Mark (né Max) Gertler was born to recently immigrated Austrian-Jewish parents in Spitalfields, London, England in 1891. The first of the 'Whitechapel boys' to attend the Slade School of Fine Art (1908–11), he was part of the so-called 'Crisis of Brilliance' generation, co-founding the short-lived ‘Neo-primitive’ group and exhibiting with the Friday Club and the New English Art Club while still a student. He went on to become a leading member of the London Group and held solo exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery, the Leicester Galleries and the Lefevre Galleries.
Painter Mark (né Max) Gertler was born to Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents in Spitalfields, London, England on 9 December 1891. The following year, during an economic downturn, the family was repatriated to Przemyśl in Galicia (then within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now eastern Poland), and lived in extreme poverty after Gertler's father, Louis, left to search for work in America. In 1896, they were reunited in Whitechapel, the heart of London’s Jewish quarter, where Louis established a furriers. Gertler studied at the Regent School Polytechnic (1906–08), reluctantly undertaking a stained-glass apprenticeship at Clayton and Bell next door in his second year. After winning a national painting competition bronze medal, and with a recommendation from William Rothenstein, he entered the Slade School of Fine Art (1908-11) with a loan from the Jewish Education Aid Society, the first and youngest Jewish working-class student of his generation to do so. He trained under the famous Slade ‘triumvirate’: Fred Brown, Henry Tonks, and Philip Wilson Steer, part of the so-called ‘Crisis of Brilliance’ generation, which included Stanley Spencer, C R W Nevinson, Paul Nash and (Dora) Carrington, his confidante, muse, and the object of his passion for the next decade; he twice won the Slade scholarship and left with another from the British Institution. Together with Nevinson and fellow students Edward Wadsworth, Adrian Allinson and John Currie, Gertler co-founded the short-lived ‘Neo-primitive’ group; his bold, flatly painted ‘Florentine’ portrait of Carrington, Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Blue Jersey (1912, Huntington, USA), executed partly in tempera, exemplifies this style. He exhibited with Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club (1910–21), the New English Art Club (primarily 1911–16, member 1912), and held a joint exhibition with Currie at the Chenil Gallery, Chelsea in 1912.
Gertler’s family, particularly his mother Golda, were the focus of his early portraits and after 1910 he attended the Slade part-time to concentrate on Jewish subjects, his early naturalism gradually replaced by a more ‘barbaric and symbolic’ vision, influenced by post-impressionism and articulating a lingering sense of conflict and displacement around his class, Jewish identity and origins (The Artist’s Mother, 1913, Glynn Vivian). St. John Hutchinson described Gertler in this period as ‘a Jew from the East End with amazing gifts of draughtsmanship, amazing vitality, [...] a sense of humour, and of mimicry unique to himself - a shock of hair, [and] the vivid eyes of genius and consumption’ (St John Hutchinson, 1940). In May 1914 seven of Gertler’s works were included in David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein’s so-called ‘Jewish Section’, part of a Review of Modern Movements at the Whitechapel Art Gallery; he was elected to the London Group in 1915 (exhibited 1914–39), where his Creation of Eve (1914, Private Collection) caused ‘Uproar’. During the First World War, rejected for military service because of his Austrian parentage, then later on medical grounds, Gertler was ordered to carry out work of national importance at his patron Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington estate, near Oxford. His most famous painting, Merry-Go-Round (1916, Tate), combines his ‘pacifist vision of cultural disintegration with one of personal despair at his unhappy affair with Carrington’ (MacDougall, 2004). Suffering from depression he left his War Artist’s commission unfulfilled and it was cancelled. In 1917 he exhibited a ‘Yiddish Cezanne’ at the Omega Workshops and participated in Roger Fry’s New Movement in Art exhibition.
Following a trip to Paris 1920, inspired by Renoir, Gertler focused on female portraits and nudes, sometimes combined with elaborate, colourful still lifes in his commercially most successful decade, holding five solo shows at the Goupil Gallery (1921-24, 1926), although tuberculosis confined him to sanatoria (Banchory, near Aberdeen, 1920–21), and Mundesley, Norfolk (1925, 1929, 1936). He had solo exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries, London (1928, 1930, 1932 and 1934), and the Lefevre Galleries (1937, 1939), latterly exhibiting carefully crafted still-life compositions in a semi-Cubist manner and painting monumental female figures. The failure of his marriage to fellow artist Marjorie Hodgkinson, with whom he had a son, Luke, in 1932, together with financial difficulties (he taught part-time at the Westminster School of Art from 1931) contributed to his later depression.
Mark Gertler died on 23 June 1939 in London, England, after committing suicide in his garden studio. Memorial exhibitions were held at the Leicester Galleries, London (1941), Ben Uri Gallery (1944) and the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1949), with further solo shows at the Minories (and tour, 1971), Ben Uri Gallery (1982, 2002, and 2019), and Piano Nobile (2012), and a Tate spotlight display room in 2018. A volume of Gertler’s letters, edited by Noel Carrington, was published in 1965, with biographies by John Woodeson (1972) and Sarah MacDougall (2002); the latter is compiling a catalogue raisonné. Gertler is represented in 45 UK collections including the Arts Council, the Ben Uri Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, Southampton City Art Gallery, and Tate.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Mark Gertler]
Publications related to [Mark Gertler] in the Ben Uri Library