This exhibition marks 75 years since Ben Uri’s Anglo-Jewish Exhibition, held in 1951 as a part of the Festival of Britain. The artworks featured here were on display at the exhibition and have either stayed in the Ben Uri collection or have since been acquired by Ben Uri.
The works in this exhibition can be explored through the many ways Jewish identity, experience and belonging have been represented through art. Spanning religious imagery, portraiture, family life, migration and landscape, the works demonstrate that there is no single visual language of Jewishness.
Religious and biblical subjects provide one important strand. Alva’s Moses, Jacob Kramer’s The Day of Atonement, Fred Kormis’ Adam and Eve, and Abraham Lozoff’s Lot and his Daughters draw on stories and traditions rooted in Jewish history and scripture. Alongside these are portraits of significant religious and cultural figures, including Elsa Fraenkel’s Head of the Haham Dr Moses Gaster, Benno Elkan’s Chief Rabbi Dr J. H. Hertz, and portraits of figures such as Israel Zangwill, Joseph Leftwich and Lord Rothschild. Together, these works reflect the importance of religious, intellectual and cultural leadership within Jewish communities.
A further group of works considers family, relationships and everyday experience. Amshewitz’s The Wedding, Lily Delissa Joseph’s Self-Portrait with Candles, and Bernard Meninsky’s family and mother-and-child compositions suggest ideas of continuity, domestic life and intergenerational connection. Orovida Pissarro’s Refugees introduces a different dimension, evoking displacement, migration and the search for safety in the aftermath of war.
The exhibition also places Jewish artists within wider British and European culture. Landscapes such as Barnett Freedman’s Country Lane, Ruth Collet’s Pear Tree after Picking, and Albert Daniel Rutherston’s Landscape at Grasse, alongside Oppenheimer’s Piccadilly Circus, demonstrate artistic engagement with places and traditions beyond explicitly Jewish subject matter.
Taken together, these works present Jewish life as both distinctive and interconnected with the wider societies in which British Jewish artists lived and worked in the mid-twentieth century. The exhibition moves beyond a single definition of “Jewish art”, revealing a diverse range of identities, experiences and forms of belonging.
