Ben Uri Research Unit

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


Georg Ehrlich artist

Georg Ehrlich was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria), in 1897 and trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule. To avoid Nazi persecution, in 1937 he fled to England, where he was briefly interned. An important figure within émigré circles during the war, afterwards Ehrlich recovered his international reputation and was well-known for his bronze compositions and portraits.

Born: 1897 Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)

Died: 1966 Lucerne, Switzerland

Year of Migration to the UK: 1937

Other name/s: George Ehrlich


Biography

Sculptor, printmaker and painter, Georg Ehrlich was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) on 22 February 1897. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) , Vienna from 1912–15, before serving in the Austrian army during the First World War. From 1919 he lived and exhibited in Munich and Berlin, returning to Vienna in 1923. In 1928 he completed his first sculpture commission, a monument to the blind organist Josef Labor (Central Cemetery, Vienna), and over the next decade exhibited in over ten cities, including three times at the Venice Biennale. After Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in 1933 and the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation, Ehrlich’s work was confiscated from galleries in Mannheim and Nuremberg. In 1937 his work featured in the regime's Entartete Kunst [Degenerate Art] exhibition in Munich (and its susbsequent tour) and he fled to England in 1937, where he was joined by his wife Bettina (née Bauer), a painter and illustrator. Bettina's sister, Mira, who was already in England, helped to organise their passage.

Ehrlich was awarded a Gold Medal at the Paris World's Fair in the same year and arrived in England with a considerable reputation as an expressionist printmaker and as an international prize-winning sculptor. In July 1938 his bronze Italian Boy (1935) featured in the Exhibition of 20th Century German Art at the New Burlington Galleries, London (staged as a riposte to the Degenerate Art show), where it was acquired by German émigré entrepreneur and art collector Erich Goeritz and presented to Tate in 1942. In 1939 Ehrlich held a solo exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery, the first of many London shows, prior to his internement as a so-called 'enemy alien' between June and December 1940  in Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. He participated in the camp's first art exhibition, showing sketches and photographs of his sculptures (The Camp, No. 2, p. 10).

In London, Ehrlich became a member of the Free German League of Culture (FGLC), a politically-inspired organisation offering cultural support to anti-Nazi German refugees in Britain throughout the war, and the Austrian Centre (AC), a left-leaning cultural forum for Austrian refugees; he served as director of its fine arts section,  the ‘Association of Austrian Painters, Sculptors and Architects’. He was actively involved in both organisations and participated in  exhibitions, mainly contributing landscapes and portraits of women and children in an expressionist style, as well as exhibiting with the left-wing Artists’ International Association (AIA). He attracted patronage as a portrait sculptor, including a private commission from the then director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, for portrait heads of his two young sons, Alan and Colin (1942–43). Clark later supported the Ehrlichs' applications for naturalisation in 1947. Ehrlich produced bronze portraits for other well-known personalities, including composer Benjamin Britten (1950–52, Leicestershire County Council) and tenor Peter Pears (1963, Red House, Aldeburgh). He also exhibited with Ben Uri Gallery and produced a portrait sculpture of the young daughter of Ben Uri board member and collector J. E. Posnansky, Gillian (later gallerist, Gillian Raffles).

Ehrlich received numerous public commissions, including for the pietà The Bombed Child (1943, Chelmsford Cathedral) for the victims of air raids; the small, classical war memorial Pax, begun in 1944, and unveiled in the Garden of Rest in Coventry in 1945; and the double-figure Young Lovers (1951, now in Festival Gardens, London). His Recumbent Boy (original plaster; bronze cast in the collections of North Hertfordshire Museum) was included in the Festival of Britain in 1951. Ehrlich also became part of a new Hertfordshire council initiative in which architects were encouraged to work with muralists and sculptors, selling his Two Sisters (1944) to Essendon Primary School, Welwyn Garden City. Manchester Guardian art critic Stephen Bone, reviewing Ehrlich’s 1953 exhibition of sculpture and drawings at the Lefevre Gallery, London, praised the 'smooth emaciation but great expressiveness’, of his figures, noting that the artist ‘is less interested in the classical qualities of stability and balance […] than in Gothic intensity of feeling. Among the best pieces of sculpture in the present show are those attenuated figures of a mother with a baby or the seated lovers ecstatically and rather mournfully embracing’ (13 January 1953, p. 4). According to Observer critic Neville Wallis, Ehrlich ‘emerges perhaps second only to Epstein to-day in his compassion for suffering humanity' (11 January 1953, p. 6). Ehrlich exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts and was elected an Associate in 1962; he was also a member of The London Group. In 1964 the Arts Council mounted an exhibition of his work, which included Two Sisters (1945–46), originally cast as a private memorial for his wife Bettina for her sister who died in 1944 (one version is in the Ben Uri Collection). From 1962, Ehrlich lived in Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Georg Ehrlich died in Lucerne, Switzerland, on 1 July 1966. A memorial exhibition was held at the O'Hana Gallery, London, in 1968. His work is represented in many UK collections, including the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, Leicester Museums & Galleries and the Tate.

Related books

  • Peter Wakelin, Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2019)
  • Sarah MacDougall, 'Shaped by Life: Artistic Responses to Remembrance in the Reconstruction Process', conference paper (Imperial War Museum, January 2012)
  • Sarah MacDougall, ''Separate Spheres of Endeavour': Experiencing the Émigré Network in Britain, c. 1933-45', in Burcu Dogramaci and Karin Wimmer eds., Netzwerke des Exils: Künstleriche Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933 (Berlin: Mann Verlag, 2011), pp. 71-89
  • Sarah MacDougall, ''A Vitalising Impulse’, Sculptors Behind the Wire: Ernst M Blensdorf, Siegfried Charoux, Georg Ehrlich and Paul Hamann’, paper presented at the Creativity Behind Barbed Wire: an Interdisciplinary Conference on the Products of Prisoners of War in the 20th century (McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge, 2010)
  • Jutta Vinzent, Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933-1945) (Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2006)
  • Margaret Garlake, 'A Minor Language? Three Émigré Sculptors and their Strategies of Assimilation', in Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet eds., Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945: Politics and Cultural Identity, The Yearbook of the Research Center for German and Austrian Exile Studies 6 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 167-200
  • Monica Bohm-Duchen, 'Georg Ehrlich', Grove Dictionary of Art (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000)
  • Johnson & Gruetzner, Dictionary of Artists Working in Britain (Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 1980), p. 163
  • Arnold Haskell, Georg Ehrlich 1897-1966 (London: Bruton Gallery, 1978)
  • Bettina Ehrlich, Georg Ehrlich 1897-1966: Bronzes, Early Drawings, Lithographs and Etchings (London: O'Hana Gallery, 1972)
  • Lord Croft and P. Pears, Georg Ehrlich, exhibition catalogue (London: O’Hana Gallery, 1968)
  • Ernest Rathenau, ed., Georg Ehrlich’s Sketchbook (New York, 1963)
  • F. G. Stone, 'Classical Sculptor', Jewish Chronicle, 13 May 1960, p. 35
  • 'Georg Ehrlich's Work Launches a New Gallery', Manchester Guardian, 2 June 1959, p. 5
  • 'Georg Ehrlich: an English Publication About a Jewish Sculptor', AJR Information, April 1957, p. 11
  • Erica Tietze-Conrat, Georg Ehrlich (London: B T Batsford, 1956)
  • A. K. S., 'Georg Ehrlich', Jewish Chronicle, 16 January 1953, p. 25
  • Stephen Bone, 'Georg Ehrlich: Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings', Manchester Guardian, 13 January 1953, p. 4
  • Neville Wallis, 'Compassion', Observer, 11 January 1953, p. 6
  • Georg Ehrlich, Sculpture, Drawings and Water-Colours by Georg Ehrlich (London: The Leicester Galleries, 1950)
  • Exhibition of Sculpture, Pottery and Sculptors’ Drawings, organised by the FGLC and the AIA, exhibition catalogue (1941)
  • The Camp, No. 8, 13 November 1940, p. 8
  • The Camp, No. 2, 29 September 1940, p. 10
  • 'Exiles' Exhibition', Jewish Chronicle, 23 June 1939, p. 43
  • 'Twentieth Century German Art’, Jewish Chronicle, 15 July 1938, p. 42
  • Stephan Poglayen-Neuwall, 'Georg Ehrlich', Parnassus, Vol. 10, No. 4, April 1938, p. 27

Public collections

Related organisations

  • AC (Austrian Centre) (president of the section of Fine Arts)
  • Artists' International Association (exhibitor)
  • FGLC (Free German League of Culture = Freier Deutscher Kulturbund) (member)
  • London Group (member)
  • Royal Academy of Arts (associate)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art, RWA, Bristol (2019-20)
  • 'Out of Austria', Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London (2018)
  • Georg Ehrlich, JPL Fine Arts (1979)
  • Georg Ehrlich, Bruton Gallery (1978)
  • Georg Ehrlich: Sculpture, Arts Council of Great Britain, MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling (1973)
  • Sculpture and Drawings by Georg Ehrlich, Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester (1970)
  • Memorial Exhibition, O'Hana Gallery, London (1968)
  • An Exhibition of Sculpture by Georg Ehrlich, organised by the Arts Council for the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and Arts (1964)
  • Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists, Ben Uri Gallery (1956)
  • Sculpture by Fredda Brilliant, Georg Ehrlich, Jacob Epstein, Lippy Lipshitz, Abraham Lozoff, Karel Vogel, Ben Uri Gallery (1955)
  • Coronation Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture Reception, Ben Uri Gallery (1953)
  • Georg Ehrlich. Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings, Lefevre Gallery (1953)
  • Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, organised by the London County Council, Battersea Park (1952)
  • Georg Ehrlich, Sculpture, Drawings and Water-Colours by Georg Ehrlich, The Leicester Galleries, London (1950)
  • London Group Exhibition, Suffolk Street (1947)
  • One-man exhibition, Arcade Gallery, London (1945)
  • Artists Aid Jewry Exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1943)
  • War Pictures, AIA exhibition, London (1941)
  • AC annual shows, London (1941 & 1943)
  • AIA and FGLC Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings, FGLC clubhouse, London (1941)
  • Camp Art Exhibition, Hutchinson Camp, Isle of Man (1940)
  • First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors, Wertheim Gallery, London (1939)
  • Sculpture & Drawings by Georg Ehrlich, Matthiesen Gallery, London (1939)
  • Exhibition of 20th Century German Art, New Burlington Galleries, London (1938)
  Georg Ehrlich
   
Ben Uri collection

Georg Ehrlich in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Georg Ehrlich]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Georg Ehrlich] in the Ben Uri Library