Belle Cramer was born into a Jewish family in New York, USA, on 11 August 1883. In 1906, she moved to Edinburgh, Scotland after her husband took up a medical post there. Cramer spent more than 30 years painting and exhibiting in Scotland and England before finally returning to the USA.
Artist Belle Cramer (née Klauber) was born into a Jewish family in New York, USA on 11 August 1883 and brought up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A musically gifted child who first trained as a pianist, she briefly attended Columbia’s Teachers College before turning to art. In 1906 she married the German-born Jewish physician, William Cramer, and the couple immigrated to Edinburgh, Scotland where he worked in cancer pathology. Cramer enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art in 1909 and remained there until 1915. With the outbreak of First World War, the family, now with their first son, moved to London. Cramer pursued further instruction both privately and at the Massy Art School.
In London Cramer gravitated to the Café Royal, a well-known meeting place for contemporary artists, where she met English painters, Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner, as well as the American-born British sculptor Jacob Epstein, who made bronze busts of Dr Cramer and Belle herself. Through this circle she became associated with The London Group, the progressive, artist-led exhibiting society, founded in 1913. From around 1917 she showed in London with increasing regularity, participating in London Group exhibitions across two decades, and placing work with other juried bodies, including the Royal Institute, Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the New English Art Club (NEAC). The modernist curator and gallerist, Frank Rutter introduced her in his eponymous gallery, and she featured in the 1919 Allied Artists Association show (organised by Rutter) at the Adlephi Gallery, where her work was described as 'striking and delightful a manifestation of 'young painting' as any now showing in London' (Westminster Gazette, 4 December 1919). She subsequently held solo exhibitions in London through the 1920s and 1930s at various spaces, including the Adelphi Gallery, Arnold Haskell Gallery, Cooling Galleries (1939, which included a number of portraits highlighted in the Jewish Chronicle, 3 March 1939), and the Goupil Gallery. Alongside this professional presence she balanced family life (a second son was born in 1924). However, although she lived in London for 24 years, much of the work Cramer produced in the capital was lost (destroyed in wartime conditions or left behind when she eventually departed). Cramer primarily worked with paper and oil on canvas. Her gestural pieces show a dynamic engagement with abstraction and figuration, where a rhythmic exchange of fractured forms and angular lines is created via both earthy tones and vivid contrasts.
In 1939, the Cramers relocated to the USA when Dr Cramer accepted a research post at the Barnard Free Skin and Cancer Hospital in St Louis, Missouri. Belle Cramer adapted swiftly to new circumstances: accepted into a juried exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum in November 1940, she opened her first solo show there the following year at the Eleanor Smith Galleries. She continued to extend her practice, studying in the 1950s with Paul Burlin, first at the University of Southern California, and then at Washington University in St Louis, as well as undertaking printmaking with Fred Conway. In St Louis, she also joined a lively and prolific group of local artists who called themselves Group 15, including Fred Becker, Burlin, Conway, Werner Drewes, William Fett, Charles Quest, E. Oscar Thalinger, and Carl Holty. She remained an active member of the group for many years, showing in St Louis and across the USA. Cramer also showed widely with the St Louis Artists’ Guild, eventually becoming known, by 1971, as the grand dame of the St. Louis art scene, with her works entering the St. Louis Art Museum collection.
Teaching and mentoring formed an important strand of her contribution to the local cultural milieu, particularly after she was widowed in the mid-1940s. Cramer embraced St Louis’s art community as a surrogate family, becoming a beloved community member and hosting memorable salon-style gatherings at her Delmar Avenue apartment, which drew established collectors, younger artists, and cultural patrons, including Joseph Pulitzer, Jr, over nearly four decades. One contemporary notably recalled: ‘The food is superb, the drinks are copious (usually served by a fleet of fresh-faced young Concordia seminarians) and the hostess in full flower into the small hours of the morning, […]. She inevitably wears bright colors so characteristic of her painting: you’ll never catch Belle Cramer in “basic black”.’ (Sally Bixby Defty, 1966 quoted in Russell, 2023). Belle Cramer died in St Louis, Missouri, USA on 9 September 1978 at the age of 95. Her works are not currentlyheld in the UK public domain. Forgotten for many years, Cramer was rediscovered in 2019, when her works was exhibited at Walker-Cunningham Fine Art in St Louis. The Belle Cramer Award in Printmaking is annually awarded to a student at Washington University, St Louis.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Belle Cramer]
Publications related to [Belle Cramer] in the Ben Uri Library