Featuring paintings, sculpture, drawings, monotypes, lithographs, puppets and related photographs, books and ephemera, this exhibition explores the remarkable activities of the now little-known Abbey Art Centre, established in 1947 on the outskirts of London by sculptor, printmaker, ethnographic collector and refugee art dealer William Ohly (1883–1955), as a site of postwar refuge. In the decade 1946–56, the Abbey offered both a creative and intellectual haven, as well as a site of transnational exchange for artists from all over Britain, Europe, and the Commonwealth. Abbey residents included Scottish painter Alan Davie, sculptor Peter King, printmaker Angela Varga, German émigré sculptors Inge King and Gudrun Kruger, pioneering German animator Lotte Reiniger, Ukrainian painter Stacha Halpern, and Australian Surrealist James Gleeson and constructivist sculptor Robert Klippel, as they navigated the seismic political and cultural shifts taking place in the postwar and postcolonial artistic landscape.
William Ohly’s visionary ideas and important antiquities and ethnographic collections, housed at the Abbey in New Barnet and at his Berkeley Galleries in central London, attracted a roster of influential visitors including Kenneth Clark, Henry Moore, Eric Gill, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, South African sculptor Lippy Lipshitz, Indian-born painter F. N. Souza, German exiled Dada photomontage artist John Heartfield, Belgian surrealist E.L.T. Mesens and French filmmaker Jean Renoir.
The exhibition also features a small number of artists associated with the Berkeley Galleries in Mayfair (established by Ohly in 1942) including renowned émigré ceramicists Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Nigerian modernist Ben Enwonwu, Guyanese painter Denis Williams and Prussian-born graphic artist Katerina Wilczynski, as well as related photographs, books and ephemera.
