Self-Portrait, An Undefiled, 1946
Oil on canvas
91 x 56cm
The Gustav Metzger Foundation
Thought to have been referring to Self-Portrait, An Undefiled, Metzger recalled, ‘I started off with a skeletal figure in the moonlight, [which] Bomberg touched…with brownish paint’.The title of the painting, which can be translated from the German inscription, may relate to the Holocaust in which his parents, eldest brother, grandparents and other close relatives perished. Metzger and his older brother Max, however, were sent to Britain under the auspices of the Refugee Children’s Movement. They arrived in England on 12 January 1939 and were initially housed in Butlins Holiday Camp, before being transferred to a hostel for refugee children in London. In 1941, having moved to Leeds to study cabinetry, Metzger became immersed in left-wing politics, while the work and writings of Eric Gill seeded the notion of becoming an artist. Upon the advice of Henry Moore whom he had approached offering to work as the sculptor’s assistant, Metzger spent six months at the Cambridge School of Art, before enrolling at the Sir John Cass Institute in 1946, where he studied sculpture and attended life drawing classes taught by revolutionary British artist, David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic.
Evidently painted on the verso of the canvas, the recto depicts a dark and turbulent vision dominated by emaciated trees painted a disconcerting shade of red. Trees was included in Metzger’s 1960 retrospective at the Temple Gallery.
