Born in Poland into an Orthodox Jewish family, Jankel Adler trained in engraving in Belgrade and the applied arts in Barmen (now Wuppertal) before enrolling at the Düsseldorf Akademie der Künste. Based in Düsseldorf between 1922 and 1933, he became steeped in progressive art circles, associating with Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky amongst others, and teaching alongside Paul Klee at his alma mater.
After the Nazi’s declaration that his work was ‘degenerate’, Adler moved to Paris in 1933, where he worked with Stanley William Hayter at the experimental Atelier 17 and met Pablo Picasso - a rite of passage for any artist with serious aspirations to belong to the avant-garde.
Following the outbreak of World War Two, Adler joined the Polish army, with whom he was evacuated to Scotland in 1940. Demobilisation in 1941 was followed by a move to London in 1943. He thus personified the European avant-garde in Britain whilst becoming a central figure in the art worlds of Glasgow and then London. Solo exhibitions were held at T&R Annans & Sons in the former, and at the Redfern Gallery, Lefevre Gallery and at Gimpel Fils in the latter; he was to have a tremendous impact on British artists, in particular Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, who shared a studio with John Minton two floors beneath that of Adler in Kensington.
Philip Vann’s declared that...
"finding refuge in Britain in 1941, the forty-six-year-old Jankel Adler embarked afresh on a richly distinctive journey as an artist. The powerful, often stark monumentality characterising his earlier continental period gave way to vibrant new works of most subtle intricacy and compassionate poignancy. All that he had learned and absorbed from the great Modernists he had known in the 1920s and ‘30s – notably Klee, [Max] Ernst and Picasso – was now assimilated and integrated with apparently spontaneous ease into radically original, humane pictures."