Eva Frankfurther

The 1930s and 1940s were tumultuous years for refugees. Jews, Spaniards, Germans, Poles, and many other groups were dislocated because of the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe. 700,000 Palestinians fled after the war in Palestine that was sparked by the creation of the state of Israel. The Partition, which divided the British Raj into India and Pakistan on religious lines, also displaced 10 to 20 million people.
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Eva Frankfurther, a German Jew and a talented figurative painter, grew up as a refugee during this era of turmoil. At the age of nine, she fled with her family to England in the late 1930s to avoid Nazi persecution in Germany. She survived a Blitz-torn London, many air-raids, and England’s penetrating cold winters. In 1946, at the age of sixteen, she began her art training in St Martin’s School of Art in London and cultivated skills in life and anatomy drawing. She had an empathetic gift of remembering the contours of people’s faces as well as reading bodily attitudes. Her classmate, Frank Auerbach, another refugee, commented that her art was “full of feeling for people”.

In the 1950s, by day, Frankfurther would work as a dish-washer at the Lyons Corner House restaurant in Piccadilly. By night, she would paint beautiful figurative portraits of her Irish, Cypriot, and Pakistani fellow co-workers. With care and skill, she captured the mundane acts, emotions, and expressions of porters, waitresses, chefs, and kitchen staff. These paintings are a compassionate window into the delicate inner lives of other newcomers as well as a testament to her sense of camaraderie with those in exilic or migration conditions. These humane portraits are known to be among her finest achievements. Suffering from depression, Frankfurther tragically committed suicide in 1959 at the age of twenty-eight.

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