Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Shmuel Dresner artist

Shmuel Dresner was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland in 1928. In 1945 he arrived in England as a refugee and was sent to Windemere in the Lake District with a group of young Holocaust orphans known at 'the Boys'; he spent four years in a medical sanatorium recouperating, where he first began to paint, partly as a form of therapy. He later studied art in London, exhibiting extensively between 1955 and 1981, including in a number of solo shows, his art powerfully influenced by his traumatic wartime experiences.

Born: 1928 Warsaw, Poland

Died: 2019 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1945

Other name/s: Samuel Dresner, Sam Dresner


Biography

Artist Shmuel Dresner was born Samuel Dresner into a Jewish family on 2 January 1928 in Warsaw, Poland, the second largest Jewish community in the world, after New York. The exact date of birth of 2 January 1928 was allocated to Dresner after the Second World War, as all of his papers were destroyed during the conflict. Dresner was 12 years old when he and his family were forced into the Warsaw ghetto. After attempting to escape, he was caught and held as a slave labourer at Buchenwald camp, and then at Theresienstadt. None of his family survived the Holocaust. At the end of the war, under the auspices of the Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief) and the agreement of the British government, Dresner came to England as a refugee in 1945. He was one of the 700 orphan child Holocaust survivors, a number of whom – known as 'the Boys' (although the group included girls) were sent to Windermere in the Lake District. Suffering from tuberculosis and malnutrition, he spent four years in a medical sanatorium, where he first began to paint, partly as a form of therapy.

In 1949 he enrolled at London’s Heatherley School of Fine Art, where he trained under the artist and wood engraver Iain Macnab, before studying at the Central School of Art in 1953. In 1956 he moved to Paris and attended the André Lhote Academy, all the while searching for a visual language in which to respond to his traumatic past. Dresner exhibited regularly with Ben Uri Gallery between 1958 and 2006, including in the Opening Exhibition at Berners Street in 1961, in a solo show in 1975, in open exhibitions (1986, 1991, 1991), and in International Jewish Artist of the Year Award (IJAYA, 2001 and 2006). During this time, his work manifested ‘dual impulses: an urge for outline and compositional firmness, and the temperamental desire to shed all fetters of boundary through an immersion in colour’. The catalogue accompanying his solo show noted the ‘diffuse vision landscapes’, characterised by a palette of blues and greens, which achieved ‘a true integration of the outer and internal image, welded by a powerful poetic sensibility’ (Zach, 1975, n.p.). He also exhibited with the Newlyn Gallery in St. Ives in Cornwall in 1959, with the Artists’ International Association (AIA, a left-leaning exhibition platform), and at St. Martin's Gallery and Henry Rawinsky's eponymous London gallery in the early 1960s. From the 1970s, he worked at the Stern Gallery in London.

Dresner's oeuvre encompassed sketches, paintings, and collages, often made up of ripped and burnt pages from books in English and Yiddish – a reference to the Nazi book burnings which sought to ‘cleanse’ Germany of Jewish literary culture. By including passages of Yiddish text, Dresner alluded not only to the books that had been destroyed, but also to the fate of all those who perished in the Holocaust. Collage works included The Ghost Town (1982, Ben Uri Collection), suggesting a desolate, deserted landscape with no trace of human presence, and Benjamin (1982, Imperial War Museum), a portrait of Dresner’s close friend and fellow prisoner, who was murdered in Strzelnica. The Ghost Town was also used as the cover image for Hilda Schiff's Holocaust Poetry: An Anthology, published in 1995. Dresner had no photographs of his family and used painting as a means to recreate what they looked like from memory, and to work through his own traumatic memories. In an interview for the BBC television documentary The Last Survivors (2020), Dresner explained the painful, frustrating and yet liberating process of producing a likeness of his sister, who was three years younger than him and who was gassed with his mother in Treblinka: ‘I can’t get any memory, can’t get anything. I think I remember what kind of eyes she had, what kind of face, but when I come to draw it, it’s no good I had to turn, to burn it all. So the only one that I did was I did a collage and it’s completely abstract. This represents my sister’ (https://bbc.in/3zApOYY).

At the end of his life, Dresner's work featured in several group shows, including Ben Uri's centenary show, Out of Chaos – Ben Uri: 100 Years in London, Somerset House, London (2015); Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2017); and Outlook: No Return. Polish artists who fled Nazi-dominated Europe (curated by BURU at POSK (Polish Cultural and Social Centre, London W6, 2019)). Shmuel Dresner died in London, England on 27 December 2019. His work is represented in UK public collections, including the Imperial War Museum and Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London.

Related books

  • Rachel Dickson ed., From Adler to Zuławski: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain (London: Ben Uri Research Unit, 2020) p. 62
  • Martin Gilbert, The Boys: Triumph Over Adversity (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017)
  • Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall, eds., 'Out of Chaos: Ben Uri
  • 100 Years in London' (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2015) pp. 124-125
  • Hilde Schiff, Holocaust Poetry: An Anthology (London: Harper Collins, 1995)
  • Walter Schwab and Julia Weiner, eds., Jewish Artists: the Ben Uri Collection - Paintings, Drawings, Prints and Sculpture (London: Ben Uri Art Society in association with Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 1994), p. 121
  • Natan Zach, introduction to Samuel Dresner: Paintings, exhibition catalogue (Ben Uri Gallery, 1975), n.p.

Public collections

Related organisations

  • Heatherley School of Fine Art (student)
  • Central School of Art (student)
  • André Lhote Academy (student)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • International Jewish Artist of the Year, Ben Uri Gallery (2006)
  • Jewish Artists Awards, Ben Uri Gallery (2001)
  • Outlook: No Return. Polish artists who fled Nazi-dominated Europe to British Culture, POSK - BURU (2019)
  • Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain, Ben Uri Gallery (2017)
  • Out of Chaos – Ben Uri: 100 Years in London, Somerset House (2015)
  • Open Exhibition, Ben Uri Gallery (1999)
  • Jewish Artists, The Ben Uri Collection (1994)
  • Open Exhibition, Ben Uri Gallery (1991, 1986)
  • Picture Fair, Ben Uri Gallery (1976)
  • Shmuel Dresner Paintings, Ben Uri Gallery (1975)
  • Exhibitions of Paintings on a Biblical Theme, Ben Uri Gallery (1962)
  • Shmuel Dresner & Gerald Laing, St. Martin's Gallery (1962)
  • Rawinsky Gallery (1961)
  • Opening Exhibition, Ben Uri Gallery (1961)
  • Artists’ International Association (1961)
  • Artists’ International Association (1960)
  • Group show, Newlyn Art Gallery (1959)
  • Annual Exhibition, Ben Uri Gallery (1958)
  Shmuel Dresner
   
Ben Uri collection

Shmuel Dresner in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Shmuel Dresner]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Shmuel Dresner] in the Ben Uri Library