Joe Rose was born into a Jewish family in Waldenberg, Germany in 1915. Following the rise of Hitler, he was imprisoned for anti-Nazi activities, escaping from Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938, after which he immigrated to England in 1939. Studying art by correspondence in London, he relocated to Australia in 1957, where he developed his surrealist-inflected art, often inspired by Jewish and Holocaust themes, and his portraiture; returning to England in 1971, he received the BEM for services to art before spending his final years in Tasmania.
Artist Joe Rose was born into a Jewish family in Waldenberg, Germany on 17 April 1915. He studied art at various ateliers and fought against tyranny and conformity from a young age. He was arrested in 1933 for anti-Nazi activities, following the rise of Hitler, and was first held at Sonnenburg concentration camp before being arrested and imprisoned again in 1938, three days after his marriage, and sent to Buchenwald. However, he managed to escape and fled to England with his wife in 1939. His father, who had fought for Germany in the First World War, was murdered by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.
In England, he volunteered for the British Army and served with the Reconnaissance Corps. After demobilisation in 1945, he gained a Diploma of Art from International Correspondence Schools and worked in London, firstly as a display artist and later as a display director. In 1957, he immigrated to Australia and settled in Sydney, where he met Australian artist Maximilian Feuerring with whom he had private lessons, after which he developed his professional art career, while also working as an art critic for the Sydney weekly, Jewish News. His artwork began to gain recognition and praise, and, from 1961 onwards, he received many awards in Australia, including eleven First Prizes in art competitions. Rose was elected a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute and, in London, where he returned in 1971, he joined the Contemporary Portrait Society, Contemporary Art Society, and Ben Uri Art Society. His work was characterised by fine draughtsmanship and a distinctive handling of colour, and an interest in Jewish, Holocaust and aboriginal themes, and in portraiture. His sitters in the UK included Jewish politician, Greville Janner, and surrealist poet, Michael Bullock. In 1972 Rose was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) for his services to art, following the recommendation of the Government of New South Wales.
Rose participated in a number of important group shows in London, including Australian Artists in England, held at the Commonwealth Institute (1974); Surrealism Unlimited 1968-1978, Camden Arts Centre, London (1978); Military Portraits, organised by the Contemporary Portrait Society at the National Army Museum, London (1984, which included his highly irreverent painting, Militant Maggie (Margaret Thatcher); and Twentieth Century Poets, organised by the Poetry Society and Contemporary Portrait Society at the National Poetry Centre (1983). From 1979, Rose lived and worked between London and Sydney, eventually returning to Australia and settling in Hobart, Tasmania, where he became a member of the Tasmanian Art Society. In the catalogue for his solo exhibition at Ben Uri Gallery in 1987, his art was described as 'powerful and disturbing - bizarre and mesmeric - a technique unmistakably his own - a powerful image of the social attitudes of our Times - one of the great Surrealists of our Time' (Ben Uri Art Society, 1987, n.p.). The Australian art critic W.E. Pidgeon stated of Rose's work that: ‘Working from his own experiences of European troubles, he reminds us that there is no escape from the human condition and that we all share responsibility for the way it is' (MacDougall 2018, p. 41). Rose's work sometimes centred on Judaic themes, such as his Hebrew Alphabet series of surreal interpretations of the Hebrew letters from aleph to tav, while he was also inspired by broader concerns, whether literary, political or reflections on society or the natural world. His exhibition career in London (including regular participation in Ben Uri's open shows during the 1970s and 1980s) was reviewed by the Jewish Chronicle, particularly by the sometime art critic, Ben Uri's own secretary Barry Fealdman, who highlighted Rose's Self Portrait and Lilith in Ben Uri's 1989 Open Exhibition ('the largest ever') (Jewish Chronicle 1989, p. 20). Fealdman praised the ‘intensity of Joe Rose's vision and the perfection of his technique’ in his solo exhibition at the Obelisk Gallery in 1980, adding that ‘There is throughout Joe Rose's work a strong sense of social consciousness expressed in a form of Surrealism whose symbolic interpretations of the real world convince one of the fundamental truth of his message. In freeing the imagination from preconceived ideas, he evokes a fresh response to human experience’ (Fealdman 1980, p. 13). Rose’s later work also included brightly-coloured sculptures, such as Bottle Woman (1982, Ben Uri Collection), made of papier-mâché and glass. Rose's continued to exhibit in solo and group exhibitions, including in Australia, USA, France, and England, until his death. Jose Rose died in Tasmania, Australia in 1999. The Ben Uri Collection holds examples of his work in the UK public domain. Posthumously, his work has featured in Theatre of the World, MONA Tasmania (2012-13) and Finchleystrasse: German Artists in Exile in Great Britain and Beyond 1933–45, curated by Ben Uri Gallery and Museum at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, London (2018).
Joe Rose in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Joe Rose]