Cosmopolis: the role of refugee art dealers in the internationalisation of the London art market, c. 1933-1960

The Nazification of much of Europe from 1933-1945 prompted the flight of many art dealers (mostly Jewish) who had supported the artistic avant-garde in their native countries. Britain and the USA became the main host countries, creating overlapping networks of émigré art dealers with pre-existing ties, whether of business, friendship, family or experience of a common trauma that spanned Continental Europe, Britain and North America. Of the forty-five art dealers who moved to Britain, half were involved in modern and contemporary art. This thesis addresses the dominant and yet largely unacknowledged role of refugee and émigré art dealers in twentieth-century London and the part they played in the transformation of London’s modern art market from small and insular in the 1930s, to a thriving international scene to rival New York by the 1960s. Based upon substantial archive research, it is the first in-depth exploration and analysis of the subject that foregrounds the confluence of forced migration and the art market, with particular regard to London’s positioning in the international art world in this period.

The thesis offers an ‘episodic’ rather than a comprehensive history of the refugee art dealer, with seven chapters each dedicated to a selected art dealer and an aspect of their activity or impact. These are arranged into three thematic parts which, by identifying broader categories into which this activity can be sorted, demonstrate that alongside the diversity and range of migration experiences and artistic activity this loosely associated group evinced, they shared key professional interests and strategies which made them a powerful force in the British art world. Part One considers art dealership as means of understanding the dealer’s sense of exile, focussing on Alfred Flechtheim’s introduction of ‘degenerate art’ to 1930s London through his promotion of Paul Klee at the Mayor Gallery; Paul Wengraf’s Arcade Gallery as a venue for wartime refugee artists; and Lea Bondi Jaray’s promotion of transnational female artists at the St George’s Gallery after WW2. In Part Two, the postwar transformation of London into an international marketplace through the import of foreign avant-gardes begins with Mabhiesen Ltd’s 1952 exhibition of Nicolas de Staël. The theme is diversified with an introduction to the contacts between refugee art dealers and colonial (later Commonwealth) artists immediately after the war, with a focus on Ronald Moody at the Arcade Gallery, and Ben Enwonwu and Kofi Antubam at William Ohly’s Berkeley Galleries. Part Three looks beyond London to consider how refugee dealers made British modernism an international force in the 1940s and 1950s by building an American market for it. Two generations of British artists benefited from Ala Story’s American British Art Centre in wartime New York, and Gimpel Fils’s utilisation of dealer networks and institutional infrastructures in the 1950s.