Jankel Adler (Tuszyn, a suburb of Łódz, Kingdom of Polan, then client state of the Russian Empire [now Poland], 1895–Aldbourne, Wilts, Great Britain 1949)

Jakub Adler was born the eighth of twelve children to Elias Adler, shopkeeper, and his wife Hana Laja, née Fiter. Jankel, as he was called by his family, grew up in the world of Hasidic Jewry. He was educated at religious schools in Łódz and then, when his family moved there, in Warsaw. In 1912 he studied engraving and worked as an engraver for his uncle in the Serbian postal service in Belgrade. He attended a Hilger’s private school in Barmen (now part of Wuppertal), and also studied drawing. He continued his art studies under Gustav Wiethuchter at the Barmen Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts). During the First Word War, he joined the Russian army and was captured by the Germans, but was soon released. In 1918, he became close to the avant-garde artists and thinkers who gathered around Berlin’s Die Aktion and Der Sturm. In 1918 and 1919, Adler lived in Poland, where he became a founding member of the Yung-yidish (Young Yiddish) group of painters and writers. In 1920, he moved to Germany, where he met Marc Chagall in Berlin.

In 1922, Adler settled in Dusseldorf. The same year, he came to know the Dresden-based painter Otto Dix. Adler exhibited two paintings in the Polish section of the important I. Internationale Kunstausstellung Duesseldorf (First International Exhibition in Dusseldorf), on view from May 28 to July 3, 1922, and participated in the Kongress der Union Internationaler Fortschrittlicher Künstler (The Congress of International Progressive Artists), which was organized to coincide with the exhibition‘s opening. Between 1922 and 1933, Adler was an active member of numerous avant-garde artists’ groups in Berlin, Cologne, and Dusseldorf, including the Gruppe progressive Künstler, Novembergruppe, Das Junge Rheinland, and Rheinische Sezession.

Adler’s achievement was recognized by the city of Dusseldorf, where he received a commission for a series of murals for a planetarium in 1925; was awarded a Gold Medal in 1928; and, after an extended period of travel in Spain and Mallorca in 1929 and 1930, was appointed to teach at the venerable Kunstakademie (Art Academy) in 1931. During the March 1933 Reichstag election campaign, Adler, together with other left-wing artists and intellectuals, published an “urgent appeal” against the policies of the National Socialists and left Germany. Two of his pictures were included in the National Socialist exhibition Kulturbolschewistische Bilder (Images of cultural Bolshevism) that took place at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1933. Four more would be exhibited in the notorious Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in 1937.

From 1933 to 1940, Adler lived in France. In 1935 he traveled to Warsaw on the occasion of a large monographic exhibition of his work, organized by the Warsaw Committee to Aid Exiles. Over the next two years, Adler traveled in Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Soviet Union, returning to France in 1937. During the “Degenerate Art” campaigns, the Nazis removed twenty-five of Adler’s works from German public collection; a tragic testament to the success and respect he had achieved in Germany.

In 1939, Adler joined the Polish army in France and was evacuated to Scotland with Polish artillery in 1940. In 1941, he was released from the army on medical grounds. He settled in London in 1943 and joined a circle of refugee artists. At the conclusion of the Second World War, Adler learned that many of his relatives died in the Holocaust. He refused to exhibit his works in Germany and ended his days in England.

[This text exerpted from Alla Rosenfeld, Ph.D., Jewish Artists, Jewish Identity: Works from the Merrill C. Berman Collection (2023), p. 66.]

For an in-depth essay on Adler’s (deaccessioned) painting, Artist of 1926 in our online journal Research, no. 1, click here.

Note: References to Annemarie Heibel’s catalogue raisonné of Adler’s paintings, Jankel Adler (1895-1949): Monografie und Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde. Münster: MV Wissenschaft, 2016 (available for download here), appear below as: [Heibel 2016].

Prints

Drawings

Paintings

Deaccessioned