LONDON.- On Thursday 8 August The Rt. Hon. Dame Margaret Hodge, MP, visited Ben Uri Gallery and Museum’s revealing exhibition ‘Art-Exit: 1939 a Very Different Europe’ at 12 Star Gallery, Europe House, 32 Smith Square, Westminster, to view the recently discovered portrait of her grandfather painted on the front page of The Times newspaper dated 6 August 1940, whilst interned at the Huyton Internment Camp outside Liverpool.

Dame Margaret’s connection to the exhibition and to this image, is deeply personal. Through a number of striking coincidences, the sitter in the portrait, with his distinctive white moustache and bright blue eyes, was identified by a member of Margaret's family as Wilhelm Hollitscher (1873-1943), former Chief Engineer of the Danube Steamboat Shipping Company, and Dame Margaret’s grandfather. Hollitscher, a Jew, decided there was no alternative but to try and escape Nazi tyranny and the pervasive anti-Semitic doctrine by migrating from Austria to Britain after the Anschluss in March 1938. Following Prime Minister Churchill’s directive to ‘collar the lot!’ Hollitscher - along with many thousands of so-called ‘enemy’ aliens - Germans and Austrians - Jews and non-Jews, was interned, first in Huyton, Liverpool before being moved to the Isle of Man.

In Huyton camp, Hollitscher was painted by the distinguished artist Hugo Dachinger, a fellow Austrian, and fortuitously recorded these events in great detail in his diary. The portrait illustrates the dynamism and strength of character of the sitter and demonstrates Dachinger’s virtuoso technique, combining watercolour and other media to great effect on graphic sheets of newsprint, often the most readily available surface in camp on which to make artworks.

The artist Hugo Dachinger was born to an Austrian Jewish family and self-funded his studies at Leipzig School of Arts and Crafts (1929-32) by selling drawings and working as window-dresser. In 1932 in Vienna he invented a system of moveable type (patented in 1933). In 1938, following the Anschluss, he immigrated to England, settling in north London and establishing Transposter Advertising Ltd (closed 1945) with Ernst Rosenfeld. From June 1940 to January 1941 Dachinger was interned at Huyton and then in Mooragh Camp, Ramsey, on the Isle of Man, holding exhibitions in both camps. After release he married German émigré artist Meta Gutmann (who nicknamed him 'Puck') and exhibited in London at Jack Bilbo's Modern Art Gallery (1942) and the Redfern and Leger Galleries (1941–45), also working as an inventor and designer.

The 12 Star Gallery is dedicated to promoting European debate and this timely exhibition reflects on a very different Europe 80 years ago. The exhibition shines a spotlight on the forced journeys made by many of central Europe’s most distinguished, talented and pioneering artists, who escaped tyranny in search of artistic and personal freedoms. The exhibition features work by émigrés including Jankel Adler, Frank Auerbach, Martin Bloch, Marc Chagall, Hugo Dachinger, Hans Feibusch, Eva Frankfurther, Lucian Freud, George Grosz, Josef Herman, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Meidner, Kurt Schwitters, Chaïm Soutine, Elisabeth Tomalin and Feliks Topolski, from countries including Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Russia.

The majority of works are drawn from the Ben Uri Collection, complemented by a small number of works from private collections. September 2019 marks the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World. ‘ART-EXIT’ is a vivid reminder of the violence, devastation, economic and social chaos that can so easily be caused by super-nationalism subsuming proud patriotism. As Europe as a whole experiences a growing nationalist momentum, these artists, their works and forced journeys, followed by new lives and significant contributions as immigrants in their new homelands, all have fascinating, important and relevant stories to tell.

Co-curated by Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson of The Ben Uri Research Unit for the Study of the Jewish and immigrant Contribution to the Visual Arts in Britain since 1900