Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1895 Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland)

Died: 1973 London, England

Biography

Painter and sculptor Max Sokol (né Mordka Ajzik) was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland) on 2 April 1895. He studied art in Stettin and then in Berlin under Prof Hugo Lederer, before moving in 1926 toJerusalem (then in Mandatory Palestine) where he worked briefly in the sculpture department at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, before returning to Germany.

Following Hitler's rise to power, Sokol was forced to flee Germany for England in 1937, settling in north west London, an area popular with German speaking refugees. In the same year, he first showed work at the Ben Uri Gallery in the Annual Exhibition of Works by Jewish Artists, where a special section showcased eleven of his sculptures, including Devotion (Ben Uri Collection), a portrait of Adolph Michaelson (then Chairman of Ben Uri), and Mother and Child in Storm (New College, Oxford); he participated in more than a dozen further exhibitions at Ben Uri during his lifetime. In 1938, he exhibited the bronze Reclining Nude (possibly shown at Ben Uri as Reclining Woman the previous year) in the important exhibition, Twentieth Century German Art held at the New Burlington Galleries, London, as a riposte to the 1937 Nazi so-called Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. Sokol became a member of the Free German League of Culture, a politically inspired, left-leaning organisation founded in Hampstead in 1939 to offer cultural support to anti-Nazi German refugees in Britain throughout the war. Two of his works, the wooden sculpture Homeless and the plaster bust Portrait of Cherne (both Ben Uri Collection) were included in the 1943 Artists Aid Jewry exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, organised jointly by the FGLC, AC (Austrian Centre) and Jewish Cultural Club. In 1945 Sokol’s portrait of noted Jewish writer, and so-called 'Whitechapel Boy', Joseph Leftwich (Ben Uri Collection) was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, singled out in the Jewish Chronicle as expressing ‘intensity and character’ (JC 1944, p. 15). In the same year, his bust of Cherne was featured at the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts 82nd Annual Exhibition, as well as in Ben Uri’s Exhibition of Portraits by Contemporary Jewish Artists. Sokol’s busts of Alfred Wolmark and Leftwich (both of whom were closely associated with Ben Uri) were both purchased for the Ben Uri Collection, while Devotion was acquired by member subscription in 1948. Sokol participated frequently in Ben Uri exhibitions postwar (18 times between 1945 until 1969), including in summer 1951, when Ben Uri hosted an art section aas an adjunct to its Anglo-Jewish Exhibition 1851–1951, as part of the nationwide Festival of Britain, which featured the work of émigrés including Jankel Adler, Martin Bloch, Benno Elkan, Hans Feibusch, Else Fraenkel, Josef Herman, Kalman Kemeny, Fred Kormis and Fred Uhlman, among others. Kemeny painted Sokol 's portrait in his later years (offered at auction at Christie's in 2005), where he is seen shaping a lump of clay. In September 1951 Sokol wrote controversially to the Jewish Chronicle, objecting to the selection of sculptor Ivan Mestrovic to create an American memorial to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, on the grounds of his support by the Nazi regime.

In 1955 Sokol had a joint exhibition with German-Jewish émigré artist Henry Sanders at Stoke Newington Library Hall, in north London. Sokol’s works, covering 20 years, included a sketch from 1935 for Mother and Child in Storm (which ‘has almost the plastic drama of Rodin’s Balzac’ (F.G.S. 1955, p. 9)), David (1939) and Expectant Mother in Concentration Camp (1945). The Jewish Chronicle art critic, furthermore, described Sokol’s recent work Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us (whereabouts unknown) as ‘moving in its simplicity’. In 1960 Sokol offered to donate the bronze The Boy David to Hackney council, provided they would bear the cost of the casting. The sculpture, which previously stood in the entrance hall to the library, is now held by Hackney Museum. In 1969 Sokol donated the bronze Mother and Child to the Middlesex Hospital, London as a sign of gratitude for the treatment he had received while a patient there. Max Sokol died in London, England on 21 June 1973. His work can be found in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection and New College, Oxford, while a large collection of works – including a self-portrait, two portraits of his daughter Diana (later Professor Diana Deutsch), and several symbolic figurative works, including Return from Captivity (Reunion) – is held by St. Anne's College, University of Oxford, from where Diana graduated in 1959.