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Mark Gertler (1891

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Mark Gertler (1891 www.jewsfww.london ! Mark Gertler Mark Gertler was one of the most prominent and today one of the most sought after ‘Whitechapel Boys’, the name given to a group of young artists and poets who grew up in London’s Jewish East End at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was born in a slum lodging house in Spitalfields (London) in 1891. He was the fifth and youngest child of Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents ‘trying their luck’ in London. London turned out worse rather than better than home and a year later the family returned to Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which is now part of Ukraine. His parents were Jewish immigrants, Louis Gertler and Kate Berenbaum, whose nickname was ‘Golda’. They gave their son the traditional Yiddish name Marks. Life back in Galicia was just as hard and his father, Louis, soon left to seek a better future in America. However, when Mark was nearly six years old, the family was reunited back in London, about a mile from where he had been born. On the family’s return to the East End, the English name Mark was given to the five-year-old boy. Although a precocious talent, poverty forced him into a job and an unhappy apprenticeship at Clayton and Bell stained-glass makers. His break in life came as the well established Jewish artist William Rothenstein recommended that Gertler join the Slade School of Art in 1908. He was helped to study there by a grant from the Jewish Education Aid Society again on the recommendation of Rothenstein, as there was little money available from the family. He was the first and youngest of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ to go to the Slade soon to be followed by Clare Winsten in 1910, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg in 1911, Bernard Meninsky in 1912 and Leeds artist Jacob Kramer in 1913. Gertler, was a striking figure and easily made friends inside and outside his local Jewish community. He enjoyed rapid success and won three scholarships during his three years at the Slade. It was no doubt that his success encouraged the others to follow him at the school. Gertler and Bomberg in particular made a real impact on British art in the years just before and during the First World War. What differentiated Gertler from the rest of the Whitechapel boys was his easy switch from a Yiddush speaking foreign and desperately poor upbringing to mingling with members and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. This group consisted of free minded artists, writers, thinkers who stretched traditional boundaries and lived life to the full. He had complex relationships with individual members of the Group and had no wish to ‘join’ and they equally had no wish to have him as a permanent feature. He greatly admired Roger Fry and exhibited at the Omega Workshops but mutual admiration was elusive. His decade long adoration for fellow Slade artist Dora Carrington was never consistently returned and fraught with complexities. Inevitably 1 www.jewsfww.london ! these complicated relationships in quite different worlds from his own milieu, combined with his recurrent physical health problems, will have contributed to his mental health. When the First World War broke out, Gertler held pacifist views but in 1916 when a law was passed that all young men must enter the army, he tried to join up. He was relieved to be turned down, firstly, because of his Austrian parents, and later because of his variable health which was to blight him throughout his life. During the war he mixed with the ‘Bloomsbury Set’ of writers and painters that he met at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s home at Garsington, near Oxford. His painting, the ‘Merry-Go- Round’ (1916, Tate), of soldiers and sailors trapped on a roundabout, created a furore and is recognised as one of the great examples of anti-war commentary. The painting was presented to Ben Uri by the Leicester Gallery in 1945 and remained an important part of the Ben Uri collection until 1984 when it was sold to Tate. Career wise between 1911 and 1914 he focussed on Jewish subjects painted in both traditional and modernist compositions. In 1914 he painted two of his most celebrated works; Rabbi and Rabbitzin with fish in the collection of the British Museum and Rabbi and Rabbitzin which is in the Ben Uri collection. In 1916 he painted his most celebrated work, The Merry-Go-Round, originally in the Ben Uri collection and today stands proud in Tate Britain. This work guarantees Gertler’s place in the annuls of 20th Century British art. In1922 he was named by the Burlington magazine as ‘one of the three or four best young painters in England’. In the 1930s he re-focussed on the female form and began to develop his vision of the distinctive visual characteristics of the female as opposed to the classic nude. His health was unpredictable and he eventually succumbed to severe depression and took his own life in 1939. 2 www.jewsfww.london ! ‘Portrait of a Girl (Sophie, the Artist’s Sister)’ (c.1908-11) by Mark Gertler (1891-1939) Oil on canvas This portrait of Mark Gertler’s sister is believed to have been painted whilst he was at the Slade School of Fine Art, sometime between 1908 and 1911. It can be regarded as symbolising a bridge between his Jewish background and the wider world of art and British society that his art training and personal interests would lead him into. Gertler’s use of a dark palette or selection of colours in the painting, together with Sophie’s formal dress can be seen as typical of portraits of the Edwardian period (between 1901 and about 1912). He was probably studying with Philip Wilson Steer at this time, an influential art teacher at the Slade School and a renowned artist who had moved from impressionism towards realism in his own work. In this portrait, he did not use modernist elements which appear in later works, such as simple, geometric shapes used for crockery in ‘Rabbi and Rabbitzin’ from 1914, or the bold colours and angular shapes of ‘Merry-Go-Round’ from 1916. ‘Portrait of a Girl (Sophie, the Artist’s Sister)’ reflected the practical needs of so many artists who could not afford the price of a model so painted family instead. It was 3 www.jewsfww.london ! during this time at the Slade School of Art that he studied with David Bomberg and Isaac Rosenberg, fellow ‘Whitechapel Boys’ and emerging modernist artists. ‘Rabbi and Rabbitzin’ (1914) by Mark Gertler (1891 – 1939), watercolour and pencil on paper In 1914, the year that the First World War broke out, Gertler drew ‘Rabbi and Rabbitzin’ in his mother’s Spitalfields kitchen. He showed a traditional way of life that 4 www.jewsfww.london ! mostly disappeared after the war. Although the title ‘Rabbi and Rabbitzin’ tells us that the couple are religious Jews there are no religious objects or iconography within the picture. Mark used modern artistic techniques including ‘Cubism’ to depict the crockery on the dresser behind the couple in simple, geometric shapes. The round challah loaf (the traditional special Sabbath bread) on the table, usually made by the Rabbitzin, echoes her piled up hair and the teapot is the same shape as the Rabbi’s bowler hat. The couple stare out at us with large, serious eyes and huge hands that suggest the hardship of their lives, but they are linked closely together showing their strength as a couple. The closely cropped scene is squared up for transfer to canvas, showing that Mark planned to turn the drawing into an oil painting. The companion piece. ‘Rabbi and Rabbitzin with Fish’ is in the British Museum. ‘Still life – Dahlias and Daisies’ (1927) by Mark Gertler (1891-1939) oil on canvas As the 1920s progressed, Gertler’s work became less forceful, with softer colour schemes and less angular lines, as with ‘Still Life – Dahlias and Daisies’. The non- offensive subject matter chosen for this painting, together with a more conventional artistic approach contrasted with Mark’s work of the previous decade. Gertler and 5 www.jewsfww.london ! Bomberg both belonged to a set of progressive artists and together were known as ‘The London Group’ who many people thought were rebellious only to be different from the establishment rather than for sincere artistic reasons. During the 1920s, Mark moved away from his earlier, controversial work with the London Group and moved towards work which attracted favourable attention and sales. ‘Still Life – Dahlias and Daisies’ demonstrates his confident use of colour, along with carefully considered composition. Still life genre or style of painting was popular for many reasons outside the intrinsic beauty as flowers, fruit and interiors were inexpensive props and cheaper and easier to handle than models. Gertler’s development as an artist can in some ways be traced through his still life works. ‘Bottle of Benedictine’ was produced whilst he studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic and was perhaps based on a Friday-night Jewish Sabbath supper. By 1935, ‘Still Life with Guitar’ showed a subject to appeal widely. This painting’s textured surface, high colouring and complex composition reflected his maturity of technique and his continuing production of still life work was partly driven by the genre’s ongoing popularity with buyers. This financial aspect to his career became increasingly important after 1930, when he married Marjorie Greatorex Hodgkinson. Their son Luke was born in 1932. Unfortunately, the 1930s witnessed a decline in sales and he once more became anxious about his finances.
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