Poet, artist and emeritus professor Jeremy Adler was born in London, England in 1947, the son of Czech-Jewish émigré parents, artist Bettina Adler (whose work is also in the Ben Uri Collection) and poet and scholar Hans Günther Adler. His mother (née Bettina Gross), fleeing Nazi persecution in 1939, had moved with her siblings to Wales; his father (who had been imprisoned in Theresienstadt at the same time as Bettina's mother) had fled to London from Prague in 1947. Jeremy Adler attended St Marylebone Grammar School (1958–66) and studied English and German at Queen Mary College (University of London) with sociology (at Cologne) 1966-69. He completed his PhD at Westfield College London in 1977.
From his teenage years, Adler wanted to both write and paint. Inspired by modern painting and sculpture, among his influences were the early Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque and the work of Paul Klee. His interest in Klee inspired a number of pictures in the 1960s and led to the article ‘Paul Klee as 'Poet-Painter'’, published in 'Art, Word, and Image' by John Dixon Hunt and others (Reaktion, 2009). From 1967 to 1977, Adler was active in the Poetry Society, at the centre of the British experimental poetry scene, producing work alongside influential members of the British Poetry Revival and with links to international movements. Around 1968, he began to experiment with visual poetry, making the first of his poem-paintings: pen and ink on postcards. These were followed by a series of black and white images, several visualising lines from his poems, and by pen-and-ink drawings, collages, stencil poems - including the sequence ‘Alphabet Music’ – and typewriter poems. From 1972 to 1977, Adler issued ‘A: an envelope magazine of visual poetry’. In 1979, he spent a semester at the School of Art and Design in Aachen, Germany, where he studied printing and typesetting. That year he printed his first book, ‘Triplets’, which marked the beginning of his artist’s books, published under the imprint Alphabox Press.
As an academic, Adler is known for his work on German literature specialising in the Age of Goethe, Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism with contributions on figures such as Goethe, Hölderlin, and Kafka; on the interface between literature and ideas in relation to major political events; and on representations of the Holocaust. He has held retrospectives in Prague (1997 & 2001) and his work has been shown in the Elvaston Gallery, South Kensington, Au Pere de Nico, Chelsea, Bristol City Arts Centre, Westfaelische Kunstverein, Kunst Museum Bielefeld, the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, and in exhibitions of visual poetry in locations including Florence, Paraguay, Warsaw and Brussels.
