Gustav Metzger was born to Polish Orthodox Jewish parents in Nuremberg, Germany in 1926. In 1939, at the age of 14, together with his older brother Max, he fled to Britain with the help of the 'Refugee Children Movement'; his remaining family perished in the Holocaust. Metzger trained under David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic (1945–53), was later recognised for his political and artistic protests and is best known for his formulation and production of auto-destructive art.
Artist and political activist Gustav Metzger was born to Polish, Orthodox Jewish parents in 1926 in Nuremberg, Germany. At the age of 14, Gustav, together with his older brother Max, escaped to Britain with the help of the 'Refugee Children Movement'; his remaining family, with the exception of his two sisters, perished in the Holocaust. Upon arrival in England in 1939, Metzger and his brother were initially housed in Butlins Holiday Camp, then in a hostel for refugee children in London, and were eventually evacuated to Hemel Hempstead at the outbreak of war. In September 1941 Metzger began a three year course to train to be a cabinet-maker in Leeds which ended after a year because of the war. It was in Leeds that he first encountered the work of Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Matthew Smith, Jacob Epstein, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper, and Gaudier-Brzeska. In 1942, he began working as a furniture maker and simultaneously became interested in revolutionary left-wing politics, reading Communist literature alongside the writings of Eric Gill. He subsequently spent six months working at the Harewood Estate and became a vegetarian before moving to Bristol, where he lived in a commune of Trotskyists and Anarchists in Clifton, while he worked on farms outside the city. It was through Derek Eastwood, a visitor to the commune that Metzger became familiar with the work of psychoanalyst Wilhlem Reich, subsequently deciding to become a sculptor instead of a professional revolutionary. Metzger made his first sculptures, 'strongly influenced by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore' while working in the organic garden at Champneys nature-cure clinic near Tring in Hertfordshire, carving them from small pieces of stone (Gustav Metzger, Frieze Magazine, March 2017).
In 1945, following the advice of Henry Moore, whom Metzger had approached hoping to become his assistant, he began studying life drawing at the Cambridge School of Art before enrolling at the Sir John Cass Institute in London to study sculpture. Between 1945 and 1953 he joined the life drawing class at the Borough Polytechnic taught by David Bomberg, himself of Polish-Jewish origin, recalling: 'David Bomberg was the biggest influence on me [...] I would describe Bomberg as a great figure because he was more than an artist. At one point, he dominated his students but, at the same moment, he opened up opportunities for them to go deeper than they would have done without him' (Gustav Metzger, Frieze Magazine, March 2017). Bomberg encouraged Metzger to exhibit a large painting in egg tempera entitled Womb-Man with the London Group in 1948, after seeing it exhibited at the Ben Uri Art Society Spring Exhibition: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings by Contemporary Jewish Artists, under the title Woman with Child, earlier that same year. Metzger became increasingly close to Bomberg from 1950 onwards, initiating the formation of the Borough Bottega, participating in their group exhibition at the Berkeley Galleries, London in 1953 and undertaking research on Bomberg's career. Metzger's decision to leave the group in 1953, however, led Bomberg to break contact, and coincided with Metzger's relocation to Kings Lynn in Norfolk.
Having experienced the destructive capabilities of twentieth century society at first hand, Metzger began to concentrate on the 'formulation of what destruction is and what it might be in relation to art'. He was actively involved in protest against nuclear armament from the late 1950s, and was one of the co-founders, together with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, of the antiwar protest group Committee of 100. From 1959 onwards, Metzger developed the concept of auto-destructive art based on the political and ecological themes of his era, such as the nuclear arms race and ecological destruction. He also developed the principle of auto-creative art and explored the idea of using computer technology in art making. In his first manifesto, he defined auto-destructive art as a 'form of public art for industrial societies' that focuses on the twentieth century's potential for annihilation by means of self-destructive elements. Processes of dissolution thus take centre stage in many of his works and actions, such as the corrosion of canvases by acid or the erosion of steel monuments. Together with John Sharkey, Metzger organised the seminal 'Destruction in Art' Symposium in London in 1966 attended by, among others, Yoko Ono. The fleeting nature of Metzger's works was designed to represent an attack on the commercialisation and commodification of art. In 1974 he announced 'Years Without Art 1977–80': a call for artists not to produce or sell work for three years, further evidence of his anti-capitalist beliefs. In the 1980s Metzger withdrew from the art world, spending five years in the Netherlands studying the work of Johannes Vermeer.
A retrospective of Metzger's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1998 and in 2009, the Serpentine Gallery held the most extensive exhibition of his work in the UK to date. Metzger lived and worked in East London, where he died on 1 March 2017. His work can be found in major UK public collections including Tate and The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Becoming Gustav Metzger: The Early Years, 1945–60 opens at Ben Uri Gallery in London in summer 2021.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Gustav Metzger]
Publications related to [Gustav Metzger] in the Ben Uri Library