Message in a Bottle

In 1936, the Stuttgart-born modernist painter and socialist lawyer Fred Uhlman arrived in Britain. He couldn’t speak English, and, as he reflected decades later in his sardonic autobiography The Making of an Englishman (1960), he knew little about British culture or British art. What he did know was not encouraging. ‘Everybody in Paris agreed’, he wrote, ‘that if one wanted a good laugh the thing was to see the Pre-Raphaelites in the Tate Gallery.’ When he visited what is now Tate Britain in the year of his arrival, Uhlman found the paintings of Stanley Spencer, which threw interwar English figures into Biblical scenes, even more hilarious.

Soon after, Uhlman met and fell in love with Diana Croft, the daughter of Tory MP Henry Croft, who, as Uhlman recalled, hated Jews, foreigners and socialists (Uhlman was all three). Together, Croft’s money and Uhlman’s connections helped to build a network of German and Central European artists in Britain, centred around the couple’s house in Downshire Hill, Hampstead, through which they saved the careers – and often the lives – of dozens of European modernists.

Regardless of Spencer’s merits or otherwise, Uhlman’s mockery is understandable if you compare Tate’s holdings at the start of the 1930s with those of the average large municipal gallery in any big German city. At a time when Tate didn’t even own a Picasso, places such as Essen or Erfurt collected everything from Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Ernst Kirchner to El Lissitzky, Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters, placing them on public display in ordinary industrial cities.

In 1937, the fascist regime that had taken over Germany in 1933 put on the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition, which toured the country to pillory the previous four decades of modern art. What is often overlooked is how the Nazi state was able to collect all this work in the first place: it was thanks to the efforts of curators and collectors in the local authorities of the Weimar Republic. In 1932, no large country in Europe had possessed so progressive a patronage of the arts; by 1937, nowhere was as determined to reverse it in favour of idiocy, mysticism and racism.

This development led to a diaspora of artists from Germany and the countries it annexed. Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, the USSR and France all seemed safe – until they weren’t; Turkey took many German intellectuals and aesthetes; some, especially in cinema, made it to the United States, while others found refuge as far afield as Shanghai in China. But several thousand came to Britain. Most were escaping to save their lives – especially German Jewish artists like Uhlman or Hans Feibusch, a painter from Frankfurt, but also communists like the German artist John Heartfield and left-wing liberals like Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka, all of whom knew that their likely fate, if they stayed at home, would be imprisonment, and probably death, in a concentration camp.

As is often the case, Britain oscillated between generosity and bigotry in its treatment of these escapees from fascism. In 1940, those with German or Austrian passports, such as Uhlman, were interned on the Isle of Man. Many others, among them the Bauhaus teacher and artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, were deported to Australia. Because of this, a propaganda effort was necessary as a way of convincing people of many things at once: that fascism was evil and extremely dangerous, and would in time come for Britain; and that the modern art developed in Berlin, Stuttgart, Dessau, Vienna, Prague, Brno, Łódź, Warsaw, Bratislava and Budapest was serious and not a game being played on the public.

The German curator Edith Hoffman organised a London show to counter Degenerate Art; the largely refugee-staffed illustrated magazine Picture Post introduced British readers to the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in photography while informing them about the Nazis’ state-organised pogroms and the struggle of the Spanish Republic against Franco. Meanwhile, up in Downshire Hill, Uhlman organised the Free German League of Culture, an association to connect German-speaking refugees and to promote their work to the British public. It put on exhibitions and produced Bertolt Brecht plays and cabarets. Its exhibitions tried to raise awareness of the destruction of the European Jews, and pointedly showcased the work made by those refugees that had been dumped on the Isle of Man. There was also a show in London, in which the new home of these immigrants was looked at with a fresh, careful, alienated eye.

Uhlman’s ‘Kulturbund’, to give it its German name, was a message in a bottle. The work it promoted – expressionism, photomontage, constructivism – gradually but decisively connected with British artists, from the constructivism of Anthony Caro and the dada streak in Eduardo Paolozzi’s work, to the John Heartfield-influenced montages of Peter Kennard. One of the less crucial, but still important, legacies of this is that visitors from Stuttgart would, over time, find more in British galleries to admire than the Victorian canvases they had giggled at.

^{Together on this Island: Émigré Art Networks in Britain, Archive Gallery, until 20 June 2027.}

^{Owen Hatherley is the author of many books on aesthetics and politics. His latest book The Alienation Effect is published by Allen Lane.}