Ben Uri Research Unit

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


Eva Frankfurther artist

Eva Frankfurther was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany in 1930; following the rise of National Socialism, the Frankfurther family fled to London in 1939; she spent a year at Stoatley Rough boarding school in Surrey, and was afterwards evactuated to Hertfordshire. After the war she studied at St Martin's School of Art, where her fellow students included Frank Auerbach. Quickly disillusioned with the London arts scene, she worked evenings at Lyons Corner House, painting portraits during the day of the ethnically diverse, largely immigrant population of London, among whom she lived and worked and whose lives she championed.

Born: 1930 Berlin, Germany

Died: 1959 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1939

Other name/s: Eva Frankfurter


Biography

Painter Eva Frankfurther was born on 10 February 1930 in the Dahlem district of Berlin, Germany into an assimilated, educated Jewish family with leanings towards music and the visual arts. Following the rise of National Socialism, she fled to England with her siblings in April 1939 (their parents following on one of the last flights to leave Germany prior to the onset of the Second World War). After a year at Stoatley Rough, a mixed boarding school in Haslemere, Surrey for German refugee children, the children rejoined their parents in a rented flat in Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead in December 1941, but shortly afterwards, Eva and her older sister, Beate, were evacuated to Hertfordshire for a further four years. After the war, Frankfurther, who had shown a talent for art from an early age, enrolled at St Martin's School of Art in London in 1946, at the age of 16, taking classes in anatomy, life drawing, painting, and etching. Her student peers included fellow refugee Frank Auerbach, who recalled her work as 'full of feeling for people', and contemptuous of 'professional tricks or gloss'; her tutor, Bateson Mason, believed that she thought of her art 'primarily as a means of establishing contact with people, and not as an end in itself' (cited Bohm-Duchen 2001). Never without a sketchbook, Frankfurther made hundreds of vivid sketches, occasionally from life, most often from memory, usually in a few telling lines. She exhibited alongside fellow St Martin's students including Auerbach, Doig Simmonds and Joseph Tilson at the short-lived Coffee House gallery, near Trafalgar Square (c. 1949–51), but quickly became disillusioned with the London art scene. During the summers, she frequently travelled abroad to continental Europe and to America, where she taught summer schools, and where a visit to Harlem laid the foundation for her interest in depicting ethnic minorities.

After returning to London, she became a counter hand and washer-up at Lyons Corner House (1951–56), working the evening shift and painting her fellow workers from among the constantly shifting, multicultural population during the day: 'West Indian, Irish, Cypriot and Pakistani immigrants, English whom the Welfare State had passed by, these were the people amongst whom I lived and made some of my best friends,' she later observed. In 1952 she moved into lodgings in Whitechapel and over the next five years, exhibited regularly at the open East End Academy exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where her work was frequently noticed by art critic and broadcaster Mervyn Levy. Her stoical cast of Whitechapel characters, particularly from the Jewish and Irish communities, observed without sentiment against a spare background in a muted palette, conjure up London's post-war austerity; her empathy for the 'stark struggle' of their daily lives, instinctively in keeping with the German Expressionist tradition. In contrast, her swift character sketches are often light-hearted and humorous. Frankfurther sold regularly but priced her work very low, never signing it and frequently giving it away to friends, family, and sitters. In 1956 she became a shift worker at the Tate & Lyle Sugar Factory in Victoria Dock, finding further material among the dockers, brickies, hod-carriers and Trade Unionists, and also exhibited in the Tercentenary Exhibition at Ben Uri Gallery.

In 1957, she accepted invitations from friends and family to spend eight months in Israel, producing a considerable body of work, much of which was stolen and never recovered. After returning to London, uncertain of her future (she had applied to become a social worker at LSE), she took her own life on 1 January 1959. A retrospective was held at Ben Uri Gallery in 1962, a further exhibition at Clare Hall, Cambridge in 1979 was reviewed by art historian and critic Frank Whitford, who observed: ‘The work on show is so good that I wondered why I had not heard of Eva Frankfurther before. It did not surprise me to find that she was a refugee from Germany, coming to Britain at the age of nine, for her style of portraiture belongs so clearly to a German tradition’ (Cambridge Evening News, 27 November 1979). An important memorial exhibition with a catalogue by Beate Planskoy and an essay by Monica Bohm-Duchen, was organised by Agi Katz at the Boundary Gallery, London in 2001. Two further exhibitions, curated by Sarah MacDougall, Eva Frankfurther Research Fellow for the Study of Émigré Artists (2011–16): Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry (2014), exploring the decade through five powerful, individual, figurative painters all working within a broadly realist tradition, and Refugees: The Lives of Others – Selected Works by Eva Frankfurther (2017), exploring the émigré context, were held at Ben Uri Gallery; the latter also launched a website dedicated to her life and work. Frankfurther's work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection and Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Related books

  • Christine Lindey, Art for All: British Socially Committed Art, from the 1930s to the Cold War (London: Artery Publications, 2018)
  • Sarah MacDougall, 'Meine Heimat is in my heart and my head': Women Artists in Exile – Eva Frankfurther and Susan Einzig', in Charmian Brinson, Jana Barbora Buresova and Andrea Hammel, eds., Exile and Gender II: Politics, Education and the Arts, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Vol. 18 (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2017), pp. 170-183
  • Sarah MacDougall, 'The Lives of Others: Eva Frankfurther', in Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman, L S Lowry (London: Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, 2014), pp. 90-103
  • Jutta Vinzent, 'The Other of the Other: Refugee Artists and Black Subjects' in Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson, eds., Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain, c. 1933–45 (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2009) pp. 80-85
  • Jutta Vinzent, Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933–1945) (Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2006) pp. 249-298
  • David Buckmann, Artists in Britain since 1945, Vol. 1, A-K (Bristol: Sansom & Company, 2006)
  • Jennifer Powell and Jutta Vinzent, Art and Migration, Humanitas Subsida Series, Number 2 (Birmingham: The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 2005)
  • Monica Bohm-Duchen, 'Eva Frankfurther' in Beate Planskoy ed., Eva Frankfurther 1930–1959 (London: Peter Halban, 2001) pp. 11-20
  • Beate Planskoy, 'Remembering Eva, My Sister' in Beate Planskoy ed., Eva Frankfurther 1930–1959 (London: Peter Halban, 2001) pp. 7-10
  • Glen Doy, Labour Intensive: Contemporary Painting Commemorating Working Lives (Leicester: City Gallery, 2000)
  • Kunst im Exil in Grossbritannien 1933–45 (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst, 1986)
  • 'Art Reviews: Paintings, Drawings and Lithographs by Eva Frankfurther', Clare Hall, Cambridge, 1979, Cambridge Evening News, Tuesday, 27 November 1979
  • Eva Frankfurther, People, with an appreciation by Mervyn Levy (London: Gilchrist Studios, 1961)

Public collections

Related organisations

  • St Martin's School of Art, London (student)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Painting with an Accent: German-jewish Emigre Stories, curated by Ben Uri at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, London (2024)
  • Migrations: Masterworks from the Ben Uri Collection, curated by Ben Uri at the Gloucester Museum (2019)
  • Liberators: Extraordinary Women Artists from the Ben Uri Collection, Ben Uri Gallery (2018)
  • Finchleystrasse: German Artists in Exile in Great Britain and Beyond 1933–45, German Embassy in association with Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2018)
  • Refugees: The Lives of Others – Selected Works by Eva Frankfurther, Ben Uri Gallery & Museum (2017)
  • 100 for 100: Ben Uri – Past, Present, Future, Ben Uri at Christie's South Kensington (2016)
  • Unexpected: Continuing Narratives of Identity and Migration, Ben Uri Gallery & Museum (2016)
  • Out of Chaos: Ben Uri – 100 Years in London, Ben Uri at Somerset House (2015)
  • Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman, L S Lowry, Ben Uri Gallery & Museum (2014)
  • Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain, c. 1933–45, Ben Uri Gallery & Museum (2012)
  • Art and Migration, The Barber Institute, Birmingham (2005)
  • Eva Frankfurther 1930–1959: Memorial Exhibition, Boundary Gallery (2001)
  • Kunst im Exil in Grossbritannien 1933–45, Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst, Berlin, Germany (1986)
  • Exhibition of Oil Paintings, Water Colours and Lithographs by Eva Frankfurther, Margaret Fisher (1981)
  • Clare Hall, Cambridge (1979)
  • Eva Frankfurther 1930–1959: Retrospective, Ben Uri Art Gallery (1962)
  • East End Academy (1957), Whitechapel Gallery (1957)
  • Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists, Ben Uri Art Gallery (1956)
  • East End Academy (1955), Whitechapel Gallery (1955)
  • East End Academy 1954, Whitechapel Gallery (1954)
  • East End Academy (1953), Whitechapel Gallery (1953)
  • East End Academy 1952, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1952)
  • 7th Exhibition of Paintings, Lithographs & Sculpture by Students of St Martin's School of Art, The Coffee House Gallery, Trafalgar Square (c. 1949–51)
  Eva Frankfurther
   
Ben Uri collection

Eva Frankfurther in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Eva Frankfurther]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Eva Frankfurther] in the Ben Uri Library