•ERNST EISENMAYER (Austrian 1920-2018) 'Old Jack'

•ERNST EISENMAYER (Austrian 1920-2018) 'Old Jack' a head and shoulders profile portrait of Joseph John 'Jack' Gover, signed and dated 1944 lower right, oil on canvas laid on board, 55cm x 45cm Ernst Eisenmayer was born in Vienna in 1920 to poor Austro-Hungarian Jewish parents. During an attempt to reach France from Vienna following the annexation of Austria in 1938 He was arrested in Saarbrücken on the French-German border and transported to the infamous Dachau concentration camp. Fortunately for Ernst, his younger brother Paul had reached Britain as a Kindertransportee, where his guardian, Professor JL Brierley, promised to sponsor Ernst in Britain. This secured his release from Dachau in April 1939, where he was possibly one of the last prisoners freed before the outbreak of the Second World War. However, arrival in Britain proved something of a Pyrrhic victory. In 1940 Eisenmayer was sent to five different British internment camps, including Onchan on the Isle of Man, where he made objects for warehouse exhibitions and wrote for the camp newspaper. His monochrome 'Violinist at Onchan' was later published as a stamp motif of the Isle of Man. In 1944 he showed work for the first time in an exhibition on Austrian art in exile. Two years later he enrolled at Camberwell College of Arts and studied there until 1947. Initially he focused on painting but later began creating sculptures and works with welded steel, bronze and stone. Acquiring British citizenship after the war, he worked temporarily as a toolmaker, painting in his free time under the guidance of the Austrian artist, poet and playwright Oskar Kokoschka, who became a key influence and supporter of his career. The City of Vienna awarded him the Medal of Honour for his artistic work. A short film by Frances Lloyd on the early work of Eisenmayer was shown at the Jewish Museum of Art as part of their 2009 exhibition, "Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain 1933-45." It describes the artist's deportation from Munich central station. The curator Rachel Dickinson considered his contribution to the exhibition as the "greatest aesthetic revelation." In 1975 Eisenmayer left England for Italy where he lived until 1988, then moving to Amsterdam until 1996. He returned to Vienna and lived in the Maimonides Center, a Jewish retirement home. His last two retrospective exhibitions were Art beyond Exile and The Dignity of Man.