Out of Chaos
Ben Uri: 100 Years in London
Somerset House, London WC2
5/5

BETWEEN 1870 and 1914 about 150,000 Jews fled the pogroms of eastern Europe for Britain, with many settling in east London.

It was in Whitechapel in 1915 that Lazar Berson, a Lithuanian painter assisted by like-minded local artists and craftsmen, founded the Jewish National Decorative Art Association, which became known as the Ben Uri Society.

Its mission was to nurture art and creativity and the free exhibition Out of Chaos charts 100 years of emigre talent with masterpieces from the Ben Uri collection — now numbering 1,300 works by over 390 artists — which address “universal issues of identity and migration through visual arts.”

Most of the association’s artists were radicalised not just by their personal experience of persecution and unwanted exile but also by the liberating influence of the Soviet revolution and the promise held in its early stages.

Great art provides insights permitted to the very few and the socially conscious realist painter Victor Hageman, a Belgian who studied alongside Vincent van Gogh, is one example.

His canvas The Emigrants — a study of his Russian-Jewish neighbours — is magnificent in its Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro that hypnotises with its potent emotional charge.

Josef Herman, born into a poor Jewish working-class family in Warsaw in 1911, is another. In the 1930s at the Warsaw School of Art he co-founded the left-wing artistic group The Phrygian Bonnet and in the 1940s settled in Glasgow.

His vibrant, impressionistic and horror-filled Refugees (top left) is the iconic image of the exhibition.

“West Indian, Irish, Cypriot and Pakistani immigrants and the English whom the welfare state had passed by, these were the people among whom I lived and made some of my best friends,” wrote Eva Frankfurther of her co-workers at Lyons Corner House, Piccadilly. She also painted them with great tenderness and an impressively confident palette, as evidenced in West Indian Waitresses.

The same can be said of David Bomberg, whose Ghetto Theatre captures the impoverished audience seeking solace and affirmation in Yiddish productions.

Also on show is a surprising political Marc Chagall, whose Apocalypse en Lilas, (Capriccio) has a hermaphrodite Christ symbolising both male and female victims of the Holocaust.

Irma Stern went to Germany from South Africa and was, together with Otto Dix, George Grosz, John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch a founder member of the Novembergruppe who called for an end to the “bourgeois development” of artists.

Here she fills a room with the sunshine colours of the Mediterranean and Africa. Her recently rediscovered superb Arab in Black was donated to help fund Nelson Mandela’s legal defence.

Imperialism and nationalism have always depended on intolerance, xenophobia and pogroms — the “ethnic cleansing” of our times. As wave after wave of desperate immigrants land on Europe’s shores we should be taking the long view this exhibition affords us.

Runs until December 13 2015, opening times: benuri100.org.uk. Free entry.