Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1901 London, England

Died: 1978 Leiston, England

Other name/s: Helen Kapp

Biography

Artist, curator, and art critic Helen Kapp was born in Hampstead, London, on 17 December 1901, to Emil Benjamin Kapp, a German-born wine merchant and vice-president of the London Jewish Hospital, and American-born Bella Kapp. Her elder brother, caricaturist Edmond Kapp (1890–1978), is represented in the Ben Uri Collection. She trained at the Slade School of Fine Art (where her brother had studied) and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, studying by day and illustrating Paris fashions for the Manchester Guardian and News Chronicle by night. During the Second World War, she lectured for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), predecessor of the Arts Council. Postwar, she spent two years as head of the art department at an army education centre in the Middle East. In 1939, she held her first solo exhibition of watercolours at Nicholson's Gallery, London. The Manchester Guardian noted an affinity between Kapp’s works and those of Cézanne and Segonzac, but praised her individuality: ‘Her most recent work has an individual sparkle and a reticence of colour that owe little to either artist’ (Manchester Guardian, 1939, p. 8). With Ben Uri she participated in the Spring Exhibition (1948, showing a watercolour view of Mount Carmel) and in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Jewish Painters and Sculptors in 1950. Kapp also exhibited at the Artists’ International Association (AIA, a left-leaning organisation of which she was a member), The London Group, and the Society of Wood Engravers, among others. The Jewish Chronicle singled out her Portrait No. 101 in the Society’s 1926 exhibition at London’s Redfern Gallery, describing it as a ‘thoroughly admirable piece of work’ (Collins, 1926, p. 17). She also illustrated books, including Seed of Israel by Gerald Bullett (1927) and the surrealist-inspired cookbook Take Forty Eggs: A Comprehensive Guide to Cookery and Household Mismanagement, which described cooking without food. In 1941, ten of Kapp’s artworks were included in a group exhibition in Wakefield for London-based artists whose opportunities to exhibit were curtailed by the Blitz. She also wrote as an art critic for the Jewish Chronicle, contributing an article on the Warburg Institute (1939) and a review of Epstein’s autobiography (1941), among others. During the 1960s, Kapp's reviews appeared in The Guardian.

Finding her artistic career unsatisfying, Kapp shifted focus to curating. In 1951, she became the fourth director of Wakefield Art Gallery (now The Hepworth Wakefield), the first woman in the role. There, she championed and acquired works by contemporary artists, including Alan Davie, Joan Eardley, Anne Redpath, and Sheila Fell, strengthening Wakefield’s mid-century British art collection. She also inspired a young David Hockney, who wrote to her after visiting the gallery. Wakefield curator Abi Shapiro has noted that while the major retrospective that established Davie’s reputation in 1958 is often credited to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, it was in fact initiated at Wakefield, adding that ‘Kapp’s show generated a great buzz and she got 1,300 people through the door in that first week in Wakefield’ (Thorpe, 2019, p. 20). Kapp also mounted the Continental British School of Painting (1959), which highlighted émigré artists who arrived in Britain between 1934 and 1943 due to persecution or war and became British citizens and AIA. members. The term ‘Continental British School’ was coined by émigré art historian J. P. Hodin but failed to gain traction. In 1956, the Manchester Guardian remarked: ‘It speaks volumes for the energy, enthusiasm and discernment of its director, Miss Helen Kapp, that the Wakefield City Art Gallery, although one of the smallest and newest of our provincial galleries, is able year after year to mount exhibitions of contemporary art which easily surpass in interest what the provinces usually have to offer’ (A.C.S., 1956, p. 5). From 1961-67, Kapp was director of the newly opened Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, Cumbria, which she inaugurated with an exhibition on British portraitist Daniel Gardner. In 1974, she became picture buyer for the North-West Arts Association.

She frequently lectured, including ‘Approach to Contemporary Art’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1951) and a six-part University of London extension course series, ‘Art Today, and its Development Since the Eighteenth Century,’ held at Ben Uri in 1948, following lectures by émigré art historian, Helen Rosenau, who spoke on 'The Jewish Contribution to Art'. After retiring, she lived in Leiston, Suffolk, but remained active, organising an exhibition at the Harrogate Festival (1973) and publishing Enjoying Pictures (1975), which aimed to make art history more accessible to the general public. Helen Kapp died in Leiston, Suffolk, England on 13 October 1978. Her artwork is represented in UK public collections, including the British Museum and V&A, London. Hepworth Wakefield’s archives hold her sketchbooks, notebooks, and curatorial material, some of which was expected to feature in the exhibition Vision & Reality: 100 Years of Contemporary Art in Wakefield, unfortunately postponed due to the 2020–2021 pandemic.