Ben Uri Research Unit

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


Erna Auerbach art historian

Erna Auerbach was born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany in 1897. She studied art history and fine art in Frankfurt, then in 1933 fled Nazi Germany with her family, settling in London. Post-war she studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and specialised in artists of the Tudor era, publishing on the subject and teaching in London, New York and Washington DC.

Born: 1897 Frankfurt, Germany

Died: 1975 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1933


Biography

Artist and art historian Erna Auerbach was born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1897 (her mother, Emma Kehrmann (1867–1958), was a painter). Auerbach studied art history at the universities of Frankfurt, Bonn and Munich, under Rudolf Kautzsch (who supervised her doctorate) and Heinrich Wölfflin, before training as a painter, attending classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Frankfurt between 1928 and 1930, and taking private classes with Willi Baumeister.

In 1933, Auerbach left Germany and immigrated to London with her sister, Ilse, whose marriage to émigré lawyer Clive Schmitthoff later led to Erna's inclusion in his archive at Queen Mary at the University of London. Auerbach's work was included in several mixed exhibitions of work by Jewish artists at Ben Uri (then the Ben Uri Jewish Art Gallery) in 1935 and 1936, and then in 1944, 1945 (twice), 1946, 1948 and 1949, and she also became one of the gallery's earliest employees in 1936, when she was paid £2 a week as a gallery invigilator. In 1938 she participated in the German Art exhibition in London at the New Burlington Gallery (intended as a riposte to the Nazi's 1937 Entartete Kunst ('Degenerate Art') touring exhibition), where she is listed alongside other émigrés including Fred Uhlman and Margarete (Grete) Marks as among those 'now working in England'. She served in the Women’s Voluntary Service throughout the Second World War, but after her studio was destroyed, she was one of several émigrée artists who earned a small living producing postcard and Christmas card designs for the Favil Press. After the war, she returned to art history, studying at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and graduating in 1950, and specialising in artists of the Tudor era. She wrote a second dissertation on patronage and painting in 16th-century England, which became the subject of her first published book, Tudor Artists (1954), the first modern work to list the documentary sources for the arts of painting and limning in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods. From 1947–75 she was a visiting lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute in London and the National Gallery, also lecturing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (1970–75) and other institutions. She published on Tudor-era portraits and manuscripts in prestigious art journals including The Burlington Magazine, Apollo and The Connoisseur. Auerbach died in London in 1975. Her archives are at Skinners Library, City University, London and at Queen Mary at the University of London.

Related books

  • Jutta Vinzent, List of Refugee Artists (Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists) From Nazi Germany in Britain (1933-1945), in Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933-1945) (Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2006), pp. 249-298
  • Dictionary of British Artists 1880–1940, ed. by J. Johnson and A. Greutzner (Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1976)
  • Paintings and Sculpture at Hatfield House (London: Constable, 1971)
  • Nicholas Hilliard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961)
  • Tudor Artists: A Study of Painters in the Royal Service and of Portraiture on Illuminated Documents from the Accession of Henry VIII to the Death of Elizabeth I (London: Athlone, 1954)

Related organisations

  • Ben Uri Gallery (invigilator and exhibitor)
  • Courtauld Institute of Art (student)
  • Crosby Hall, Westfield College (lecturer)
  • Metropolitan Museum, New York (lecturer)
  • National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (lecturer)
  • Polytechnic Institute, London (lecturer)
  • Women's Voluntary Service (1939-45)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Flower Paintings of the World of Augustibe Gall, Holt, Norfolk (1971)
  • Ben Uri Picture Fair (1961, 1968)
  • Contemporary Jewish Artists Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Ben Uri Art Gallery (1949)
  • Spring Exhibition by Contemporary Jewish Artists, Ben Uri Art Gallery (1948)
  • Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Contemporary Jewish Artists, Ben Uri Art Gallery (1946)
  • Autumn Exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings by Contemporary Jewish Artists, Ben Uri Art Gallery (1945)
  • Exhibition of Portraits by Contemporary Jewish Artists, Ben Uri Art Gallery (1945)
  • Arcade Gallery (1945)
  • Summer Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings by Contemporary Artists, Ben Uri Art Gallery (1944)
  • Leicester Galleries (1944)
  • Royal Academy of Arts (1943)
  • Exhibition of 20th Century German Art, Royal Academy of Arts (1938)
  • Solo Show, Brook Street Gallery, London (1938)
  • Annual Exhibition of Works by Jewish Artists, Ben Uri Jewish Art Gallery (1936)
  • German Jewish Artiststs' Work, Parson Gallery, London (1936)
  • Annual Exhibition of Works by Jewish Artists, Ben Uri Jewish Art Gallery (1935)
  • Exhibition of Works by Jewish Artists, house of Mrs. E. H. Schiff, Lyall Street, Belgrave Square (1935)
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Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Erna Auerbach]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Erna Auerbach] in the Ben Uri Library