Anna Mayerson was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1906 and studied fine art at the Vienna Academy. Following the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938 she fled to London, where she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1942 she exhibited at Jack Bilbo's Modern Art Gallery, <em>The Tribune</em> describing her work 'direct, simple and colourful'; she also showed with the Leger Galleries, Redfern Gallery, Hanover Gallery and Annely Juda Fine Art, the latter two venues run by émigré women.
Painter Anna Mayerson was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1906. She studied Fine Art in Zürich, Switzerland and at the Vienna Academy, and according to obituaries in the Jewish Chronicle and AJR Information, she worked for a year at the Brain Research Clinic in Vienna, modelling and illustrating neural phenomena. Following the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria), in 1938 she fled to London, where she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1940 she showed a portrait of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes at Claridges hotel (a picture of Mayerson standing by the painting is reproduced in The Tatler and Bystander, 4 December 1940, p. 382). In 1941 her work was included in Bond Street's Leger Galleries' summer group exhibition, Contemporary Continental Art, featuring painters and sculptors who 'number among them many refugees' (Jewish Chronicle, 25 July 1941, p. 25.) She had solo exhibitions at German émigré Jack Bilbo's progressive Modern Art Gallery in London in 1942, where her work was described by socialist newspaper, The Tribune as 'direct, simple and colourful; she is a proletarian artist, making pictures from factories and workers, but she has struck out from the fashionable drabness of her predecessors' (6 March 1942, p. 22), and again with the Leger Galleries in 1943. In 1946 her work was also included in a group show alongside the English painter Graham Sutherland and émigrés Jankel Adler, Raoul Ubac and Otto Bachmann at the prestigious Redfern Gallery in Cork Street. She also exhibited at Erica Brausen's Hanover Gallery in London in 1948 (its inaugural year). From 1949–59 she lived in Taormina, Sicily, exhibiting in continental Europe. She later returned to London and held two solo shows at Annely Juda Fine Art in 1971 and 1972, her subjects often drawn from he rimagination and highly coloured.
Anna Mayerson died in London, England in 1984. In 2018 her work featured in Ben Uri's exhibition, Out of Austria: Austrian Artists in Exile in Great Britain 1933-1945, marking the 80th anniversary of the Anschluss and the kindertransport initiative (which brought Jewish refugee children to Britain). Her work is represented in the Ben Uri Collection and in the collection of Somerville College, University of Oxford.
Anna Mayerson in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Anna Mayerson]
Publications related to [Anna Mayerson] in the Ben Uri Library