#06 Jack Bilbo 1907-1967
INTERNMENT ON the Isle of Man as an ‘enemy alien’ in 1940 did not stop the artistic endeavors of Hugo Baruch, otherwise known as the artist Jack Bilbo, later described by the critic John Russell Taylor as “a wild, émigré modernist who blew some unpredictable life into the London gallery scene”.
At the Onchan camp he organised exhibitions in his ‘cabin’, visited by 1500 internees. As camp impresario he was the focus of artrelated activities; artworks and a caricature made by fellow internees, Henry de Beuys Roessingh and Heinz Kiewe.
His family story was tragic. His family’s theatrical costume business was confiscated by the Nazis, and his father commited suicide. His mother, who was disabled, was subjected to medical experiments in a concentration camp, and did not survive. Bilbo had been arrested for anti-fascist activities in Berlin in 1933, but escaped to France, then Spain, arriving in England in 1936.
In 1941, he established the Modern Art Gallery, occupying one floor at 12 Baker Street, London as an exhibiting platform “against Hitlerism and all it stands for”. In 1943 he relocated to a building at 24 Charles II Street near Haymarket and the Gallery became a vital meeting place for émigré artists. Bilbo showed his own work alongside major figures including Picasso, Soutine and Modigliani, unknown artists, émigrés including Hein Heckroth, Anna Mayerson, Samson Schames, cartoonist ‘Vicky’ (Victor Weisz) and Jacob Bornfriend, and British artists including Jan Gordon and Joan Atkins. He hosted readings of Schwitters’ Dadaist poetry and Bilbo’s own macabre stories, and published books on the Moderns, Picasso, famous nudes, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Theophile Alexandre Steinlen, and Bilbo’s own outsize autobiography (1948).
When it closed post-war, Bilbo moved to Weybridge, Surrey, where he created giant erotic female nudes in his garden, which upset the neighbours. Bilbo and his wife Owo later moved to Paris, then the South of France, and in 1956 he returned to Berlin, where he opened a bar and continued his art practice. His art was influenced by Surrealism and embraced bizarre, erotic or grotesque themes. An irreverent and acute social critic, his satirical drawings expressed the socialist and virulent antifascist views he shared with fellow German artists including George Grosz and John Heartfield.
Words were essential to his art.In his autobiography he created dramatic back stories, often entirely fictitious, such as being a bodyguard for gangster Al Capone.
Bilbo died in Berlin, Germany after a long illness in 1967.