Ben Uri Gallery presents the second of two linked exhibitions under the umbrella title A Brush with Evil. Following Peter Howson’s stark, monumental depiction of the horrors of war in Holocaust Crowd Scene II earlier this summer, this exhibition explores war’s consequences. On display are two of Laura Knight’s major drawings made in 1946 in Nuremberg at the Trial of Nazi war criminals, studies for her extraordinary commissioned painting on this subject in the Imperial War Museum, The Nuremberg Trial (aka The Dock, Nuremberg, 1946) (see reproduction).
The display unpacks the background to the commission, Knight’s arrival in Nuremberg, and experiences inside and outside the Courtroom, as both witness and spectator, through her drawings and extracts from her illustrated Nuremberg diary, accompanied by contemporaneous photographs of the artist and archival materials, which provide context and background to the trial itself, as well as to Knight's own work. A copy of Feliks Topolski’s studies of the Nazi war criminals from ‘Topolski’s Chronicle’, kindly loaned by the Topolski Estate, is also on display.
Also on display in the lower gallery and library are works from the Ben Uri Collection by artists from Jewish immigrant or refugee backgrounds: works by Zeev Ben-Zvi and Jacob Epstein depict key individuals in Britain from the 1930s; works by Enid Abrahams, Bettina Adler, Harry Blacker, Barnett Freedman, P. L. May, Stephen Roth, Feliks Topolski and Katerina Wilcynzski respond to aspects of the Second World War on the home front, and a portrait by Joseph Otto Flatter of Simeon Alex Chima Onyejiako marks a friendship between representatives of the ‘Hitler émigré’ and new postwar African-Caribbean immigrant generations. Further works by Josef Herman, Orovida (Pissarro) and Eva Frankfurther reflect the refugee experience during and just after the war.
We extend our huge thanks to Laura Knight’s biographer Barbara C. Morden and her publishers McNidder & Grace for kind permission to quote from Laura Knight: A Life(copies available to purchase) and Caroline Peden Smith for her assistance; to John Croft, Laura Knight’s great-nephew and compiler of the Catalogue Raisonné; and to all those at the Dame Laura Knight Society, especially Michael Johnson and Evie Knight. We are grateful to Bridgeman for permission to quote from Laura Knight’s unpublished diary and to reproduce facsimile materials, and to Inspire Nottinghamshire Archives for allowing access. We would also like to thank Lucien Topolski for the loan of Topolski’s ‘Chronicle’, the Imperial War Museum and National Portrait Gallery for providing facsimile materials, as well as Philippe Sands KC and Art UK for permission to reproduce his short text, and Sir John Tusa for permission to quote from The Nuremberg Trial by Ann Tusa & John Tusa (BBC Books, 1995).
We also thank the Ben Uri team who have helped to make the exhibition possible, particularly Clare Matthews, Verity Laycock and Joy Onyejiako, with the assistance of Milly Alweiss, Ashwag Alharbi, Eliza Neil and Yueshi Yang.
