Born: 1907 Berlin, Germany
Died: 1967 Berlin, Germany
Year of Migration to the UK: 1936
Other name/s: Hugo Baruch, Hugo Cyril Kulp Baruch
Biography
Gallerist and artist Jack Bilbo (né Hugo Cyril Kulp Baruch) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany on 13 September 1907; he adopted his new name in 1933 after his family’s theatrical costume business was confiscated by the Nazis. Following this expropriation, Bilbo’s father committed suicide, and his disabled mother, later subjected to medical experiments in a Nazi concentration camp, perished. Bilbo was arrested for anti-fascist activities in Berlin in 1933 and escaped to France, then Spain, finally arriving in England in 1936.
Despite the outbreak of war, Bilbo showed at Dutch émigré Anton Zwemmer's London gallery in spring 1940, prior to internment as a so-called 'enemy alien' in summer 1940 in Onchan camp on the Isle of Man, where he organised exhibitions in his 'cabin', visited by 1500 internees. As camp impresario he was the focus of art-related activities. Artworks and a caricature made by fellow internees, Henry de Beuys Roessingh and Heinz Kiewe, gifted on his release in November 1940, confirm his pivotal cultural role. In 1941, he established the Modern Art Gallery, occupying one floor of 12 Baker Street, London as an exhibiting platform ‘against Hitlerism and all it stands for’. Two years later, he relocated to a building at 24 Charles II Street near Haymarket and the gallery became a vital meeting place for émigré artists, including Kurt Schwitters. Bilbo showed his own work alongside major figures including Picasso, Soutine and Modigliani, as well as émigrés including Hein Heckroth, Anna Mayerson, Samson Schames, cartoonist 'Vicky' (Victor Weisz) and Jacob Bornfriend, and British artists including Jan Gordon and Joan Atkins. The gallery also hosted readings of Schwitters' Dadaist poetry and Bilbo’s own macabre stories and published books on the Moderns, Picasso, famous nudes, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Theophile Alexandre Steinlen, and Bilbo's own outsize autobiography (1948). When it closed postwar Bilbo moved to Weybridge, Surrey, where he created giant, erotic female nudes in his garden, later destroyed due to local hostility. During the 1950s, Bilbo and his wife Owo moved to Paris, then the South of France, and in 1956 he returned to Berlin, where he opened a bar and continued his art practice. The Association of Jewish Refugee's journal (AJR) regularly followed Bilbo's activities in its 'Old Acquaintances' column, with an 'In Memoriam' early in 1968.
Bilbo’s own art was influenced by Surrealism and embraced bizarre, erotic or grotesque themes. An irreverent and acute social critic, his satirical drawings expressed the socialist and virulent anti-fascist views he shared with fellow German artists including George Grosz and John Heartfield. Bilbo’s pen drawings, predominantly ballpoint, which influenced émigré artist, Helga Michie, often included text, clearly revealing his ideological position. As Sam Sherman has observed, 'Bilbo's application of ink and paint was as emphatic as his sloganeering. In both drawings and paintings, marks carry a childlike intensity; in counterpoint, the imagery, simplistic and unsophisticated as it may be, effectively conveys what his words describe' (Sherman 2015, p. 223). Bilbo subtitled his autobiography Forty Years of the Complete and Intimate Life-story of an Artist, Author, Sculptor, Art Dealer, Philosopher, Psychologist, Traveller and a Modernist Fighter for Humanity. While his artistic themes were strongly shaped by the unexpected course of life, storytelling remained an important element, and Bilbo deliberately created dramatic back stories, often entirely fictitious, such as being a bodyguard for gangster Al Capone.
Jack Bilbo died, after a long illness, in Berlin, Germany on 19 December 1967; his grandchild is the artist Poppy (formally known as Ben) Woodeson. In 1983 Ben Uri hosted Jack Bilbo, Lottie Reizenstein, Henry Sanders: a memorial exhibition and in 1987, gallerist John Denham included Bilbo’s work in Bildende Künstler im Exil. Bilbo's Estate has been represented by England & Co. since 1988 with exhibitions celebrating both Bilbo’s art and the Modern Art Gallery including Obsessive Visions: Art Outside the Mainstream (2001). Reviewing their 1990 exhibition, critic John Russell Taylor described Bilbo as 'a wild, émigré modernist who blew some unpredictable life into the London gallery scene' (Russell Taylor 1990, p. 21). Bilbo has featured posthumously in Ben Uri exhibitions, including Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933-45 (2009–10), Refugees: The Lives of Others - German Refugee Artists to the UK (2017); Finchleystrasse: German Artists in exile in Great Britain and beyond 1933-45 (2018) and in an online exhibition on interned artists. A posthumous solo exhibition was held at David Zwirner Gallery, London (2014). Bilbo has been cited as an influence on contemporary German painter, Daniel Richter, who featured in Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Richter acknowledged Bilbo's influence in Richter/Bilbo, Max Liebermann Haus and Stiftung Brandenburger Tor, Berlin (2017). Bilbo's work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection and the British Museum.
Related books
- Peter Wakelin, Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2019)
- Richter/Bilbo (exh. cat.), Max Liebermann Haus and Stiftung Brandenburger Tor, Berlin (Berlin: Walter Koenig, 2017)
- Sam Sherman, Jack Bilbo, Artforum International, Vol. 53, Fasc. 5, January 2015, p. 223
- Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar: Jack Bilbo & Ben Woodeson, (London: England & Co., 2014)
- Jutta Vinzent, Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933-1945) (Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2006)
- Jutta Vinzent, Muteness as Utterance of a Forced Reality – Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery (1941-1948), in The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 6, eds., Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet (Amsterdam: Rodopi: 2004)
- John Russell Taylor, 'Critic's Choice: Galleries', The Times, 23 November 1990, p. 21
- Jack Bilbo: An Autobiography' (London: The Modern Art Gallery, 1948)
- Laugh with the Piffles. Drawings by Jack Bilbo with rhymes by Owo Bilbo (London: Modern Art Gallery, 1947)
- Jack Bilbo, Out of My Mind. Strange Stories (London: Modern Art Gallery, 1946)
- Jack Bilbo, Carrying a Gun for Al Capone (London: Quality Press, 1943)
Public collections
Related organisations
- Modern Art Gallery (Director and Founder)
Related web links
- Video on Jack Bilbo's sculptures
- England & Co. Gallery biography
- Jewish Museum Jewish Lives Project
- Ben Uri's online exhibition of interned artists
- Pathé News, 1944
- Pathé News, Interview with Jack Bilbo in Weybridge, 1947
Selected exhibitions
- Finchleystrasse: German Artists in exile in Great Britain and beyond 1933-45, Germany Embassy, London (2018)
- Refugees: The Lives of Others - German Refugee Artists to the UK, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2017)
- Richter/Bilbo, Max Liebermann Haus and Stiftung Brandenburger Tor, Berlin (2017)
- Jack Bilbo, David Zwirner Gallery, London (2014)
- Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar: Jack Bilbo & Ben Woodeson, England & Co., London (2014)
- Obsessive Visions: Art Outside the Mainstream, England and Co., (2001)
- Jack Bilbo and the Moderns: The Modern Art Gallery (1941-1948), England and Co., (1990)
- Retrospective Exhibition, England and Co. (1988)
- Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien 1933–1945 [Art in Exile in Great Britain], Schloss Charlottenburg, West Berlin (1986)
- Jack Bilbo, Lottie Reizenstein, Henry Sanders: a memorial exhibition, Ben Uri Gallery (1983)
- Jack Bilbo, The Modern Art Gallery, London (1947)
- Jack Bilbo, Zwemmer Gallery, London (1940)
Ben Uri collection
Jack Bilbo in the Ben Uri collection
Ben Uri archive
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jack Bilbo]