The Insiders/Outsiders Festival, which celebrated refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe and their contribution to British culture, ran until the end of March 2020 with exhibitions, performances, film screenings, walks, lectures and other events taking place all over the country.
Since the programme began in March 2019, it has brought together contributions from some of the UK’s most prestigious cultural organisations, ranging from Glyndebourne and Tate Britain to Sotheby’s and Kelvingrove Art Gallery. While March 2020 marked the official end of the festival and the pandemic has disrupted plans for 2020 activities, there are still ways to engage.Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual Culture, edited by Monica Bohm-Duchen, examines the extraordinarily rich and pervasive contribution of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe to the visual culture, art education and art-world structures of the United Kingdom. In every field, émigrés arriving from Europe in the 1930s – supported by a small number of like-minded individuals already resident in the UK – introduced a professionalism, internationalism and bold avant-gardism to a British art world not known for these attributes. At a time when the issue of immigration is much debated, the book serves as a reminder of the importance of cultural cross-fertilization and of the deep, long-lasting and wide-ranging contribution that refugees make to British life.
Their Safe Haven: Hungarian artists in Britain from the 1930s, compiled and edited by Robert Waterhouse. Around 3,000 Hungarian émigrés found refuge in Britain before the Second World War, fleeing not only the clutches of the Third Reich but also the ills of twentieth century Hungary. A much smaller community than other Central European refugees, they nonetheless included numbers of talented artists, architects, film-makers and musicians. When the critic Charles Rosner was asked to assemble an exhibition of graphics to mark the Hungarian Club’s April 1943 move to new premises in West London, he gave special prominence to 14 artists who had made their homes in Britain. Robert Waterhouse’s book, patchworked together from interviews and archives in Budapest, Vienna, London and around the UK, incorporating lost images, unpublished diaries and out-of-print texts, reveals the lives and work of these mostly forgotten artists.
An exhibition showing work by Klara Biller, Val Biro, Lili Markus, George Mayer-Marton, Jean-Georges Simon, Charles Rosner, and George Buday was to have been shown at the Mercer Gallery Harrogate, but has been postponed.
A campaign is underway to save George Mayer-Marton's striking Crucifixion with a highly unusual combination of mosaic and painted fresco for Holy Rosary Church in Fitton Hill, Oldham. The Diocese of Salford decided to close the church three years ago and concern is growing that the mural is deteriorating and is increasingly in danger of decay, vandalism, theft and even destruction if the building is redeveloped. The eight-metre-high mosaic was installed in the church in the 1950s and is made of natural stone and glass tesserae, giving it a striking sheen, typical of Byzantine work. The original piece had frescoes depicting St John to Jesus’ left and the Virgin Mary to his right, but these were covered over with white emulsion in 1980. It is one of the most notable ecclesiastical works of art in the North West but is at risk because Salford diocese decreed Holy Rosary redundant as part of its restructuring plan. Save Britain’s Heritage has written to Historic England, the body responsible for listing buildings, urging it to protect the mural.
Ben Uri Gallery and Museum was founded in 1915 in Whitechapel in the Jewish East End of London.
All their programming initiatives and ingredients stem from the imaginative use of their distinctive and growing museum collection which uniquely represents the Jewish and immigrant contribution to British visual art since 1900. Over the past two years Ben Uri has been reinvented through the design of a pioneering virtual museum. From this new concept virtual museum they will fulfil their charity objects and generate valuable relationships through innovative sharing of their scholarship and research projects, collections, archives, 3D exhibitions, virtual catalogues, films, podcasts, schools and family learning, and their important, pioneering arts and health institute.
Part of that programme is an ongoing series of exhibitions produced by the ‘Ben Uri Research Unit for the Study of the Immigrant and Jewish Contribution to the Visual Arts in Britain Since 1900’ (BURU). BURU has, since 2016, undertaking investigations into Austrian, Czech, German and Polish nationals who migrated to Britain - narratives which were significantly impacted by the Second World War and the Nazi domination of Europe.
The current exhibition in this series, Midnight's Family: 70 years of Indian artists in Britain, is BURU’s first exhibition to explore a non-European émigré artistic community. This timely exhibition, which coincides with the date of Indian Independence (declared at midnight on 15 August 1947), addresses the representation of Indian immigrant artists (both first and second generation) working in Britain for more than 70 years. This online iteration provides a snapshot of Indian artists in Britain from varied backgrounds and across different time periods. Modernists, such as F.N. Souza and S.K. Bakre, lived in the UK only briefly, whilst others, such as the Singh Twins, are second generation Britishers who consider this country to be their home. Meanwhile, global figures such as Anish Kapoor, feel they are ‘just’ artists, for whom questions of national belonging are incidental. The exhibition includes a cross- generational range of practitioners, who work across diverse media and with differing approaches to the question of identity; of being an ‘Indian’ artist in Britain. The exhibition is co-curated by painter, Shanti Panchal with advice from Dr Zehra Jumabhoy, Courtauld Institute, London. It is part of South Asian Heritage Month 2020.
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U2 - A Sort Of Homecoming.
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