JANKEL ADLER (1895-1949)
JANKEL ADLER (1895-1949)
JANKEL ADLER (1895-1949)
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PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
JANKEL ADLER (1895-1949)

Two Figures

Details
JANKEL ADLER (1895-1949)
Two Figures
signed 'Adler' (lower right)
oil on panel
27 5/8 x 35 7/8 in. (70.2 x 91 cm.)
Painted in 1944.
Provenance
Charles Aukin, London.
with Waddington Galleries, London.
Herzliya, Tiroche Auction House, 26 December 1992, lot 120, where purchased by the present owner.
Literature
A. Heibel, Jankel Adler (1895-1949) Vol II: Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Münster, 2016, p. 343, no. WV 255, illustrated.
Exhibited
London, Lefevre Gallery, Jankel Adler: Recent Paintings 1943-45, May 1946, no. 26, as 'The Fugitives'.
Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, One Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Exhibition, 1954, no. 291.

Brought to you by

Alice Murray
Alice Murray Head of Evening Sale

Lot Essay

Jankel Adler was born in Tuszyn in Poland and was brought up as a Hassidic Jew. His life and artistic activity span several European countries and cultural traditions, due to the political circumstances and events of 1930s and 1940s Europe. He travelled to Germany in 1916 to begin his art studies in Barmen in the Rhineland. During the 1920s he travelled widely in Europe where he formed a relationship with Otto Dix and perhaps more significantly with Paul Klee whom Adler met while teaching in Dusseldorf in 1931. After the Nazis gained power in 1933, Adler was labelled a degenerate artist and fled Germany. He worked in Warsaw and Paris before being evacuated to Britain from Dunkirk as a member of the Polish Army of the West in 1940. He arrived in London in 1943 and settled into a studio in Bedford Gardens above the ‘Two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, whom he had previously met in Glasgow.

It was after his arrival in London that, Joanna Pollakowna comments, ‘came the last stage of his work, during which Adler’s vision was to assume its final and definite form. The time of war, of Shaoh - the Holocaust - demolished the old view of the world; with it, an old language of forms was also smashed to pieces. In order to express the inexpressible, a new voice had to be found, a language made up of broken pieces – eloquent and reticent at the same time; a truly human voice characterised by tragic restraint and simplicity … In those pictures painted during and immediately after the Second World War, his much- experimented rich texture harmoniously compliments wide black outlines and extensive colour planes’ (see J. Pollakowna, exhibition catalogue, ‘Reflections on Jankel Adler’s Art’, Jankel Adler, Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle, 1985, pp. 249-250).

In the present work, painted in 1944, two male figures stand side by side. They face the viewer head on, each holding their left hand up in a way that suggests they are waving or hitchhiking. When the painting was first exhibited in 1946, it was entitled ‘The Fugitives’, and it has been suggested the work depicts Adler alongside fellow artist Joseph Herman, who was also a European fugitive. Both Adler and Herman were members of the Polish army who arrived in Scotland in 1940. In Glasgow, they contributed to a vital resurgence of the Scottish arts scene during this period and were both became members of the influential Glasgow New Art Club founded by J.D. Fergusson. In 1943, Herman, like Adler, moved to London.

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