soon follow in his footsteps, their studies, like Gertler's own was financed by 'loans' from the
Jewish Educational Aid Society.) At the Slade Gertler mixed with C R W Nevinson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer, won many prizes, and left with a reputation as a draughtsman to equal that of Augustus John. There he also met and fell in love with fellow student Dora Carrington, who became his confidant and muse, and the object of his unrequited passion for the next ten
years. Gertler's early patrons included Winston Churchill's secretary Edward Marsh and the
indefatigable society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, who introduced him to many members of
the Bloomsbury Group. Gertler's highly experimental work in the years of the First World War made an outstanding contribution to British modernism.

His work was praised by fellow artists including Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell and Henry Moore, and he so fascinated his contemporaries that he was fictionalised in a variety of portraits ranging from the sinister sculptor of D H Lawrence's Women in Love, to the dashing Byronic hero of Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. During the 1920s Gertler exhibited frequently and was a leading member of the London Group. However, in the 1930s ill-health and financial worries exacerbated by the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, and uncertainty over the direction and reception of his work led to his eventual suicide in 1939.

This retrospective chronicles the many stages of Gertler's remarkably varied career: from the
carefully observed still-lifes and highly naturalistic family portraits of his early years, to the
highly experimental work of the war years - reflecting his understanding of Post-Impressionism (particularly Cézanne) - through to the Renoir-influenced female portraits of the 1920s, and finally, to the neo-classical nudes and semi-Cubist still-lifes of his last years. Highlights of the exhibition include the Ben Uri's newly-acquired Rabbi and Rabbitzin (1914), shown here together with the British Museum's companion drawing Rabbi and Rabbitzin with Fish, and several paintings, including The Sari (1938), exhibited here for the first time since the artist's death.

This exhibition also marks the opening of a series of forthcoming Ben Uri exhibitions subtitled The Whitechapel Boys, which examine the lives and paintings of those young Jewish East End artists, who often studied, worked and exhibited together in the years immediately preceding World War One.

Curators: Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson.

Sarah MacDougall is an art historian and the author of a new biography of the artist Mark
Gertler, published by John Murray. Rachel Dickson is a freelance curator and art consultant, and has recently co-curated the exhibition of contemporary site-responsive sculpture and
installation 'Art in the Garden' at the Chelsea Physic Garden.

Contact: Sarah MacDougall on 020 8654 4458 macseed@talk21.com or Rachel Dickson on 020 8741 9577 rsilman@aol.com