Elsa Fraenkel (1892-1975) and Erna Nonnenmacher (1889-1988)
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ABSTRACT Founded in 1915 in London's East End ghetto to support artists and craftsmen from the Russian Pale of Settlement, Ben Uri Art Society was significantly reinvigorated during 1933- 45 as a second wave of Jewish émigrés, fleeing Nazi persecution, enriched its exhibition programme. From its first 'open' exhibition in 1934, it became an important platform for émigré artists into the postwar period, as an accessible - though often limited option - and hence its annual shows unintentionally became a roster of the recently dispossessed. Drawing on Ben Uri's recently-accessed archives, and other sources, this essay highlights the career in exile of two of German-speaking Jewish women sculptors, whose narratives have been neglected: Elsa Fraenkel (1892-1975) and Erna Nonnenmacher (1889-1988). Frankel, one of the first émigré women to exhibit with Ben Uri, arrived in London in 1935, via Paris, where she had studied sculpture. Initially supported by her parents' business in Heidelberg, she established a London studio, producing portraits of notable sitters including Dr Stella Kramrisch, Sidney Sabin, Bond Street gallerist, and Haham Gaster, leader of the London Sephardi Jewish community. Fraenkel escaped interment; Nonnenmacher, in contrast, who had trained at the progressive Reimann Schule and the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin, was interned on the Isle of Man, with her sculptor husband, Herman. Following her release, she participated in the AIA/FGLC Sculpture and Drawings (1941), and the AIA Sculpture in the Home at Heal's (1945). Erna was appointed tutor at Morley College jointly with Herman in the postwar period, teaching ceramics and modelling, and both became members of the RBS. However, her wider career remained largely unfulfilled. In this essay, I hope to examine the position of these marginalised figures within the wider context of British twentieth century sculpture, facing complex issues as Jewish women and as exiled artists attempting to re/establish their careers in a new homeland. TITLE PAGE ‘I hear only what my eyes tell me’: Two Jewish Women Émigré Sculptors: Else Fraenkel (1892-1975) and Erna Nonnenmacher (1889-1989) RACHEL DICKSON 23 St Peters Square Hammersmith London W6 9NW 07919221788 [email protected] [email protected] BIOGRAPHY up to 75 words Rachel Dickson (MA Courtauld) is Head of Curatorial Services at Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, jointly responsible for programming, curation and publications. She has researched and published extensively on Jewish émigré artists who arrived in Britain from the end of the nineteenth onwards. A Committee member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, University of London, she is co-editing Yearbook book 19, on émigrés and the applied arts, due for publication in 2018. On 1 July 1947 Ben Uri Art Gallery at its townhouse at 14 Portman Street, London, W1, opened an exhibition accompanied by a simple red printed catalogue entitled Painting by Walter Trier and Sculpture by Else Fraenkel and Erna Nonnenmacher.1 This display, as the foreign-sounding names of the exhibitors suggested, was typical of Ben Uri’s continued commitment – which was not in any way formalised – to support the increasing number of Jewish émigré artists, working across a range of media, who had been settling in London since the early 1930s.2 It also unintentionally demonstrates a longstanding support for women artists – who currently make up 28% of the permanent collection – a significantly larger figure than for many national and regional collections, where it is often around 4-5%.3 Ben Uri had been founded further east in London’s Whitechapel ghetto in July 19154 in the midst of the First World War, as an art society for newly arrived Ostjuden artists and craftsmen – Yiddish speaking, Orthodox immigrants primarily from the Russian Pale of Settlement – who could not access the cultural bastions of assimilated Anglo-Jewry. The society’s aim, beyond that of exhibition forum, was to celebrate Jewish cultural endeavour in its broadest forms, and to establish the basis for a museum of so-called Jewish art. Indeed, the biblical name chosen, after Bezalel Ben Uri, decorator of the Tabernacle, confirmed its scope beyond fine art alone.5 Two decades later, with its focus shifted away from the East End, and its lingua franca now English, as the first wave of émigrés became more prosperous and integrated, Ben Uri was again operating as exhibition platform and cultural hub for a second wave of mainly German speaking émigrés, now fleeing Nazi persecution. Between 1933- 1945 more than 300 painters, sculptors, graphic designers, illustrators and architects,6 both Jews and non-Jews, sought refuge in Britain; and from 1934, Ben Uri’s catalogues reveal that more than 50 émigrés, primarily German and Austrian, but also Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, and from the Baltic states, exhibited in its annual open shows, with a consistently strong presence in sculpture. In September 1933, when Secretary Marcus Lipton published his strongly-worded statement, ‘Jewish Artists will be lost to Jewry without Jewish Support’ in the Jewish Chronicle,7 he was reminding Anglo-Jewry to support its own; the following summer Ben Uri hosted the first of its annual open exhibitions. However, this admonishment became altogether broader and more urgent as the situation deteriorated in Europe, and it was increasingly evident that the Society’s duty was to assist the growing number of émigré artists. Chillingly, in summer 1944, the catalogue announced: ‘in light of the total ruin of Europe by the Nazis, the work undertaken by the Society has become of even greater significance.’8 This chapter focuses on two German Jewish émigré women sculptors, Else Fraenkel (1892- 1975) and Erna Nonnenmacher (1889-1989), who both sought refuge in London, tracing their respective trajectories as they attempted to continue their former careers as portrait sculptor and ceramicist respectively, whilst overcoming issues relating to their complex identities as émigrés, Jews and women. Else Fraenkel (nee Rothschild) was born into a prosperous family in Bensheim, but grew up in Heidelberg. She took early drawing lessons in Brussels, studied History of Art at Heidelberg University, and drawing and sculpture at Karlsruhe Academy. Beginning to sculpt in 1914, following marriage to lawyer, Georg Fraenkel, she relocated to Hannover, remaining there until 1933, the year of her divorce, of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and the rise in anti-Semitic legislation. Around 1919 she joined the social circle of local artist, the renowned Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), becoming part of a small group of women surrounding him, who ‘fulfilled - and this was quite new - several roles at once: they were bourgeois […], they had children, and were nevertheless professional artists or had other careers. They could be self-reliant, financially independent and be politically active, without having to conform to the cliché of the trouser-clad ‘new woman’ with her short hair and cigarette’9 – the latter comment perhaps referring to more modish figures such as Hanna Hoch. Schwitters’ reviewed Die Frau als Künstlerin (1928) in the Hannoversche Tageblatt as he knew three of the local women artists, including Fraenkel, who was listed as: ‘Bildhauerin, Hannover’; 10 an early portrait head in plaster is notable for its simplicity and defiant anti- modernism, despite these connections with the avant-garde. Despite family commitments, Fraenkel engaged fully in the artistic life of Hannover, exhibiting at the Kestnergesellschaft, founded in 1916 to promote modern art, and with GEDOK (Association of Female Artist Communities and Patrons of the Arts), finding these organisations particularly congenial in contrast to the formal atmosphere of a city she found ‘somewhat cold and distant’, and where wives were often addressed by their husband’s title. She also showed at the Galerie von Garvens, owned by industrialist and art collector, Herbert von Garvens, who also exhibited Schwitters. Fraenkel’s daughter suggests that she was introduced to a number of sitters by von Garvens’ who had an extensive circle of friends and acquaintances.’11 Writing about her career in the Hannoverschen Anzeiger at the age of 40, Fraenkel recalled: ‘One did not plan anything extraordinary for me. I was to become a housewife,’ adding that ‘only introspection and unending patience will lead the work to the heights of art. I am lucky to have been a wife and mother, which has constrained my time, but, as I believe I can say, has propelled the intensity of my work.’12 From the mid-1920s she began to travel between Hannover and Paris with Käte Steinitz (1889-1975), also part of Schwitters’ circle. Schwitters later dedicated a collage to Fraenkel in 1928, in which the words ‘PARIS’ appears.13 Returning annually, she established a studio in Montrouge, studied under Jacques Loutchansky, and moved in the circles of Brâncuși, Despiau, Maillol, Léger and others.14 She also maintained a lively correspondence in French with Piet Mondrian.15 Influenced by Despiau’s portraits and ancient art in the Louvre, she worked with bronze, pewter and silver, retaining a noted anti-modernist approach - portrait sculpture was an area in which woman were advancing despite its lesser role within the avant-garde. In October 1931 her Frauernmaske, on exhibit at GEDOK in Bremen, was the cover image of the periodical Kunst und Mode,16 whilst the following year, Cahiers D’Art reported from ‘Hanovre’ on an ‘Exposition des sculptures de Mme Elsa Fraenkel qui excelle surtout dans la sculpture des portraits.’17 This was perhaps a reference to her show at the Kunsthandlung Victor Hartberg, Berlin, which was noted in Die Weltkunst in September.18 She also exhibited with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976, one of the founders of Die Brucke group), showing nine sculptures at the Gesellschaft der Freudne Junger Kunst in Braunschweig in February,19 whilst the prestigious Galerie Albert Flechteim in Berlin confirmed display of her mask in their ‘Junge Künstler’ exhibition.20 Fraenkel began to sculpt life size busts of striking individuals she encountered in her daily life, including professors and students at the Sorbonne.