This online event is hosted by Tate Archive to celebrate the culmination of the Émigré Art Archives Project, which has catalogued and made available to the public for the first time the archive collections of Jankel Adler, J.P. Hodin and the family archive of David Mayor.
Welcome and introductions
14.00 Adrian Glew (Archivist, Tate Archive) and Joanne Rosenthal (Symposium convenor)
14.05 Introduction to the Émigré Art Archives project
Peter Eaves (Cataloguer, Tate Archive)
First session: The archives of Jankel Adler
14.15 Gleanings from the sketchbooks of Jankel Adler: Roadmaps to International Modernism and Cosmopolitanism?
Glenn Sujo
14.35 ‘Driftwood Cast Upon a Foreign Shore’: Jankel Adler – an émigré journey through the Archives
Sarah MacDougall
14.55 Q&A with audience
15.15 Comfort break
Second session: The archives of J.P. Hodin and the family of David Mayor
15.25 JP Hodin: A humanist modern
Alexandra Lazar
15.45 ‘[…] an unhappy lot of uprooted talents in the midst of an indifferent society’
Exhibiting the Exile: J P Hodin, Jewish Art, Else Meidner and the Ben Uri Art Gallery
Rachel Dickson
16.05 On the Trail of the Motesiczky Family: Exploring David Mayor’s Archive
Ines Schlenker
16.25 Q&A with audience
Responses and close
16.45 Respondent’s comments
Monica Bohm-Duchen
17.00 Thanks and close
Gleanings from the sketchbooks of Jankel Adler: Roadmaps to International Modernism and Cosmopolitanism?
Glenn Sujo
Out of his family’s parochial origins in the rural outskirts of Łódź, drawn precociously to radical expressions of a cultural Judaism, Adler’s mature work combines salient strands of international modernism with an engaged cosmopolitanism — its perceived promises and failures, its peculiar forms of association (insiderness, marginality), its geographical inflections (conjuring languages, metropoles, constituencies, centres and peripheries). Restless and always on the move, he evinced a ‘cultivated detachment from his own culture of origin’ practising an ‘unconditional receptivity to cultural Others’. These attitudes make him the subject of intense interest today. This paper will share insights gleaned from Adler’s sketchbooks, now at Tate Archives, which admirably convey the prerogatives and choices open to this displaced individualist and uprooted non-conformist.
‘Driftwood Cast Upon a Foreign Shore’: Jankel Adler – an émigré journey through the Archives
Sarah MacDougall
Focusing on a particular strand within Jankel Adler’s émigré journey, following his accidental arrival in Scotland in 1940 – ‘Driftwood cast upon a foreign shore’, as Michael Middleton termed it – and the two-and-a-half years that he spent there, this paper explores and questions the relationship between archive and biography in tracing Adler's personal and artistic exilic narrative. It asks what the archive, particularly the artist’s sketchbooks, can tell us about this sojourn, its influence (if any) upon his practice, and his cultural engagement with the city of Glasgow and the artist’s colony at Kirkcudbright, as well as what they leave out.
JP Hodin: A humanist modern
Alexandra Lazar
Revisiting J.P. Hodin’s critical writing, and in particular his collected essays in Modern Art Modern Mind and The Dilemma of Being Modern, this paper will examine his idea of “living criticism”, Europeanness and methodological cosmopolitanism in praxis, juxtaposing it with contemporary approaches to art criticism. Hodin’s political and critical consciousness grew from youthful interest in Panslavism and writings of T.G. Masaryk towards a more inclusive cosmopolitanism and the idea of Europeanness as historical consciousness. Not without its flaws and particularisms, his framework encompasses nation-transcending theoretical, linguistic and ethnic memories and experiences, inviting comparisons between Herbert Read and Oto Bihalji-Merin but also more contemporary figures such as Hans Ulrich Obrist. Adopting a scientific approach yet seeking authentic artistic expression, Hodin seeks to illuminate the artistic presence within its times, ‘a new vision’ of humanity not without its relevance in today’s view of authenticity, boundaries, and the relighting of the Cold War.
‘[…] an unhappy lot of uprooted talents in the midst of an indifferent society’
Exhibiting the Exile: J P Hodin, Jewish Art, Else Meidner and the Ben Uri Art Gallery
Rachel Dickson
Notwithstanding his international reputation as art critic and art historian, Hodin concentrated certain artist investigations close to his own home in Hampstead, a neighbourhood housing an unprecedented number of émigré artists. This presentation examines Hodin’s support for painter, Else Meidner, wife of exiled German Jewish expressionist, Ludwig Meidner, particularly via Ben Uri. Discussing Hodin’s links with the gallery, and his awareness of the implicit problems of so-called ‘Jewish art’, it suggests that although Ben Uri had many shortcomings (exemplified by the commercial failure of the Meidners’ joint show), he nevertheless utilised the institution as a platform to promote Else’s work, following Ludwig’s triumphant solo return to Germany in 1953.
On the Trail of the Motesiczky Family: Exploring David Mayor’s Archive
Ines Schlenker
In 2007 David Mayor deposited his family’s papers in Tate Archive. The art publisher and curator is a relative of the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky who had left her native Austria in 1938 and settled in the UK. This paper explores the traces the Motesiczky family left in David Mayor’s archive. The material throws light on the friendship between members of the two branches of the family that lasted into exile as well as their mutual interest in art and culture. It also highlights the close links between émigré art archives and the necessity to collate information across them.
Monica Bohm-Duchen
Monica Bohm-Duchen is an independent writer, lecturer and curator, based in London. The institutions she has worked for include Birkbeck, University of London, the Courtauld Institute of Art, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Tate, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. Her many publications include After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Art and the Second World War. She is the Founding Director of Insiders/Outsiders, an ongoing celebration of the contribution made by refugees from Nazism to British culture, and editor of its companion volume, Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual Culture.
Rachel Dickson
Rachel Dickson is former Head of Curatorial Services at Ben Uri Gallery and Museum. She has a research specialism in the successive waves of European Jewish artists and designers who took refuge in the UK from the late 19th century onwards and their non-Jewish counterparts who escaped Nazi Germany between 1933-45, and has published and spoken widely on the topic. A committee member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, University of London, she continues to act as Consultant Editor for the Ben Uri Research Unit for the Study of the Jewish and Immigrant Contribution to the Visual Arts in Britain since 1900.
Alexandra Lazar
Alexandra Lazar is an art historian, writer and curator. She read art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, obtained her MA in Arts Criticism and Theory from City University, London and BA in graphic art from the University of Applied Arts, Belgrade. She is the head curator of the Wiener ART Collection and the founder and Chair of the Association of Art Galleries Serbia. Alongside her curatorial practice, she has worked as a LCACE Researcher at Tate Britain in collaboration with the Courtauld Institute of Art and Tate Archive on specialist archival research examining émigré artists and critics (2009-2011). Her previous books include Ana Knežević. A Place To Hold You (2017); Connecting the nature with the artistic processes (2021), and Božidar Plazinić (2022), and a number of critical essays.
Sarah MacDougall
Sarah MacDougall is Director of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum and heads the Ben Uri Research Unit for the Study of the Jewish and Immigrant Contribution to the Visual Arts in Britain since 1900, and collections and exhibition programming. She co-curated Jankel Adler: A “Degenerate” Artist in Britain, 1940-49 (2019), and presented “Europe in Scotland: Josef Herman, Jankel Adler and the émigré contribution to Scottish Visual Arts (1940–43)”, University of Edinburgh (online conference, 2022). A committee member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies (University of London), she co-edited Yearbook 18 on Émigrés and the Applied Arts.
Ines Schlenker
Ines Schlenker is an independent art historian with a special interest in National Socialist, “degenerate” and émigré art. Hitler’s Salon, her study of the officially approved art in the Third Reich as shown at the Great German Art Exhibition, was published in 2007. She wrote the catalogue raisonné of the paintings of the Vienna-born émigré Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (2009), co-edited the artist’s correspondence with the writer Elias Canetti (2011) and curated the exhibition at Tate Britain that celebrated the opening of the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Archive Gallery in 2019/20. Capturing Time, her study of the life and work of the émigré artist Milein Cosman, came out in 2019. Her book on Marc Chagall was published in 2022.
Glenn Sujo
Glenn Sujo is an artist, author and educator. He has contributed actively to the recovery of drawing language in art polemics and higher education through practice‐led research, exhibitions and publications. His original research in museums, libraries and archives in Central and Eastern Europe culminated in exhibitions and publications on the subject of the ‘Imagination in Internment’. These include: Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory, Imperial War Museum, London (2001); Artists Witness the Shoah, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (1995); On The Track of Tyranny, The Wiener Library, London (1983). He is a contributing author to several volumes exploring visual art and the Holocaust, including a forthcoming article ‘Art of the Holocaust: Conundrum and Complexity’ for The Cambridge History of the Holocaust (2024).
Beginning in 2019, the team involved in the Émigré Art Archives project, which has been generously funded by the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, has transformed over 300 boxes of unsorted materials into accessible archival resources from three émigré archive collections:
- The extensive papers of the Czech art historian and critic Josef Paul Hodin details the prodigious career of a writer dedicated to the support of émigré artists who made the UK their home following the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Consisting of diaries, letters, manuscripts and photographs this archive illustrates Hodin’s unique creative process and brings into focus the hardships faced by many of his émigré subjects.
- The 16 sketchbooks of the Polish-Jewish artist Jankel Adler document a tumultuous period of the artist's life after he was forced to leave his home in Germany in 1933. The sketchbooks take us across Europe, to the south of France and finally to the UK. During this period of transience Adler would often be without studio or canvas and these sketchbooks provided a vital outlet for artistic expression.
- The family papers of the art curator and publisher David Mayor offer an insight into the history of a notable Austrian émigré family, the Schey von Koromlas. The archive describes the progress of the family as they left Austria for the UK; providing details of the stage career of Mayor’s grandmother Anny Schindler and her relationship with the American-born artist, Edward Renouf, later associate editor of Wolfgang Paalen’s surrealist journal, Dyn.