Becoming Gustav Metzger:
Uncovering the Early Years (1945-1959)
Lecture by Nicola Baird, London (UK)

Born in Germany to Polish-Jewish orthodox parents in 1926, Gustav Metzger (1926-2017) was one of 10,000 Jewish children evacuated in 1939 to London as part of the Kindertransport. His parents, eldest brother, and maternal grandparents, all perished in the Holocaust. Upon the advice of Henry Moore, Metzger spent six months at the Cambridge School of Art, before enrolling at the Sir John Cass Institute in 1946, where he studied sculpture and attended David Bomberg’s life drawing classes at the Borough Polytechnic, alongside contemporaries including Frank Auerbach.

The following year Metzger joined Bomberg’s composition class, producing ‘extremely fast and intense’ paintings. In 1948 he obtained a stateless passport which enabled him to travel to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to study continental European painting. He returned to England in 1949, resuming Bomberg’s evening classes and subsequently initiating the Borough Bottega exhibiting society. After resigning in 1953, Metzger stopped painting for almost four years and moved to Kings Lynn in Norfolk. It was not until 1956 that he produced a series of oils depicting a three-legged table evocative of a mushroom cloud, his return to painting having coincided with his involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Between 1957 and 1959, Metzger embraced abstraction, experimenting with paintings on thin sheets of mild steel. He described such work, which laid the foundation for his later auto-destructive practice, as a continuation of that produced in Bomberg’s composition classes. From these important beginnings, Metzger went on to become ‘the conscience of the artworld’, a pioneering practitioner whose definitive contribution to British cultural and political history cannot be underestimated. He died in London in 2017.

On view at Ben Uri Gallery and Museum in London June 16 – September 17, 2021, “Becoming Gustav Metzger: Uncovering the Early Years (1945–59)” is the first museum exhibition to examine the little-known formative years of refugee artist and activist Gustav Metzger. The sixth in the Ben Uri Research Unit’s survey exhibitions highlighting the important contribution of Jewish and immigrant artists to British visual culture since 1900, the exhibition showcases rarely seen drawings and paintings from this crucial early period – the majority never previously exhibited – together with related archival material. Highlights include Metzger’s Head of E. Royalton-Kisch (1950) and the large expressionist oils, The Dissolution of the City (1946) and Eroica, Funeral March (1946), as well as early abstract works on board and cardboard, and a kodak box. Together they chart Metzger’s artistic journey from figuration to abstraction prior to the development of his later radical auto-destructive practice.

The exhibition also includes important contextual works by pioneering modernists Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and David Bomberg (drawn from the Ben Uri Collection), all important early influences upon Metzger. Bomberg mentored Metzger – a favoured pupil at his revolutionary Borough Polytechnic evening classes, and, in 1948, encouraged him to exhibit at both Ben Uri Art Gallery and the London Group. Metzger later paid tribute to Bomberg as arguably ‘the biggest influence on me’.

The exhibition is curated by Nicola Baird and Leanne Dmyterko, Co-Director of The Gustav Metzger Foundation.