Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Suzanne Perlman artist

Suzanne Perlman (née Sternberg) was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1922 and was largely self-taught. In 1940, in the midst of war, she married Heinz Perlman, a Dutch Jewish businessman and scholar; forced to flee from the Netherlands, they settled in Curaçao in the Caribbean, where Perlman began to paint. In the 1960s after attending a workshop taught by Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, she was invited to work alongside him and he became a major influence; widowed in 1983, Perlman relocated to London in 1990 (her work was first shown by Ben Uri in 1989), continuing to paint and exhibit until her death in 2020.

Born: 1922 Budapest, Hungary

Died: 2020 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1990


Biography

Painter Suzanne Perlman (née Sternberg) was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary on 18 October 1922. Her parents, Abraham and Elizabeth were antique dealers and collectors. Her elder brother, Sigmund (1921–2016) immigrated separately to the UK and was knighted as a distinguished philanthropist and inter-faith campaigner. After her father's death when she was only thirteen, Suzanne studied from home, assisting her mother in the family business. 'The art and antique store was a preparation for life', she later reflected, remembering cataloguing postcards of works by artists, including Goya, Monet and Matisse: 'When I was older, I saw the originals in museums. It was like visiting old friends' (Suzanne Perlman Obituary, The Times, 12 October 2020). In 1939, aged 17, she married Heinz Perlman, a Dutch grain trader, with whom she moved to Rotterdam. In May 1940, amid the chaos of war, they travelled to Paris (helped by the French Interior Minister, a family friend), only three days before the Germans occupied the Netherlands. Advised to flee to a Dutch colony, on the day the French armistice was signed, the couple sailed to the southern Caribbean island of Curaçao, in the Dutch Antilles, on the last vessel leaving Europe. Settling in the small capital, Willemstad, for the next twenty years they ran their own art and antique shop, above which Perlman established a studio and began painting the colourful daily life on her doorstep: street vendors, domino players, ritual dancers, and the synagogue – the oldest surviving in the Americas – with its Dutch-inspired interior and sand-covered floor.

From the late 1950s, Perlman spent time in New York and Florida, absorbing abstract expressionism. In the 1960s, after attending a workshop in Salzburg with renowned Austrian Expressionist Oscar Kokoschka, Perlman was invited to work in his studio; Kokoschka thus became a major and enduring influence. 'The very first impression of a vision is crucial to retain. This cannot be taught, but you can do it,' he told her (Suzanne Perlman Obituary, The Times). While Perlman’s paintings echoed Kokoschka's energetic use of colour and bold brushstrokes, she was 'far from an imitator', wrote critic, John Russell Taylor in The Times, reviewing her 1993 Boundary Gallery show, adding: 'Whether painting the Friends’ Room at the Royal Academy, a fair in Covent Garden, or a double-decker passing the Angel, she captures the particular feel of the place while abating none of her expressionist dash.' In 1967, she had her first solo show in London at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries, where Peter Stone described her as 'a Fauve colourist, a formalist, and a humanist, at her best when she contrives a unison of colour-pattern and form' (Jewish Chronicle, 3 November 1967). In the early 1970s Perlman took classes at the Art Students League of New York, working with American modernist, Sidney Gross (she subsequently showed abstract paintings in New York, Miami and Los Angeles); at Columbia University, New York; Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and St Martin’s School of Art, London. Perlman regularly visited England – her three sons were educated here – eventually immigrating permanently in 1990, after Heinz's death in 1983, establishing a studio in her St John's Wood home. She first exhibited with Ben Uri in Prints and Drawings from the Permanent Collection (1989), in several annual Picture Fairs in the 1990s, and in Ben Uri's International Jewish Artist of the Year Award (IJAYA, 2001).

London proved an inspiration as well as ‘a tremendous challenge […] In London – the endless city depicted […] for me, most movingly, by van Gogh […] I began to paint immediately. As an outsider […] I had to communicate this sense of wonder’ (cited on the artist's official website). In 2000, her painting, Parliament with the Burghers of Calais was bought by the Parliamentary Art Collection. An ongoing and resonant theme, part fantasy and part documentary, the city was the focus of a special exhibition, Painting London, curated by Ben Uri at The Gallery, Cork Street (2014), during which Perlman – in her 90s – featured in conversation at JW3 (London's Jewish cultural centre in NW3). Perlman continued painting cityscapes, still-lives, people (a tender portrait of her mother made in 1986 remained in her collection), along with dazzling crowd scenes, some inspired by Jewish ritual. In May 2016, Perlman's painting Curaçao Lovers (Ben Uri Collection) featured in Ben Uri's expanded centenary show at Christie's South Kensington. In 2018 the Dutch Centre, London held a retrospective, and in 2019, her work featured in Suzanne Perlman – A Painter of Three Continents, Saatchi Gallery, London. Suzanne Perlman died in London on 2 August 2020, aged 97. Her work is represented in UK public collections including Ben Uri Collection; the Jewish Museum, London; the Museum of London, the Parliamentary Art Collection (House of Lords) and the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Collection.

Related books

  • David Glasser ed., Suzanne Perlman: Painting London (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2014)
  • Suzanne Perlman, Jewish Renaissance: Magazine of Jewish Culture, Vol. 6-7 (2007)
  • Henry E. Coomans, Suzanne Perlman: Motifs of Curaçao (Netherlands: Stiching Libri Antilliani, 2006)

Public collections

Related organisations

  • Arts Students League, New York (student)
  • Columbia University, New York (student)
  • St Martin’s School of Art, London (student)
  • Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico (student)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Suzanne Perlman – A Painter of Three Continents, Saatchi Gallery, London (2019)
  • Suzanne Perlman: Catching the Ephemeral, Dutch Centre, London (2018)
  • 100 for 100: Ben Uri at Christie's South Kensington, London (2016)
  • Suzanne Perlman, Painting London, The Gallery, Cork Street, London (curated by Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 2014)
  • International Jewish Artist of the Year Award (IJAYA), Candid Arts, London (2001)
  • Open Exhibition of Works by Contemporary Female Jewish Artists, WIZO House, Gloucester Place, London (1998)
  • Suzanne Perlman: Arcadia in London, Boundary Gallery, London (1997)
  • Suzanne Perlman: London Observed: Paintings and Works on Paper, Boundary Gallery, London (1993)
  • Secret Painters – ORT at Ben Uri, Ben Uri Gallery, London (1992)
  • Prints and Drawings from the Permanent Collection, Ben Uri Gallery, London (1989)
  • Sternberg Centre for Judaism, London (1986)
  • Upper Grosvenor Galleries, London (1967)
  • Solo exhibition, Curaçao Museum (1961)
  Suzanne Perlman
   
Ben Uri collection

Suzanne Perlman in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Suzanne Perlman]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Suzanne Perlman] in the Ben Uri Library