Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Bernard Meninsky was central to the great generation of 20th century Anglo-Jewish artists which included Bomberg, Gertler, Kramer and Rosenberg, but remains perhaps the least known today. Major critical appreciation eluded Meninsky during his lifetime - despite the power of his dark, atmospheric landscapes of the 1920's and 30's, the tenderness of his "mother and child" series and the magic of the visionary, pastoral world of his later years.

Bernard Meninsky was born in 1891 in Karotopin, Ukraine but his family moved to Liverpool, where he studied at the Liverpool School of Art. He entered The Slade School of Fine Art with a scholarship in 1912-13. When the war broke out in 1914 Meninsky joined the Royal Fusiliers, seeing action with General Allenby in Palestine. In 1918 he became an official war artist.

After the war he joined the London Group and taught at the Westminster School of Art and later at the Oxford School of Art. He had his first one-man show at the Goupil Gallery in 1919.

As John Russell Taylor, art critic of ‘The Times’ shows in this first significant study of his life and art, Meninsky has always defied easy classification. Meninsky has been compared to Augustus John and latterly has been dubbed a Neo-Romantic. Significantly his work was well represented in the Barbican exhibition ‘A Paradise Lost’. Yet even this convenient tag tells only part of the story. The flow and sculptural solidity of his draughtsmanship - and even more the monumentality of his figures in landscape - have more in common with the spirit of Picasso or Matisse than with the contorted lines of the English Neo-Romantics proper.

Much of Meninsky's life was devoted to teaching, but as a man he was shy, retiring and neurotic. He was a man of many secrets, who finally took his own life at the age of 58. In spite of all this, Meninsky had a blazing talent, resolving the torments of his life into an art of elegiac grace and rare visionary power. He was an early friend of Bomberg, Gertler and Epstein, and was praised and recommended by Sickert. He worked with Gordon Craig and was collected by Ivor Novello, and during the Second World War he lived in the Oxford of Tolkein, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. During his life Meninsky went through a complete mental breakdown and came out the other side, this served to strengthen and deepen his art up until his death

Examples of his work can be found in numerous prestigious public and private collections throughout the world, including the Tate Gallery, London; The National Portrait Gallery, London; The Imperials War Museum, London, Ben Uri Gallery, London, The City of Manchester Art Gallery; Sheffield Art gallery; The Ashmoleum Museum, Oxford; Leicestershire Museums & Art Galleries; The Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry; Hove Museum of Art; The Cooper Gallery, Barnsley; and Wakefield Art Gallery amongst others.