Interned Artists: Ben Uri and the 80th Anniversary of Internment

When Alva made this work, he was experiencing his own exodus. Painted the year before the outbreak of the Second World War, it references both the biblical account of the departure of the Israelites from Egypt and the artist's own 'forced journey' from Germany. Following Hitler's rise to power and increasingly antisemitic legislation, Alva moved to Paris in 1933, afterwards settling in west London. Following Churchill's directive to 'Collar the Lot', Alva was briefly interned as an 'enemy alien' on the Isle of Man, at a camp as yet unidentified, as records, particularly for male internees, remain surprisingly incomplete. His time in internment was briefly referenced, accompanied by a sketch of a lone bearded figure hemmed in by barbed wire, in With Pen and Brush Autobiography of a Painter by Alva (London: W. H. Allen, 1973) with the recollection: "I had become stateless when the Nazi regime cancelled my German passport as soon as Hitler came to power, because neither of my parents were German subjects. I moved to London before the war, but when war broke out, my place of birth (Berlin) was held against me, and I spent the summer and autumn of 1940 on the Isle of Man […] Ironically this "excursion" may have saved my life, because when I returned to London at the end of 1940, I found that my studio had been destroyed by German bombs." Alva remained part of an active Jewish and Yiddish cultural life in London, maintaining friendships with émigré artists including Jankel Adler and Josef Herman. In this scene, the refugee procession is depicted without background or context, conveying a sense of both distance and desolation. The anonymity of the figures evokes the systematic mistreatment of an entire race under the Hitler regime and symbolizes the turmoil of the millions of Jews forced to leave their homes across Europe during the Holocaust.