Jankel Adler Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings _ GOLDMARK

This is a photograph of Janko Adler, one of the very many Jewish and Eastern European immigrants who came to Britain in the face of the rise of Nazism and fascism on the continent. He was also among the most influential. His combination of cubist abstraction and expressionist vigour helped breathe new life into British art, and he leaves behind him a legacy that really changed the face of British art for the rest of the 20th century. This exhibition is a celebration, a celebration specifically of the work that Adler produced when he came to the UK in 1940, the work that left such an incredible, indelible impression on the artists he came into contact with, and the work for which he is today still best remembered. This is not, in fact, our first Janko Adler show. We had an exhibition in 2014, and there may be pictures in this exhibition that you recognise. But first I'm going to take you to a painting that you won't have seen before. It's of two figures almost in flight or travelling somewhere. We don't know where their destination is, we don't know where they've come from, but there's this feeling that they're moving out of frame. Travel, flight, escape, these were things that Janko Adler knew profoundly. He was born in Tuzin, which is a small industrial town near Łódź in Poland. He moved to Dusseldorf as a young man, and it was there that he really established his reputation. He befriended people like Otto Dix and Paul Klee, and became very moved by the work that they were producing at that time, a sort of combination of strange abstraction, of expressionist angst, the work of the new objectivists. But he found with the rise of fascism in Germany that he was forced to flee yet again. He spent some time in the south of France in exile, and then eventually moved to Paris. It was in Paris that he made a profound decision. He'd seen his home country invaded by the Nazis, and it deeply moved him. And so he decided to join the Polish Western forces in France. He was evacuated along with many thousands of Polish troops at Dunkirk, and found his way to Scotland. He spent some time in an army camp before he was demobbed due to a heart condition, and came to Glasgow. Glasgow was to become hugely important to him. He was only there for a couple of years, from 1940 to 1942 and 43, but it proved incredibly important to his life. It was here that he was reacquainted with a fellow artist, fellow Pole, Josef Hermann. They were two of a great many Eastern European and often Jewish immigrants who found their way to the UK during the war, often in Scotland, thanks to that movement of the Polish RAF and the Polish troops from France up to Glasgow. It was also here that Jan Kladler's influence really started to be felt. The incredible experience and understanding of European avant-garde painting that he brought with him. He started to exhibit in JD Ferguson's New Art Club in Glasgow, and fellow artists around the colony started to recognise some of the strange things going on in his work. If you look at this series of pictures along this back wall here, we've got figures, typically in interior scenes, as we get a lot of in Jan Kladler's work. There's a range of figures, they're mostly female, new figures. But there's an interesting thing that Jan Kladler is doing with the shapes and the forms of these bodies. Slightly ovoid heads, there's a kind of angularity to everything. If you look at a lot of British art from the 1950s, you'll find almost exactly the same thing going on. There's a sudden harshness, a kind of bleakness, there are straight and severe angles applied to the human body. Heads that are often squared off or rounded into strange abstract shapes. You think of the work of people like William Scott, Kenneth Armitage. A lot of this was down to the profound influence of European artists who found their way to Britain, people like Peter Poporowski. Jan Kladler was probably among the most prominent of those artists, someone who knew what Picasso had been doing, who had direct contact with some of the very important avant-garde artists working in Germany and working in France in the years before the war. There's also a sort of sparseness to all these images. We get figures on chairs, people often seated at tables, maybe with food in front of them, in fairly empty rooms. This was a time of great poverty, of difficulty, a difficult time for people, particularly the Polish and Eastern European refugees, who found their way into the country without their families who they had to leave behind. His friendship with, for example, Josef Hermann was incredibly important. When Hermann had a breakdown, when he realised that his entire family had perished during the war, it was Jan Kladler who nursed him back to health. Kladler spent a brief six or eight months in the colony at Kirkwood Bright, where a lot of artists were settled, before moving to London. He came away from Scotland and it was here, really, that Adler's influence was most profoundly felt. He gathered around him a kind of coterie of young British artists, people like the two Roberts, Kahuna McBride, Prunella Clough, and the things that he was doing with the human figure, with his still lives, the strange complex rearranging of his paintings, started to have a really profound influence on their work. You come across here, though, we've got a more simple painting next to something like this very abstract, bright, colourful, strange totemic watercolour. Here is a self-portrait of Adler. It's a portrait of a man who was separated from his wife, Betty, and his daughter, Nina, for the duration of the war. It's also a portrait of an artist who discovered, in 1945, that every one of his nine siblings had perished during the war. He was an artist on a foreign shore and he was one who brought with him not just the harrowing memories of the brief period of time that he spent during the war, on the front, as a soldier, but also who recognised all that he left behind him, the great destruction of the culture that he left. Paintings like this portrait are incredibly moving. They're both bleak and melancholic. They show a kind of a sadness for what has happened, but also there's a real vigour to the way that he's using his paint, to the way that he's building up the surface of the painting. And it was these two combinations, a combination of extreme artistic focus and a great understanding of pictorial structure, a kind of intensity to his work, tinged with the kind of the sadness, the strangeness, the unfamiliarity of being a foreigner in a new country that really infuses a lot of his work. But he was also an incredibly generous soul. We've got three very important and magnificent paintings on this back wall here and they show sort of the interior world that Jan Coladlo was working with when he came to Britain. Often scenes of rooms with tabletops. There are kind of intimations of figures at them but they're often abstracted in strange ways and they're very difficult to read. We're not quite sure what it is we're looking at. There's a kind of sense of a figure here in the darkness in the background of this magnificent tall painting with this table and these strange sculptural almost objects on it. Something similar going on here. We can see what might look like pieces of fruit or cups and vases. Suggestions of a presence of something here, some strange floating form that could be the heads of people at the other side of a table, maybe a hand pointing up here. But Adler was also a generous man, a vigorous man. He was apparently a very good cook and he would take his prayer shawl in his home, lay it out on his table, spread aside the paints and the paint brushes that were strewn about it and serve food for people. It's possibly where some of the inspiration for some of these still life paintings comes from. These settings with an obvious fish here and sometimes fruit, things sitting on a table. It's a kind of portrait of the small pleasures, the kind of the joys, the small delight of being able to bring people around the table and have a moment to themselves in what was an incredibly difficult period of history. He was not alone in Britain. He made friends with a number of major literary figures, people like Samuel Beckett and Dylan Thomas. He also befriended a number of artists, both the younger British artists that he worked alongside with, lived near, but also fellow emigres, people like Oskar Kokoschka, Kurt Schwitters, Martin Bloch. In 1933 he had signed an urgent appeal against fascism. He was not an intellectual that shied away from the political side of life. He saw what was coming, what his future had in store as a Jewish artist, an avant-garde modern artist. A lot of his paintings sort of struggle with that tension, the tension between the pull that he had in his art of pushing boundaries, of finding new ways of depicting people, shapes, interior scenes and the incredible destruction that he left behind him. Paintings like this need no explanation really. There's a woman with a bird that's come from a cage here flying out towards an open window. There is a sense of optimism, of hope for the future, but it's one tinged, tainted by reality. This almost emaciated skeletal looking bird and outside the clouds are dark. This is not an easy future that this symbol has in front of it. A lot of his work, though we see no signs of the war, no few soldiers, few signs, few pictures of the battlefields, we get commemorations. Two paintings here commemorating the Polish dead. And even in simple portraits like this, a beautiful painting of a young girl staring out towards us with incredible intensity and directness. There is a feeling of what is the future we've left behind for the next generation? How does the next generation, the young people who have had to live through this war, how do they deal with the circumstances? And while his art, his influence was invaluable in allowing the next generation of artists to make that statement, to take art to where it had to go, to make sense of this incredible embed that had just happened, he was not there to see it. He died prematurely at the age of 53 after suffering a heart attack. It was possibly a heart attack that was linked to the difficulties that he'd had in naturalising. Jan Kladler was an outspoken artist. He was left-leaning, as a lot of his friends were, a lot of his associates were, his contemporaries. And it's thought that possibly his associations with left-wing socialist friends, writers, intellectuals, hampered his attempts at gaining citizenship. In the end, the British government, in all its wisdom, decided to decline his application. And so an artist who had been nursed, had been supported by the people that he met in this country, both in Scotland and then later in London, an artist who had found refuge, he'd been allowed to practice art which, in Hitler's exhibitions of degenerate art, had seen Adler's paintings gathered and no doubt destroyed. In the end, it could not accept him as he was. I think it's quite a strong message to end this exhibition on. Immigration to this country, particularly from Eastern Europe, from young Jewish artists, whether it was at the time of the Second World War, or before that, the First World War, or many hundreds of years ago, has always brought with it great art. It's always infused our culture. At a time when this country is still dealing with, how does it appropriately re-home people? How does it deal with people trying to find a new future here in a broadly tolerant society? We can look to someone like Janko Adler, not just to see the incredible richness that an artist like him could provide, an incredible legacy that he'd leave behind him, but also how difficult and how challenging it was for him, and how easy it can be for us to turn people like this away. I hope you've enjoyed seeing some of these pictures. They are not easy, they are not always happy, but they are profoundly important. They're an invaluable record, not just of a particular time period, of a particular artistic scene, but of a more general feeling of hopelessness and of optimism in the face of great destruction, of great sadness and despair. After the arrival of Janko Adler, British art was never the same. His legacy continues to influence to this day.