Homage to hope by refugee from Nazis back in view after 40 years

He had washed up in the UK having fled the Nazis to France, where he had been medically discharged from the reconstituted Polish army.

The artwork has been in the same Glasgow family since the avant-garde artist gave it to the late owner’s grandfather, Adler’s dentist, in exchange for dental work.

Simon Hucker, senior fine art specialist at Lyon & Turnbull and co-head of the Modern Made auction, said of the poignant piece: “I think you can see something of the zeitgeist in the painting itself.

A Peasant and his Wife by Jankel Adler, displayed by Lyon & Turnbull. (Steward Atwood)[Missing Credit]

“It’s a real privilege to be able to bring this rare and major work to the market for the first time ever. This is a large-scale, ambitious, fully fledged example of European Modernism, representing the very best of Jankel Adler, but painted in Glasgow during the war, under stressed circumstances.”

Adler grew up in a large Orthodox Jewish family in Łódz, where he co-founded Poland’s first avant-garde group for young Jewish artists, Young Yiddish, in 1918 – the first of many progressive artist groups with which Adler would be associated.

In 1920 he began immersing himself in the avant-garde scene in pre-war Berlin and Dusseldorf, rubbing shoulders with Chagall and Otto Dix and befriending the Swiss-German painter Klee, who taught alongside him at the Dusseldorf Academy and had a profound stylistic influence on Adler’s work.

But at the height of Adler’s early success in 1933, the Nazis came to power and he was forced to flee the country owing to his Jewishness and his experimental modernist work.

Many of Adler’s paintings were deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis and confiscated from public collections in Germany. In 1937, four of Adler’s paintings were included in the Nazis’ infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich, staged to condemn the artists whose work was considered to represent the controversially modern, “un-German” style.

Adler spent the following few years primarily in Paris, where he met leading figures in the art world including Picasso, and spoke out against the rising tide of fascism.

On the outbreak of war in 1939, Adler joined the Polish army in France, but in 1941 he was medically discharged and relocated to Glasgow, where he was swiftly welcomed into the thriving art scene.

In December 1942, Adler’s work was included in an exhibition of Jewish Art at the Jewish Institute in Glasgow.

Jankel Adler (1895-1949). (Photo: August Sander, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)[Missing Credit]

Adler’s paintings, many of which featured Jewish subjects, were displayed beside paintings by both British and European Jewish artists, including David Bomberg, Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine.

Adler moved to London in 1943 after a brief stay in the Scottish artists’ town of Kirkcudbright. He shared a house in Kensington with the “two Roberts”, acclaimed Scottish painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, whom Adler closely mentored over the following two years.

He moved to Wiltshire in 1945, where he died of a heart attack four years later at the age of 53.

It was believed to be the result of both ill health and having recently learnt that none of his nine siblings had survived the Holocaust.

But Adler’s impact on contemporary British art persisted. His paintings were featured in several major posthumous exhibitions, including a memorial exhibition organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1951.

The painting will be on display at the Mall Galleries in London from April 28 until May 1, when it goes up for auction.