Paul Feiler was born in 1918 to an affluent Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. First educated in Zwolle, the Netherlands, then at Canford School, Dorset in England, he subsequently studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, while also taking classes at the Euston Road School. Holding numerous well-received solo exhibitions in leading UK galleries and museums throughout his life, including at Redfern and Grosvenor Galleries in London, and Tate St Ives, alongside his teaching career, Feiler is best remembered for his many Cornish landscapes, poised between abstraction and representation..
Painter, printmaker and teacher, Paul Feiler was born in 1918 in Frankfurt, Germany to an affluent professional Jewish family of dentists, lawyers, and liberal politicians. After schooling in Zwolle in the Netherlands, Feiler moved to Dorset, England to continue his education at Canford School in 1933 (the year of Hitler's rise to the German Chancellorship). Between 1936 and 1939, Feiler studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, alongside Patrick Heron and Kenneth Armitage, while also taking classes at the Euston Road School. Despite being anglicised, Feiler was interned on the Isle of Man, and then in Canada, as an 'enemy alien' from 1940-41, following the government's policy of mass internment. Returning to Britain, he became an art teacher at Eastbourne College; after the end of the war, he joined the West of England College of Art in Bristol (currently the Royal West of England Academy). After a successful solo show in 1953 at the prestigious Redfern Gallery in London (which showed the work of several notable émigrés, including Jankel Adler and Josef Herman), Feiler moved to Kerris, near Penzance in Cornwall, buying a disused chapel. He began teaching at the St Ives summer school founded by artist, Terry Frost, and his work was included in group shows alongside that of English painters, Bryan Wynter, Peter Lanyon and William Scott. His abstracted, heavily encrusted landscapes, likened by Scott to the paintings of Ecole de Paris artist, Nicolas de Staël, immediately distinguished Feiler's work from that of his St Ives contemporaries. In June 1954 Feiler's work was included in a show of recent additions to the Artists' International Association (AIA) Picture Lending Library, held in the AIA's gallery in Lisle Street, London. Across the next two decades, Feiler's work was often favourably reviewed by the Jewish Chronicle; in September 1954, his Redfern show elicited the comment: 'One can think of few artists who have struck such a perfect balance between the abstract and the representational' (10 September 1954), while Charles Spencer's review of Jewish artists' works in UK public collections in 1978, listed Feiler among the 'refugee artists who enriched our national life' (24 November 1978).
Feiler's works were gradually acquired by major museums, including Large Welsh Bay, purchased by the Arts Council of Great Britain from his 1953 Redfern show. In 1957 Feiler completed a tiled mural for the recently-opened Jews College building in central London and his work featured in Dimensions at the O'Hana Gallery, London, selected by renowned English-born, American art critic and curator, Laurence Alloway. Feiler was part of the British Council's exhibition, British Abstract Painting, which toured Paris, Milan, Montreal and Melbourne in 1957, and British Painting in the 1960s held at Tate in 1961. In 1964, Feiler showed alongside Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Alan Davie at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. His paintings during the early 1960s grew more abstracted, consisting of heavily painted, subtle modulations of white, as Feiler sought to evoke the chalk cliffs, wind and sea-spray of the Cornish coast. However, Feiler was uncomfortable with the idea of being part of a group, and by the late 1960s, his work had taken a different turn; inspired by the lunar landings, he began making simplified compositions of circles and vertical bars, reminiscent of Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist works. Feiler was inching ever closer in his quest to capture what he termed 'elusive space'. In 1969, he painted a series of concentric squares, at the centre of which a circle was enclosed. This was the first of his so-called 'shrine' paintings, which he spent the next four decades developing and refining, taking inspiration from classical architecture. The delicate colour gradations recalled his Cornish landscapes, even if the paint was now applied in flat, meticulous strokes.
From 1995 to 1997, Feiler worked on the Janus series, which took on the patterns of his earlier Sekos and Aduton series, but were painted in dark colours, some entirely in subtle modulations of black. The following series, Janicon, saw the introduction of gold and silver leaf, and gessoed board. In 1995, Feiler held the first of two retrospectives at Tate St Ives; in the second, The Near and The Far (2005), Feiler juxtaposed his own paintings with those he had chosen from Tate's permanent collection, including works by Paul Cézanne, Lanyon, Malevich and de Staël. From 2008 Feiler broke new ground with his Square Reliefs, in which the composition incorporated both painted and Perspex elements. Feiler died in Cornwall, England, in 2013. For his centenary, a large-scale retrospective was held at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings in 2018. In the same year, one of his paintings featured in Ben Uri's exhibition (and accompanying catalogue), Finchleystrasse: German artists in exile in Great Britain and beyond 1933-45, held at the German Embassy, London. Examples of Feiler's work are currently included in thematic displays at Tate Britain and Tate St Ives. His work is held in collections of international institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate, London; Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. His estate is represented by the Redfern Gallery, London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Paul Feiler]
Publications related to [Paul Feiler] in the Ben Uri Library