#02 Artists
Eva Frankfurther 1930 - 1959
FORM AND colour were concerns of the fellow artists that Eva Frankfurther knew, but for her “these were only a means to an end, the understanding and commenting on people.” And in her brief life she demonstrated again and again her insight into the human condition in paintings, drawings and lithographs of a multi-cultural throng of people. “West Indian, Irish, Cypriot and Pakistani immigrants, English whom the Welfare State had passed by, these were the people amongst whom I lived and made some of my best friends,” she said, when she lived in the 1950s in Whitechapel,working evening shifts on the counter at Lyons Corner House and later in a sugar refinery to support herself so she could paint during the day.
Frankfurther was born into a cultured, assimilated Jewish family in Berlin in 1930. Following the rise of the Nazis in Germany, she escaped to London with her family in 1939. Between 1946 and 1951 she studied at St Martin’s School of Art, where her fellow students included Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, who later recalled Frankfurther’s “contempt for professional tricks or gloss” and praised her work as “full of feeling for people”. Her distaste for the art world led to her eventual move to Whitechapel. Between 1948 and 1958 she also travelled extensively in Europe, writing lively and perceptive letters home about the art and people she encountered. In her last year she spent eight months living and working in Israel, returning to London in October 1958. Three months later, suffering from depression, she took her own life at the age of 28.
During her lifetime Frankfurther exhibited regularly in local group shows at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Bethnal Green Museum. Her work has also been exhibited posthumously in London, Leicester, Cambridge, Bedford and Berlin and is in collections including Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, Clare College, Cambridge, and a number of private collections both in the UK and abroad.