The Jewish artists who helped resettle refugees fleeing the Nazis

She was the Jewish artist from Manchester who famously documented London’s East End, West End and the life of working people everywhere from Moscow, which she visited four times, to Wales, where she went down the mines in the name of research.

But although she was famous for her lithographs before winning fresh respect as a television artist, author, designer and baroness (as the wife of a former Lord Chancellor), Pearl Binder’s art was overlooked for decades until being beautifully showcased with more than two dozen works in a new exhibition of anti-Fascist art at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne.

Not that the artist named Pearline by her parents, but known to her friends as Polly, cared about showing off her illustrations when she had so many more strings to her bow besides making political statements with her art. As the thirties darkened, she played a leading role in a series on fashion history in the early days of television, wrote children’s stories, designed costumes for Joan Littlewood’s theatre company, china for Wedgwood and even a set of stained glass windows for the House of Lords. She would go on to spawn a children’s author, a political activist and a fashion historian of her own with her second husband, anti-fascist lawyer and Labour politician Frederick Elwyn-Jones.

“She was always too busy making work to promote herself with exhibitions,” says Professor Lou Taylor, the youngest of three children of the socially-aware creative who worked in a textile mill and took evening classes at the Manchester School of Art before moving south. “She was proud enough that much of her work was in the collection of institutions like the British Museum and the V&A.”

Busy indeed; the daughter of immigrant tailor Morris Binderofski had a lot of living to do after arriving in London in 1925 at the age of 21. She satirised the Bloomsbury set, who lived close to the cheap room she rented, as well as capturing in lithographs the working-class citizens of Whitechapel, where she later moved, and spent time in Paris as well as Moscow, where she journeyed to find out about the role of Soviet artists under Communism.

In 1933 Pearl, who before turning 30 had been married and divorced, recovered from TB and suffered a nervous breakdown, became, following her first Moscow trip, a founding figure of AIA, the left-wing Artists’ International Association whose members helped resettle an ever-growing number of Jewish colleagues and other refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe. They used art as political expression and built up an impressive following in the run-up to the war. Yet despite the fact they numbered more than 1,000 and held many exhibitions even as bombs pummelled London, their story has been overlooked, a fact the Towner show aims to correct in times when antisemitism has become rife and the world once again appears to be lurching dangerously to the right.

The AIA’s most famous Jewish members included co-founder Misha Black (born Moisey Tcherny in Baku), Lucien Pissarro – son of the godfather of French Impressionism, painter David Bomberg, and former Bauhaus professor, painter and photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Also represented in the Eastbourne show is fellow Hungarian-Jewish Bauhaus alumnus and refugee Peter Laszlo-Peri, whose depiction of a Nazi photographing a hanged couple was painted in wartime before he discovered that his own four brothers had died in the Holocaust.

The most affecting work in the show is Morris Kestelman’s incredibly emotional Lama Sabachthani (Why Have You Forsaken Me?), showing a group of eastern European Jews crying into the wilderness with their shtetl behind them. He was the son of a Whitechapel cabinet maker who found refuge from Russian pogroms in the East End. It was first exhibited in 1943, when the Final Solution was already underway and, fittingly for the artist who also served as a wartime air warden, on one of the most prominent West End bomb sites. “It was commissioned especially for the show in the only part of the building still standing after six storeys of John Lewis were blitzed out in Oxford Street,” says Andy Friend, curator of the Towner show, whose book Comrades In Art is the exhibition’s inspiration.

Although Pearl Binder grew up in a kosher home where the family attended synagogue weekly in her childhood, in the 50s she followed other Jews who joined the Quakers to further the course of peace. However, she wrote in 1984 when arranging her Quaker burial (she died in 1990): “I am totally Jewish by birth and upbringing and I do not wish to renounce this profound racial inheritance.” This may be one reason she sent her youngest daughter to a kibbutz at the age of 16, says Lou, who went on become a professor of fashion history at the University of Brighton. “It was not just to get me out of the house for the summer, but also, I am now sure, so that I should learn to recognise my own Jewishness.”

*Comrades In Art: Artists Against Fascism runs at the Towner, Eastbourne until 18 October. townereastbourne.org.uk