Wounded (Portrait of Man in a cap)
Born to a Jewish family, the seventh of ten children. Adler moved to Germany in 1914 to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule. In 1918-19 he returned to Łódź and was involved in Jung Jidysz, an important artistic group in interwar Poland. (Adler and fellow member Natan Szpigel are both represented in the Ben Uri Collection.) In 1920 Adler moved to Berlin, then to Dusseldorf in 1922 to teach at the Academy of Arts where he met Paul Klee, who influenced his work, which often portrayed Jewish subject matter using a modernist vocabulary. From 1933, as a Jew, and a modern artist, Adler faced persecution under Hitler’s regime. He fled soon after, spending time in Paris, where he was influenced by Picasso, and at Hayter’s Atelier 17. Adler regarded his exile as a conscious political resistance against Germany’s Fascist regime. In 1937 the Nazis once again seized his works, taking 25 from public collections, four of which were shown in the Entartete Kunst [Degenerate Art] exhibition in Munich. With the outbreak of war, Adler volunteered for the Polish Army in France, but in 1941 he was invalided out and subsequently lived in Scotland, moving to London in 1943. He died knowing that none of his family had survived. Wounded is characteristic of his haunting portraits,fusing an intense memory of tragedy, his Jewish/Polish identity and modernist impulses, reminiscent of Picasso - here a head is both full-view and profile, whilst oversized hands beseech the viewer.
Acrylic on paper on board
54.5 x 37.0cm
Images and text © Ben Uri collection, 2017