Anna Mayerson 1906-1984

Anna Mayerson was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1906 and raised in the city. She studied Fine Art in Zürich, Switzerland and at the Vienna Academy. In 1938, following the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria), she fled to England, settling in London, where she completed her studies at the Slade School of Fine Art. She exhibited extensively in London: showing a portrait at Claridges in 1940, then holding solo exhibitions in 1942, at German-Jewish émigré Jack Bilbo's Modern Art Gallery in London, where her work was described by the socialist journal ‘The Tribune’ as: 'direct, simple and colourful; she is a proletarian artist, making pictures from factories and workers, but she has struck out from the fashionable drabness of her predecessors', and at the Leger Galleries in 1943. In 1946 her work was included in a group show alongside the English painter Graham Sutherland and émigrés Jankel Adler, Raol Ubac and Otto Bachmann at the prestigious Redfern Gallery in Cork Street, London. She also exhibited at Erica Brausen’s Hanover Gallery in Mayfair in 1948 (its inaugural year) and participated in mixed shows with the Artists' International Association (AIA); the Arts Council; Ben Uri Gallery - where her 'Sabbath Afternoon' was shown in 1951 - and 'Deluge with Clowns' in 1956; the London Group and the Leicester Galleries, London. Between 1949 and 1959 she lived in Taormina, Sicily, and exhibited in continental Europe. She later returned to London and held two solo shows at Annely Juda Fine Art in 1971 and 1972. She liked to work on a large scale in both a figurative and abstract style. Anna Mayerson died in London in 1984. Her work is represented in the Ben Uri Collection and Somerville College, University of Oxford.