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Self styled

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his circle
Ben Uri Gallery, 108a Boundary Road. London NW8, until 8 June

It seems that Isaac Rosenberg thought of himself as a poet rather than as a painter, but that is to undervalue his distinct dual contribution as an artist. Although he exhibited little in his short lifetime, he trained at the Slade and was actually an artist–poet in the English Romantic tradition of William Blake. Remarkably, this is the first exhibition to examine his achievement solely as a painter in the context of his peers. Although there is not a great deal to see, the quality of the work assures Rosenberg’s place in the pantheon. The show is the sixth in a series organised by the Ben Uri to explore the lives and careers of London-based Jewish artists born, raised or working in the East End in the first three decades of the 20th century. (Others have included Bernard Meninsky, Mark Gertler and Alfred Wolmark.) This exhibition coincides with the 90th anniversary of the end of the first world war and is a fitting moment to reconsider the reputation of one of its myriad lost talents. Rosenberg was killed on April Fool’s Day 1918, aged just 27, less than six months before the war’s end.

He was born in Bristol in 1890, the second child and eldest son of Russian and Yiddish-speaking Jewish émigrés from Lithuania. In 1897, the family moved to Stepney, where the young Isaac grew up, and at school he showed more interest in drawing than in anything else. There was no money to send him to art school, however, and he was apprenticed to a Fleet Street photo-engraving firm, a fate he lamented as being ‘chained to this fiendish mangling-machine’. He took evening classes in painting at Birkbeck College, and then was fortunate enough to secure the patronage of a trio of wealthy Anglo–Jewish ladies who sent him to the Slade (1911–13) where he won prizes. His health was not good and he was dispatched to South Africa by the same support group, yet he returned to England and enlisted in the army in October 1915. As he wrote to Ezra Pound, there was a ‘strong temptation to join when you are making no money’. He had written to Laurence Binyon: ‘I find writing interferes with drawing a good deal, and is far more exhausting,’ but from 1915 onwards most of his energies went into his poetry.

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