Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1913 Brooklyn, New York, USA

Died: 1993 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1941

Other name/s: Elihu Estorick

Biography

Collector and art dealer Eric Estorick was born Elihu Estorick in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York City, the son of Jewish émigrés who had fled anti-semitic pogroms in Russia in 1905. He studied sociology at New York University, where he also came into contact with left-wing intellectual ideas. His encounter with the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who displayed European avant-garde art at his 291 Gallery, including that of the Futurist painter Gino Severini, left an indelible impression on him. By 1938 Estorick was a lecturer in sociology at New York University, a position he kept until 1941 when he went to England to undertake research for his book on the British Labour politician Stafford Cripps. During the Second World War, he became head of the British Empire Division of the United States Broadcast Intelligence Service.

Travelling home on the Queen Elizabeth liner after the war, he met Salome Dessau, the daughter of a German-Jewish refugee. She had studied art in London, specialising in textile design. They married a few weeks after their arrival to New York in 1947, moving back to London the same year. During their honeymoon in Switzerland, they met the Polish émigré artist Arthur Bryks. Passionate about avant-garde art, he showed Estorick Umberto Boccioni's book on Italian Futurism with illustrations by Severini, Giacomo Balla and others. Eager to buy Italian art, the Estoricks travelled with him to Milan. There, they visited Mario Sironi, a former Futurist artist, impoverished, unfashionable and ostracised because of his earlier support for Mussolini. They bought the contents of his studio – some 40 years' work – on the spot. From that moment on, Estorick became an avid collector of Italian Futurist art, travelling frequently to Italy in the late 1940s and 1950s, visiting dealers and artists' studios. In 1956 he employed émigré Annely Juda as his secretary; she in turn would establish her own successful eponymous gallery in London which still runs today). Bolstered by a strong post-war dollar and a feeble lira, he was able to build one of the world's greatest collections of early 20th-century Italian painting. Estorick bought hundreds of paintings and drawings at knock-down prices from all over Europe, including avant-garde works from the Soviet Union and other Socialist Bloc countries. He also signed an agreement with the Soviet government to act as an official export agent for modernist Russian artworks and, between 1960 and 1964, visited Russia 14 times.

In the 1950s, he started promoting his collection across Britain. Exhibitions were organised with the help of the Arts Council, most notably a show at the Wakefield City Art Gallery, Yorkshire in 1957. In 1954, he persuaded the Tate directors to hold the exhibition Modern Italian Art from the Estorick Collection, which later travelled to several European and American venues. In 1960 Estorick took up art dealing full-time. He opened the Grosvenor Gallery in Mayfair later that year, selling works by artists such as Marc Chagall and René Magritte, as well as by previously unknown painters, including from Czechoslovakia. In 1965 he mounted an exhibition of works by Oskar Rabin, one of the leaders of Soviet 'unofficial art' of the 1960s, the first one-man show by a living Soviet artist held in the West. In 1966 he mounted the first London exhibition devoted to the Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky. In 1967 he met the Russian-born French designer Erté (Romain de Tirtoff), whose art deco work had been popular in the 1930s. After the success of Erté's first London exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1967, the Estoricks signed an exclusive contract with Erté and initiated a series of solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, which brought him back into the public eye and made him one of the best-selling artists of the 1980s. In 1968 the Italian Republic conferred the title of Cavaliere on Estorick, followed in 1970 by the honour of Commendatore for his services in promoting Italian art. Unwilling to sell his collection to museums, shortly before his death he founded the Eric and Salome Estorick Foundation to house his Italian works. Estorick died in London in 1993. In 1998 the Estorick Foundation opened its doors to the public, in a Georgian house in Canonbury Square in north London.

Related books

DianeKunzelman, More Than Meets the Eye: New Research on the Estorick Collection (London: Estorick Foundation, 2015)
Anne Pimlott Baker, 'Estorick, Eric Elihu', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Alexandra Noble, 'Eric Estorick: a Life in Pictures', in Alexandra Noble and Livia, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art (London: Umberto Allemandi, 1997), pp. 9-31
'The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art', Visiting Arts, No. 35, Autumn 1997
Eric and Salome Estorick: Memorial Exhibition, exhib. cat. (London: Grosvenor Gallery, 1994)
Eric Estorick, Erté, The Last Works: Graphics, Sculpture (New York: Dutton Studio Books, 1992)
Eric Estorick, Aspects of Contemporary Soviet Art: Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours (Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery, 1964)
Modern Italian Art from the Estorick Collection, Tate, exhib. cat. (Bishops Stortford: Chadwyck-Healey, 1975)
Eric Estorick, Modern Italian Art from the Estorick Collection (London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1956)

Public collections

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art

Related organisations

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art (founder)
Grosvenor Gallery (founder)
New York City University (student and lecturer)

Selected exhibitions

Eric and Salome Estorick Memorial Exhibition, Grosvenor Gallery, London (1994)
First One Man Exhibition by the Russian Painter Oskar Rabin: Paintings 1956–1965, Grosvenor Gallery, London (1965)
De Estorick verzameling van moderne Italiaanse kunst, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1960)
Paintings From the Estorick Collection, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (1959)
Modern Italian Art from the Estorick Collection, National Gallery of Ottawa, Ottawa and Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (1958)
Modern Italian Art from the Estorick Collection, Tate Gallery, London (1956)
Contemporary Italian Art: Works from the Collection of E. Estorick, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (1955)
Contemporary Italian Art, Wakefield City Art Gallery (1954)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Eric Estorick]