Director's Choice: Highlights from the Ben Uri Permanent Collection
24th September-9th November 2003

This will be a rare opportunity to reappraise some of the diversity of works in the Ben Uri’s collection of almost one thousand pieces illustrating the contribution that British and European Jewish artists made to the development of the visual arts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection is still expanding to represent the powerful and diverse contributions made by artists of Jewish descent today, and this will be reflected by a number of important modern works, including Frank Auerbach and Patrick Hayman, and several major new contemporary acquisitions, including pieces by David Breuer-Weil and Julie Held.

Alongside key works by post-war and contemporary artists, there will be major examples by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists, including a magnificent self-portrait by Max Liebermann, the great German-Jewish post-Impressionist. Painted in 1929, this self-portrait of the artist as an old man is hauntingly powerful and an important example of his late painting. Solomon J. Solomon’s Micha Elman Playing the Violin (1911) is a vigorous portrait of the young violinist displaying wonderful contrasts of light and dark. David Bomberg’s At the Window (1919) is an important example of his Vorticist style, depicting a man in red at a window. Emmanuel Levy’s modernist depiction of Two Rabbis with Scrolls of the Law, captured in a pared-down and sparse style in shades of brown, white and black, is one of the most powerful and daring paintings on a religious theme in the collection. One of the Ben Uri’s most popular images by a woman artist is Lily Delissa Joseph’s late nineteenth-century Self-Portrait with Candles, a beautiful painting that shows the artist immersed in the dark holding a lighted candle out before her in each hand.

Richard Aronowitz-Mercer, Director of the museum, says: “From this lightning tour of just some of the many pieces in the exhibition, it is clear that our Collection is as diverse as the artists’ names involved. I am certain that Director's Choice: Highlights from the Ben Uri Permanent Collection will be an enlightening, thought-provoking and stimulating show that will provide a wonderful glimpse into the breadth and depth of the Ben Uri’s Permanent Collection begun so long ago in 1915.” 

For further information or images, please contact Elinor Kaye at elinor@benuri.org.uk

Opening Times:
Mon – Thurs 10-5.30pm,
Fri 10-3pm, 
Sunday 12-4pm

Closed for Rosh Hashana 26th-28th Sept, Yom Kippur 5th-6th Oct, Succot 11th-12th & 18th-19th October

Admission Charge: Free 
Closest Tube: Swiss Cottage, St. John’s Wood. 
Buses: 189, 139, 31