100 Artists #14

Dora Holzhandler 1928 - 2015

Religious rites and everyday pleasures abound in the vibrant, colourful paintings of Dora Holzhandler, pictures with a folk art feel and a very Jewish heart. She was not concerned about perspective (“Before Leonardo no one used perspective” she would say) and her list of inspirations included Persian miniatures, Oriental watercolours and the work of Modigliani and Rousseau.

Dora Holzhandler was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Paris, France in 1928. Her father was a handbag maker and her mother a singer and seamstress. After the collapse of her father’s business, her parents placed her with a Catholic farming family in Normandy, where she spent five “idyllic” years. Returning to Paris, her mother supported them while her father sought medical treatment in London. Dora’s maternal grandfather, a rabbi, fuelled her interest in Jewish traditions.

In 1934 she and her mother joined her father in London, living in a flat opposite a synagogue in Dalston. “Jewish life in the East End was very vividly imprinted in me,” she said later. During the war she was evacuated to Norfolk. Many members of her wider family were killed by the Nazis, incuding her grandfather the rabbi — she later painted him in her only work to refer directly to the Holocaust.

In 1941 she moved to Suffolk with her mother. Postwar she returned briefly to Paris before re-settling in London, beginning her exhibiting career in the prestigious Royal Society of British Artists (RBA) Young Contemporaries show in 1949. Between 1948 and 1950 she attended the Anglo-French Art School in St John’s Wood.There she met and married fellow pupil George Swinford, an aspiring jewellery designer. She showed in a group exhibition in 1954 at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London and her work was acquired by Charlie Chaplin and refugee painter, Josef Herman, among others.

During the 1960s the family lived a bohemian lifestyle with little money, in furnished rooms, and in the early 1970s relocated to Dumfries, Scotland. Describing herself as a “Jew-Bu”, Holzhandler’s work often incorporates repeated iconography, mystical and religious symbolism, inspired by her dual beliefs in Judaism and Buddhism.

According to Edna O’Brien, her paintings “make us recall our childhoods, our myths, our roots and if we have severed from these things they make us long for them in a palpable way.”

Dora Holzhandler died in London on October 8 2015 at the age of 87.

The Ben Uri Research Unit for the study of the Jewish and immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900 can be accessed at benuri.org/researchunit