Alfred Aaron Wolmark, British Modernist Portrait of Chaim Weizmann President of Israel Oil Painting

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Alfred Aaron Wolmark (1877 – 1961) was a painter and decorative artist. He was a Post Impressionist and a pioneer … Read more Alfred Aaron Wolmark (1877 – 1961) was a painter and decorative artist. He was a Post Impressionist and a pioneer of the New Movement in Art.
He was born Aaron Wolmark into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland who were amongst the many subsequently fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe. The family moved to Devon when he was six before moving to Spitalfields, East London, there along with many other Jewish immigrant émigré families. He became a British citizen in 1894.
He studied at the Royal Academy Schools and exhibited there from 1901-1936. (1895-8 (1st Silver Medallist for Drawing). There he took the name Alfred Wolmark, by which he is known.
Returning briefly to Poland in 1903, he painted works based his Jewish identity and faith, refraining from depicting the persecution and anti-Semitism his family witnessed on the continent and idealising the peaceful and contemplative elements of his religion. His first one-man exhibition was held at the Bruton Galleries in 1905.
In July 1911, after an artistic epiphany on honeymoon in Concarneau, Brittany, he became influenced by modern French painting, his colour palette and style became post impressionist, and Wolmark jettisoned his early methods in favour of the pioneering 'colourist' path that he followed for the next two decades of his working life. He was a British fauvist and pitched his tonal divisions to a higher key than any of his contemporaries. Wolmark kept to traditional genre, and transformed his subjects through the use of flattened forms, built up with a heavy impasto. His daring use of bright colour on some paintings such as "An Arrangement: Group of Nudes" demonstrate a skillset akin to Andy Warhol and earned him the title of ‘The Colour King’. the early colourist, Alfred Wolmark, the so-called father of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’. This group includes painters David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Jacob Kramer, as well as (by association) the sculptor Jacob Epstein, First World War poet-painter, Isaac Rosenberg, and the only ‘Whitechapel Girl’ Clare Winsten, all of whom made a distinct contribution to early British modernism. This work presages the portrait works of later British jewish artists R.B Kitaj and Lucian Freud.
His use of colour was so bright that in an exhibition of the International Society of Artists no English painter dared hang work next to his. His work was finally placed next to Van Gogh's, a matter of considerable pride to the artist in later years. Also exhibited at "Manet and the Post Impressionists" in 1910 at the Grafton Gallery.
Wolmark, like Van Gough, are characterized by a bold application of paint, dominated by heavy impasto. In later years Wolmark met the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the two became close friends. Gaudier-Brzeska warmed to Woolmark's impassioned New Art and modelled a bronze bust of the young artist in 1913 and ended up celebrating the artists individuality in a face that strongly resembled Beethoven at the time.
He visited New York in 1919, soon after the end of the First World War, and his paintings of the city were exhibited at the Kervorkian Gallery there in 1919-20. A retrospective of his work was held at Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull in 1975.
A gifted portraitist, whose sitters included Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley and G. K. Chesterton, Wolmark was also active as a graphic designer, producing book illustrations and posters, as well as undertaking work on costume and stage designs for two Diaghilev ballets in 1911, a set of abstract designs for the stained glass windows of the church of St. Mary’s in Slough in 1915 and a selection of decorative pottery for an exhibition the following year. He was one of the prime movers in setting up the Ben Uri Art Society, 1915.
His paintings are now in many galleries around the world, including the National Portrait Gallery, London, Sheffield and Derby Museum and Art Gallery.
The Tate Gallery Archives hold two complete boxes donated by Wolmarks family which contain a number of letters, papers, artworks, photographs and press cuttings including his original diary containing who some of his works were sold to.

Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was a Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as President of the Zionist Organization and later as the first President of Israel. He was elected on 16 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952. Weizmann convinced the United States government to recognize the newly formed state of Israel.
Weizmann was also a biochemist who developed the acetone–butanol–ethanol fermentation process, which produces acetone through bacterial fermentation. His acetone production method was of great importance for the British war industry during World War I. He founded the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel and was instrumental in the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. See less