Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1913 Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic)

Died: 1993 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1939

Other name/s: Bettina Gross

Biography

Sculptor and printmaker Bettina Adler was born Bettina Gross into a Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) in 1913. Adler began carving wood at a very early age and studied with a master wood-carved in 1928. In the 1930s, she studied sculpture in Prague and later moved to Paris to study drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution, she moved with her siblings to Wales, taking up work in a button factory in Merthyr Tydfil, where she remained throughout the war, living within the Jewish refugee community. Her father Dr Emanuel Gross died in 1936, and her mother, Bertha Maendl, perished in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. In 1947, after an extensive courtship and correspondence, referenced in the biography H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds (Peter Filkins, 2019) she married Hans Günther Adler, a German-language historian and writer who had fled Prague in February 1947 (his first wife had also perished in Auschwitz), and they settled in London where they remained. Previously, in 1941, H.G. Adler had been imprisoned in Theresienstadt, unknowingly with Bettina's mother before she was moved to Auschwitz. The couple had one son, Jeremy, born in 1947, who would become a distinguished writer, poet and academic. Adler took on work as a commercial artist, creating fabric designs and linocuts, and returned to her primary practice of sculpting in the 1960s, when she worked in a variety of different media including terracotta, plaster and wood. In London, Adler and her husband nurtured a younger generation of artists and intellectuals, including émigré Helga Michie who credited Adler for tutoring and encouraging her artistic career in the 2018 monograph I Am Beginning to Want What I Am. Fellow émigrés, Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and Yehuda Bacon were also part of the Adler's artistic circle.

Bettina Adler died in London in 1993. Her work is held in UK public collections including the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Jeremy Adler, Emeritus Professor of German at King’s College London, presented a collection of prints and drawings by both Bettina and H.G. Adler to the British Museum in 2003, as a symbol of gratitude for the sanctuary offered to his parents by Britain during the Second World War. In addition, he presented the Jeremy Adler Collection to King’s College, a body of work comprising books, invitations and exhibition catalogues on artists including his mother and those in her émigré circle.

Related books

Peter Filkins, H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)
Carol Tully, Out of Europe: Travel and Exile in Mid-twentieth-century Wales, Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 18, Issue 2, 2014, pp. 174-186
Marcel Atze, Otlose Botscahft. Der Freundeskreis H.G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Baermann Steiner im englischen Exil, Marbacher Magazin, 84 (Marbach: Schiller-Nationalmuseum, 1998)

Public collections

Related organisations

École des Beaux-Arts (student)

Ben Uri Research Unit

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

Bettina Adler artist