Eva Frankfurther (10 February 1930 – January 1959) was a German-born British artist known for her depictions of the immigrant communities of the

East End of London The East End of London, often referred to within the London area simply as the East End, is the historic core of wider East London, east of the Roman and medieval walls of the City of London and north of the River Thames. It does not have uni ...

in the 1950s.

Biography

Frankfurther was born in the Dahlem district of Berlin to a Jewish family. Her father, Paul, was a businessman while her mother, Henriette, was an economics graduate. Henriette died of cancer 18 months after Eva was born and her father remarried in 1934. The family fled to Britain in 1939 to avoid persecution under the Nazis. The children, Eva and her two siblings, left Berlin six months before their parents and spent some time in

Haslemere The town of Haslemere () and the villages of Shottermill and Grayswood are in south west Surrey, England, around south west of London. Together with the settlements of Hindhead and Beacon Hill, they comprise the civil parish of Haslemere i ...

, being looked after by German refugee teachers, before their parents arrived in England during August 1939. The family rented a flat in

Belsize Park Gardens Belsize Park is an affluent residential area of Hampstead in the London Borough of Camden (the inner north-west of London), England. The residential streets are lined with mews houses and Georgian and Victorian villas. Some nearby localities ar ...

but Frankfurther and her sister were evacuated to

Hertfordshire Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For govern ...

in World War II to avoid the bombing of London. After the War, Frankfurther enrolled in Saint Martin's School of Art in 1947. There she studied life drawing under

Roland Vivian Pitchforth Roland Vivian Pitchforth RA ARWS (25 April 1895 – 6 August 1982) was an English painter, teacher and an official British war artist during the Second World War. He excelled at watercolours and in later years concentrated on landscapes, sea ...

and was held in great esteem by her fellow students, who included

Leon Kossoff Leon Kossoff (10 December 1926 – 4 July 2019) was a British figurative painter known for portraits, life drawings and cityscapes of London, England. Early years and education Kossoff was born in Islington, London, and spent most of his early ...

and Frank Auerbach. As a student, Frankfurther had spent some summers in America. After graduating in 1951, she visited Italy, where she painted numerous portraits of street beggars and pilgrims, and then, briefly, Paris. Returning to England, Frankfurther took herself away from the central London art scene, and her family home, and moved to the East End of the city. She lived in a basement flat in Whitechapel and took an evening job, working as a counter-hand and dish-washer at the

J. Lyons and Co. J. Lyons & Co. was a British restaurant Chain store, chain, food manufacturing, and hotel conglomerate founded in 1884 by Joseph Lyons (caterer), Joseph Lyons and his brothers in law, Isidore Gluckstein, Isidore and Montague Gluckstein. Lyons’ ...

Corner House restaurant in

Piccadilly Piccadilly () is a road in the City of Westminster, London, to the south of Mayfair, between Hyde Park Corner in the west and Piccadilly Circus in the east. It is part of the A4 road that connects central London to Hammersmith, Earl's Court, ...

. This allowed her time to paint during the day. Frankfurther spent five years working at the Corner House and painted several portraits of her fellow workers, including the double portrait ''West Indian Waitresses''. Frankfurther also painted portraits of the local East End population. As well as depicting members of the long established Jewish East End community, she also sketched and painted people from the Pakistani, West Indian and Irish communities then arriving in the area. She left the Corner House in 1956 and took a job at the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery at Victoria Dock. Frankfurther left that job in 1957 and lived in Israel for several months. She returned to London in 1959 where, suffering from depression, she took her own life. During her life, Frankfurther only appears to have exhibited locally in the East End, mainly at the Whitechapel Gallery, though she did feature in a group exhibition at the

Ben Uri Gallery The Ben Uri Gallery & Museum is a registered museum and charity based at 108a Boundary Road, off Abbey Road in St John's Wood, London, England. It features the work and lives of émigré artists in London, and describes itself as "The Art Museu ...

in 1956. The same gallery hosted a memorial exhibition in 1962 and included examples of her work in their 2014 ''Refiguring the 50s'' exhibition and held a one-person show of her work in 2017.

Exhibitions

Posthumous exhibitions: *1962, Ben Uri Gallery *1979, Clare College, Cambridge *1980, Bedford Central Library *1981, Margaret Fisher Gallery, London *2001, Boundary Gallery, London

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Frankfurther, Eva 1930 births 1959 deaths 1959 suicides 20th-century German painters 20th-century German women artists Alumni of Saint Martin's School of Art Artists from Berlin Artists who died by suicide Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United Kingdom Jewish women artists Suicides in Westminster

Biography

Exhibitions

References

Further reading

External links