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 by Nazi Germany in 1938 she fled to London, where she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. She exhibited widely in London venues, including several run by refugees, including Jack Bilbo's Modern Art Gallery, the Hanover Gallery and Annely Juda Fine Art, the latter 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', as noted by the Jewish Chronicle (J.M.S. 1941, p. 25). Their art critic, J.M.S, highlighted two paintings in his review, particularly the portrait titled Dr. Herbert, praising her use of vivid, contrasting colours to construct the subject and her innovative technique of using brilliant surface planes instead of traditional modeling. This experimental approach reflected aspects of crystal formation, and despite not quite achieving the desired clarity, it showcased Mayerson's bold and dynamic artistic style (J.M.S. 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 the 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, her portraits of women and girls described as ‘outstanding’ in the Tatler and Bystander (29 September 1943, p. 26).Maintaining her links with her homeland in exile, she showed with the Austrian Centre (a gathering point for refugees) in 1944. In 1946, her work was 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 émigré, Erica Brausen's Hanover Gallery in London in 1948 (its inaugural year). Despite any ambiguity in the interpretation, a reviewer in The Scotsman acknowledged Mayerson’s pleasant use of colour and her ability to create an impression that something was occurring, even if it was in an abstract or distant manner (The Scotsman 1948, p. 7).
From 1949–59, she lived in Taormina, Sicily, exhibiting in continental Europe. During this period, her painting, Deluge and Circus, featured in Ben Uri's Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists in 1956, marking the 300th anniversary of the readmittance of Jews into England, under Oliver Cromwell. She later returned to London and held two solo shows at Annely Juda Fine Art in 1971 and 1972 (the gallery bearing the name of its eponymous émigré founder), her subjects often drawn from her reimagination and highly coloured. Her Volto in ‘bright ecstatic colours,’ which featured in the exhibition Women and the Arts at the Herbert Art Gallery in 1965, was singled out in the Coventry Evening Telegraph (1965, p. 7). In 1981, a solo exhibition of her work was held at the Off-Centre Gallery, London, comprising drawings dating from about 1948 and paintings of some dozen years later. The Illustrated London News noted that the show featured ‘hunted work by an artist who ought to be better known. The drawings showing circus acts which could never exist are half-way between Paul Klee and Saul Steinberg’ (Illustrated London News 1981, p. 95), whereas Barry Fealdman in the Jewish Chronicle noted, ‘The drawings have a magical quality that is the product of a most winsome imagination. Freely and delicately drawn, they are full of fantasy and wit […]’ (Fealdman 1981, p. 17).
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). In the UK public domain 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