Dodo Burgner – a Weimar artist rediscovered

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Darrelyn Gunzburg visits an exhibition on a little-known émigré artist at London’s Ben Uri gallery

Ben Uri’s exhibitions for the rest of this year focus on three women. Later in the year there will be a show concentrating on the work of American artist Judy Chicago. Another show centres on a work of, rather than by, a woman: Chaïm Soutine’s La Soubrette (The Waiting Maid). But the first and current exhibition, ‘The Inspiration of Decadence: Dodo Rediscovered – Berlin to London, 1907–1998’, features the work of Berlin émigré, Dodo Burgner (1907–98) a German Jewish artist, graphic designer and illustrator, set within the broader context of her émigré peers.

After graduating from the progressive Reimann Schule in Weimar Berlin and working in fashion illustration, Dodo became a prolific illustrator for the weekly Berlin-based satirical magazine Ulk, during an intense two-year period from 1928–30. Dodo's drawings wryly observe the dances, cocktail bars, cars, fashionable women, theatre performances and cafés that surrounded the excitement and decadence of the Jazz Age in a city notorious for its bohemian society.

In 1933 Ulk was closed down by the Nazis. The same year Dodo undertook Jungian psychoanalysis in Zurich, as a means of dealing with the trauma of an affair and abortion, her feelings often externalized in a remarkable range of watercolours.  In 1936 shortly after the birth of her son, she fled Nazi persecution and arrived in Finchley, London, with her two children. Her husband, Hans Bürgner, followed two years later. Following a brief failed second marriage to her Berlin lover, psychoanalyst Gerhard Adler, Dodo concentrated on bringing up her family, her German success now tempered by the difficult post-war émigré life.

Dodo managed some limited commercial success, illustrating a number of children’s books, greetings cards, packaging and designs for catalogues for fashion retailers such as John Lewis and Co. The exhibition at Ben Uri has revised and expanded the exhibition ‘Dodo – A Life in Pictures’ curated by the Sammlung Modebild, Lipperheidesche Kostümbibliothek, at the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin, 1 March – 28 May, 2012). It shows Dodo's oeuvre alongside works by émigrés from the Ben Uri collection, including a number of artists who contributed to Ulk, such as Georg Grosz, one of Weimar's most savage artist-critics, Katerina Wilczynski and Julius Rosenbaum, almost unknown in this country.

Excitingly, Ben Uri has been able to borrow Dodo’s earliest known work so far, a 1923 poster design, from her student days, which was in terrible condition, notes David Glasser, executive chair of Ben Uri. It has been fully restored and opens the exhibition. The show runs at Ben Uri in London until 9 September 2012.