Born: 1901 Berlin, Germany
Died: 1973 London, England
Year of Migration to the UK: 1938
Other name/s: Siegfried Solomon Alweiss
Biography
Painter and graphic artist Alva was born Siegfried Solomon Alweiss into an observant Jewish family on 29 May, 1901 in Berlin, Germany but lived in Galicia until the age of ten. After leaving school, he began a career in commerce, then studied music in Berlin before turning to art, travelling in Europe and settling in Paris in the 1920s, where he studied painting, exhibited in the Salon d'Automne, and legally adopted the shortened form of his name, 'Alva', in 1925.
In 1934 he travelled in Palestine, Syria and Greece, holding his first solo exhibition in Tel Aviv in the same year, but following increasing anti-Semitic legislation in Germany, he travelled to France, and from there fled to London in 1938, setting up a studio in west London. In 1940 he was briefly interned as an ‘enemy alien’ on the Isle of Man, where he produced Campflowers, 13 ballpen portraits of fellow internees printed on an office copying machine. In his Autobiography of a Painter (London: W. H. Allen, 1973) Alva recollected that 'I had become stateless when the Nazi regime cancelled my German passport as soon as Hitler came to power, because neither of my parents were German subjects. I moved to London before the war, but when war broke out, my place of birth (Berlin) was held against me, and I spent the summer and autumn of 1940 on the Isle of Man […] Ironically this 'excursion' may have saved my life, because when I returned to London at the end of 1940, I found that my studio had been destroyed by German bombs'. Alva held his first solo London exhibition in 1941 at J. Leger & Son, which was critically reviewed, including in The Times (15 August 1941), in Apollo (August 1941), and by Herbert Read in The Listener (24 July 1941). Subsequent London shows during the 1940s included a return to the Leger (1943); Alex Reid and Lefevre (1943), and Leicester Galleries (1948), garnering reviews by critics and art historians such as Jan Gordon in The Studio, and fellow émigrés, Edith Hoffman in Burlington Magazine, and Dr Helen Rosenau in The Contemporary Review (all September 1942). In 1944 he was included in the opening exhibition at Ben Uri's new Portman Street premises, initiating his longstanding relationship with the gallery: in November 1948 he presented a lecture on The Purpose of Painting, in which he claimed inspiration from Rembrandt and Daumier, among others, and participated in group shows on numerous occasions. During the 1950s he exhibited widely, in London (including Waddington Galleries, 1958) and in Israel, France, USA, and South Africa, and several volumes on his work were published (including Alva: Recent Paintings and Drawings, Bodley Head, 1951, with a foreword by Herbert Read) which was reviewed by David Sylvester in the Jewish Chronicle (6 June 1952). In 1958 John Berger wrote on Alva in The New Statesman (14 June 1958). Alva continued to exhibit into his seventies, returning to increasingly sensuous figurative work, including the nude, celebrated in a 1971 publication, Alva: The Female Form; critic Lewis Sowden described the images as '[...] signalling, one might say, the joy of the artist's return to warm and human realities' ('Alva's Women', Jerusalem Post, 22 March 1972). J. S. Goldsmith wrote an anniversary profile: 'Alva at 70' for The Jewish Quarterly (Winter 1971-72).
Alva also worked as a graphic artist, illustrating and decorating a version of the first chapter of Genesis and producing a series of lithograph studies of the Prophets in serigraphs (published in New York, Serigraph Gallery, 1954). He maintained a lifelong interest in Yiddish culture and language, contributing illustrations to Yiddish publications in London during the late 1930s and 1940s. These included the cover design for Y.A. Liski's Produktivizatsie (Productivisation), printed by noted East End printer Israel Naroditsky in 1937, For, du kleyner kozak! (On Your Way, Little Cossack!) in 1942, and the cover illustration to Yiddish poet Malka Locker's Shtetl. He also painted portraits of Locker and fellow Yiddish poet, Itzik Manger, among others, as well as symbolist oil paintings on Jewish life. Yiddishists and émigré artists, including Jankel Adler and Josef Herman, remained part of his social circle in London, where he died in 1973, the year that his autobiography, With Pen and Brush: The Autobiography of a Painter was published. His work was shown posthumously in Ben Uri exhibitions in 1979 and 1981 and was among Ben Uri collection loans to the exhibition Achievement: British Jewry, curated by Charles Spencer, at Camden Arts Centre, London, in 1985; more recently, his painting Exodus featured in the loan exhibition Exodus: masterworks from émigré artists from the Ben Uri collection, held at Bushey Museum in 2018. Alva died 13 November 1973 in London, England. His work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection and Gilden's Art Gallery.
Related books
- Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo Jewish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
- Jutta Vinzent, Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933-1945) (Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2006), pp. 10, 44, 53, 57-59, 68, 101, 253, 267, 281, 295
- Frances Spalding and Judith Collins eds., 20th Century Painters and Sculptors (Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 1990)
- Herbert A. Strauss and Werner Roder eds., International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigres 1933-1945' (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1983)
- 'Alva', The Times, 27 November 1973, p. 21
- Alva, With Pen and Brush
- Autobiography of a Painter (London: W. H. Allen, 1973)
- Cecil Roth ed., Encyclopaedia Judaica: A-Z (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972)
- Alva: The Female Form (London: W. H. Allen, 1971)
- Alva: Towards Concise Form in Painting: A Memoir (Leonardo, January 1969)
- Alva: Recent Paintings and Drawings (London: The Bodley Head, 1951)
- Maurice Collis, Alva, Paintings and Drawings (London: John Lane, 1941)
Public collections
Related organisations
- Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (exhibitor and lecturer)
Related web links
Selected exhibitions
- The Art of Exile: Paintings by Jewish-German Refugees, Leo Baeck Institute (2019)
- Exodus: masterworks from émigré artists from the Ben Uri collection, Bushey Museum (2018)
- Achievement: British Jewry, Camden Arts Centre (1985)
- Exhibition of Selected Works from the Permanent Collection, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1981, 1979)
- Alva: Recent Images, Waddington Galleries (1958)
- 40th Anniversary Exhibition: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1956)
- Exhibition of Recent Acquisitions (5th Collection) Friends of the Art Museums of Israel, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1955)
- Festival of Britain: Anglo-Jewish Exhibition, 1851-1951, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1951)
- Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Jewish Painters and Sculptors, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1950)
- Contemporary Jewish Artists: Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1949)
- Leicester Galleries (1948)
- Opening Exhibition, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (1944)
- Lefèvre Gallery (1943)
- Leger Gallery (1941)
- Maskit Gallery, Tel Aviv (1935)
Ben Uri collection
Alva in the Ben Uri collection
Ben Uri archive
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Alva]