This drawing from Meidner's Weimar period typifies his powerful graphic, expressionist style. In Berlin, his series of apocalyptic landscapes anticipated the First World War, and he exhibited with fellow expressionists in Hewarth Walden's renowned Galerie Der Sturm. Following his inclusion in the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, Meidner and his artist wife, Else (his former pupil), fled to England in 1939, where they lived in impoverished circumstances, neither receiving proper recognition for their unfashionably expressionist oeuvre. Interned in Huyton on the mainland and then in Hutchinson Camp, on the Isle of Man, amid religiously tolerant, intellectually stimulating company, Meidner unusually petitioned to stay on, when many other artists were pleading to be released from captivity. He declined to sign the important artists' declaration: 'Art Cannot Live Behind Barbed Wire', published in the New Statesman and Nation on 28 August 1940, co-signed by sixteen artists, including Schwitters and Solomonski. Following his eventual release, Meidner's sole exhibition in Britain was a joint show with Else at Ben Uri in autumn 1949, which he likened to a 'second-class funeral'. He returned alone to Germany in 1953 to renewed critical acclaim and is now considered to be one of the most important German expressionists of the early twentieth century.
Interned Artists: Ben Uri and the 80th Anniversary of Internment
Forthcoming exhibition
