Ernest (né Ernst) Neuschul was born to Jewish parents in Aussig, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic) in 1895. A prominent member of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, he was considered a 'degenerate artist' by the Hitler regime, and fled to Prague from Nazi Germany in 1938. In 1939 he took refugee in Britain, living for a brief successful period in Wales, at Mumbles, Swansea, before moving permanently to London; Neuschul exhibited with the refugee organisation, the Free German League of Culture (FGLC) in London in 1939, and continued to show his work, as his figurative style evolved towards full abstraction.
Painter and graphic artist Ernest (né Ernst) Neuschul was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Aussig, Austria-Hungary (now Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic) in 1895. He studied in Prague and then Vienna, where he was drawn to the work of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka; he avoided conscription by moving to Cracow in 1916. In summer 1919 he returned to Prague, where he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. He held his first solo exhibition, comprising 39 works, in Prague in 1919, and was hailed as one of the leading exponents of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, that rejected expressionism, combining elements of satire and social commentary. In Prague, Neuschul also met the Dutch-Javanese dancer Takka-Takka (Lucie Lindemann, 1890–1980), his first principal model, whom he married in 1922, holding his first solo exhibition in Rome the same year. He designed her costumes, and for the next four years they toured Europe, the USA and Canada as a Javanese dance couple, with Neuschul adopting the name 'Yoga-Taro'.
In 1926 Neuschul joined the radical, anti-fascist, Berlin Novembergruppe, meeting Ludwig Meidner and Arthur Segal; he was elected chairman in 1932. As a confirmed socialist and Communist, he recorded the lives of working people in his painting. 1927 was a key year: he participated in eight exhibitions, six of them in Berlin, and was offered a contract with Neumann-Nierendorf gallery. He was appointed chair of drawing and painting at the Charlottenburg Municipal Art School in 1931, and Professor of Fine Art at the Berlin Academy in 1932. Following the rise of Nazism, Neuschul was dismissed from his professorship and labelled a 'degenerate artist'. In 1933, following an earlier self-portrait, 'The Agitator' (1932), he painted a searching double portrait of himself and his Czech model Mimi Wotzilka (1918–2014) (now Ben Uri Collection). In February 1934, he married a young German woman, Christl Blell, who gave birth to their first son Tyl Peter (later Khalil) in March. Soon afterwards, Mimi joined the household; both women continued to pose for Neuschul and they became lifelong companions.
In 1935, at the invitation of the Moscow Artists Association, the Neuschuls moved to Moscow, where he painted a double portrait of Josef Stalin and Georgi Dimitrov. As Stalin’s purges intensified however, Neuschul was warned that it was unsafe, and they returned to Aussig in 1936, where during his 1937 exhibition, several paintings were slashed and disfigured with swastikas. In 1938 Hitler annexed the Sudeten, and the Neuschuls fled to Prague. In 1939, they were forced to flee again on the last train out of Czechoslovakia; his mother and other family members, who were due to follow the next day, all perished in Auschwitz concentration camp. The Neuschul household was helped by Usti friends and companions Ruth and Didi; the latter, who was already in the UK, found them all sponsors through Lady Gowers, wife of senior civil servant Sir Ernest Gowers. Neuschul was also greatly assisted by David Grenfell, Labour MP for Gower, Wales, a major supporter of Czechoslovak refugees, whose portrait he painted as a sign of gratitude, presenting it at the House of Commons. The Neuschuls lived temporarily in London, Devon and Oxford, before settling, with Grenfell’s encouragement, in Mumbles, Swansea, where Neuschul painted local working people, including steelworkers, miners and cockle pickers, as well as local worthies, among the Mayor of Swansea, J.R. Martin, and Lewis Jones MP. In 1941, upon the recommendation of William Grant Murray, curator of the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, Neuschul made an (unsuccessful) submission to the War Artists Advisory Commission.
After the war, Neuschul moved to London, explaining to Grant Murray that: ‘Swansea is not a place to provide an artist with a livelihood’, and in 1946, settled in Hampstead, anglicising his name to Ernest Norland (although it most commonly appears as Ernest or Ernst Neuschul). As a member of the Free German League of Culture (FGLC), he participated in its first group exhibition at the Wertheim Gallery, London in 1939, showing a powerful, dramatically lit painting of a charwoman scrubbing. He also lectured for the Anglo-Sudeten Club and contributed articles to Einheit (Unity), the Club's newspaper, which was published fortnightly from May 1942 until November 1945. In 1944 he had an exhibition at the National Museum of Wales. Afterwards, Neuschul gradually moved towards simplified figuration and then to abstraction. Despite further solo exhibitions and a 1959 retrospective at the Bezalel National Museum in Jerusalem, he was never able to recapture his earlier success.
Ernest Neuschul died in London, England on 11 September 1968. In 1988 the Leicester Museum & Art Gallery held his first UK retrospective exhibition. His work is represented in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea and Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, as well as the Berlinische Galerie in Germany. A Neuschul research project is currently being undertaken in Brno.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ernest Neuschul]
Publications related to [Ernest Neuschul] in the Ben Uri Library