Ivor Weiss was born in London, England to Romanian-Jewish immigrant parents in 1919, studying at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art and St Martin’s School of Art. A versatile artist, he experimented with a wide range of media and techniques, including oils, watercolour, mosaics, murals, drawings, linocuts, stained glass and textiles. His widely-exhibited work focused on working-class protagonists both in England and Italy, as well as Jewish traditions and memories of his childhood in the East End.
Artist and art teacher, Ivor Weiss was born in Stepney in the East End of London to Romanian-Jewish immigrant parents in 1919. He showed an early artistic talent which was encouraged by his parents. His studies at the Northampton Road Polytechnic were curtailed by the outbreak of the Second World War and he served with the British Eighth Army, principally in North Africa and Malta. During this period he attended the Bardi Studio in Cairo, then the Malta School of Art, gaining first prize for figure drawing. In 1946, after he was demobbed, he briefly attended Heatherley’s School of Fine Art in Chelsea, London, where he gained a diploma in painting. He then progressed to St Martin’s School of Art where he studied painting and art history and met fellow student, Joan Dare, whom he married in 1948.
After graduating in 1950, the couple immigrated to the USA, to join Weiss’s brother, an RAF pilot on secondment, who promised a good life in Alabama, while Britain struggled under postwar austerity. The couple ran inter-racial art classes, supplemented by mural and mosaic design commissions for commercial clients, and art dealing. However, their liberal practice of holding multi-racial classes was at odds with a segregated society, and in 1955 they returned to England.
Weiss carried out a number of commissions in the UK and further afield, including enamelled jewellery for Harrods and Heals stores in London; stained-glass windows for the Stock Exchange in Johannesburg, South Africa; a silk scarf for Hardy Amies, the London-based fashion house, and mosaic for Michelson Ltd Diagnostic in Maidstone, Kent. He taught art at Lancing College, a private boys' boarding school near Brighton, but after just six months he and his family decided to move to Brightlingsea, a small seaside town in Essex, where he took a post as an art teacher at the local High School. In 1965 Weiss and his wife purchased a large house in Colchester, Essex, where they opened their first gallery as fine art dealers and restorers. In 1969, they acquired a farmhouse in Tuscany, which inspired Weiss’s Italian landscapes.
Weiss had the first of several solo exhibitions with the O’Hana Gallery, Mayfair, in 1963, followed by a solo exhibition at the Minories Galleries in Colchester in 1971 and a retrospective at the Ben Uri Gallery in 1980, where he had first shown in 1961 at the opening of the gallery's Berners Street premises. Interested in figurative representation and stylised abstraction, he experimented with a wide range of media and techniques, including oils, watercolour, mosaics, murals, drawings, linocuts, stained glass and textiles. His figurative works focused on working-class protagonists both in England and, in the latter part of his career, in Italy. His bold linocut Women of Lucania (Ben Uri Collection) depicting two peasant women from Lucania, in southern Italy; their bulky skirts, stout shoes and tightly-wound headscarves, emphasising their solid forms which dominate the foreground, reminiscent of Russian folk-art motifs. A painted version of this work was shown in the Ben Uri retrospective in 1980. Following a series of paintings on Jewish ritual, inspired by his childhood and the traditions he grew up with in the East End among orthodox Jews, Weiss created a body of works in the 1970s exploring Christian practices and iconography. This included several iterations of 'The Last Supper', of which the version held in the Ben Uri Collection, grouping the apostles in a dramatic vertical format, is among the most powerful and original. Weiss was a member of Colchester Art Society in the 1950s and for a second period from 1970–85. Ivor Weiss died of a heart attack in London, England in 1986. The Albemarle Gallery, in the East End of London, organised a posthumous exhibition of his work in 2005. More recently, in 2017 the Weiss Gallery (now run by his son Mark) held the exhibition Portrait of an Artist: Ivor Weiss accompanied by an online catalogue. In the UK public domain, Weiss's work is represented in the Ben Uri Collection which holds four works, including Four Card Players, a homage to the Cezanne work of the same subject. In 2017 the Weiss family donated a painting by Weiss to Sandys Row Synagogue, in London's East End.
Ivor Weiss in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ivor Weiss]