Bernard Meninsky (; ;()John Russell Taylor, Bernard Meninsky, Redcliffe Press, 1990, pp. 9–10.In the UK census for 1901 and 1911 the family are called Meninsky, and this is the name that Bernard's parents, Isaac and Annie, used when applying for UK citizenship in June 1915 – ref: 'Naturalisation Certificates and Declarations, 1870–1916', Ancestry.com. In the 1901 census Bernard is shortened to 'Barney' and he is listed as having been born in Liverpool. In the 1911 census, Bernard completes the census form and puts his nationality as 'Russian'. This is consistent with his own need to apply for UK nationalisation, which was granted on 1 July 1918 (London Gazette, 2 August 1918, p. 9122). His younger sisters, Katie and Sarah, are listed as having been born in Liverpool. 25 July 1891 – 12 February 1950) was a British painter of figures and landscapes in oils, watercolour and gouache, a drafter and a teacher..
Biography Early life and education Bernard Meninsky was born on 25 July 1891 in Konotop, present-day Ukraine to a Yiddish-speaking Jewish Ukrainian family. The family moved to Liverpool when Bernard was six weeks old.
Although Meninsky left school at the age of eleven, his talent for art was demonstrated by the sale of a drawing to a local comic postcard business.John Russell Taylor, 1990, p. 10. The business was owned by the Appelbaum family – friends of the Meninskys. While working as an errand boy during the day, he attended free art classes in the evenings, and these enabled him to gain a place at the Liverpool School of Art. He studied there from 1906 to 1911, being financed by a succession of scholarships. He attended summer courses at the Royal College of Art, London, in August 1909 and August 1910. In 1911 he won a scholarship to study at the Académie Julian in Paris for three months.'He later recalled crying in misery in Paris because he missed his family so much' – John Russell Taylor, 1990, p. 16.
The Slade School and after
With financial support from the Liverpool Jewish community and the Jewish Educational Aid Society (JEAS), Meninsky studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1912.Monica Bohm-Duchen in A Singular Vision: Drawings and Paintings by Bernard Meninsky, University of Liverpool and the Contemporary Art Society, 2001, p. 24. His contemporaries there included David Bomberg, Isaac Rosenberg, Jacob Kramer and William Roberts. Roberts would become a lifelong friend and later a colleague at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Another important contact Meninsky made at this time was Walter Sickert, who hosted 'at homes' for Slade and ex-Slade students in his Fitzroy Street studio.Matthew Sturgis, Walter Sickert: A Life, Harper Perennial, 2005, p. 481.
In the autumn of 1912 Roger Fry's Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition opened at the Grafton Galleries, London, and was seen by the public as scandalous in its modernism. Meninsky's tutors at the Slade, Henry Tonks and Wilson Steer, also rejected the cubist work on display at the Grafton.Anna Gruetzner Robins, Modern Art in Britain 1910–1914, Merrell Holberton, London, 1997, pp. 64–107. While Bomberg and Roberts would go on to explore their own brand of 'English Cubism' in their immediate post-Slade years, Meninsky's work was less radical – though he had nevertheless 'been bowled over most completely by the greatness of Cézanne'.John Russell Taylor, 1990, p.57.
In 1913 Meninsky left the Slade to work as a 'pupil/teacher' for Edward Gordon Craig at his theatre school in Florence. Unfortunately he found Craig 'an unexpectedly hard and unreasonable task-master'.John Russell Taylor, 1990, p. 31. Returning to London a few months later, he began teaching life drawing at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.Sylvia Backemeyer et al., Object Lessons: Central Saint Martins Art and Design Archive, Lund Humphries, London, 1996. The principal of the Central, F. V. Burridge, had been head of the Liverpool School of Art when Meninsky had been a prize-winning student there. Teaching would be a passion of Meninsky's, and his relationship with the Central School would be important to him throughout his life.John Russell Taylor, 1990, p. 33.
World War I
In the summer of 1914 Meninsky's work was exhibited in the 'Jewish Section' of 'Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements' at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London's East End.Anna Gruetzner Robins, 1997, pp. 139–44. During World War I Meninsky exhibited with the New English Art Club, the Friday Club and, from November 1916, with the London Group – an organisation that he would be associated with throughout his career..Sarah MacDougall, 'The Early Years of The London Group, 1913–28', in Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Stratton, eds., Uproar! The First 50 Years of the London Group 1913-63, Lund Humphries, 2013.
In the first quarter of 1918 he married Margaret ('Peggy') O'Connor in Marylebone Register Office, and their son David was born later that year.Ancestry.co.uk, 'England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1916–2005'.Ancestry.co.uk 'England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1916–2007'.
Meninsky had enlisted as a private in the Royal Fusiliers in January 1918, and worked in a clerical capacity in the regiment.Ancestry.co.uk 'UK, British Army World War I Pension Records 1914-1920’. He applied to be a war artist under the scheme run by the British War Memorials Committee (BWMC), and was released from military duties for an initial four-month period from May 1918. He was discharged from military service in August 1918, due to neurasthenia.Ancestry.co.uk, 'UK, British Army World War I Pension Records 1914-1920’. John Russell Taylor in Bernard Meninsky, 1990, p. 35, states that Meninsky signed up in 1914 and served till mid-1918, and various online sources refer to him fighting in Palestine; but the British Army Pension Records state that he did not serve overseas and that he was not called up until 1918. Meninsky completed The Arrival of a Leave Train, Victoria Station, 1918 and at least five other related works before the end of 1918, all of which are now in the Imperial War Museum collection. The Arrival of a Leave Train, Victoria Station, 1918 was included in the major exhibition of war art held at the National Gallery, London, in late 1919 and early 1920.National Gallery, Dec. 1919–Feb. 1920.
Mother and Child
After the war ended, Meninsky resumed teaching at the Central School and also accepted Walter Sickert's invitation to take over his life class at the Westminster School of Art.Matthew Sturgis, 2005, p. 504. When it came to light that Meninsky was still on the BWMC contract, he was required to extend his involvement with the war artist scheme for a further period.
In the first few months of his son's life, Meninsky created a portfolio of 28 'mother and child' drawings in a variety of media, and the subject became a regular theme throughout Meninsky's career. When he was elected to the London Group in 1919, he exhibited an oil painting on this subject at their April 1919 exhibition,The Tenth Exhibition of the London Group, 12 April–17 May 1919, the Mansard Gallery at Heals, London. This oil painting, Mother and Child, is thought to be the work in the University of Leeds art collection and is reproduced in Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Stratton, eds., Uproar!, p. 98. and an exhibition of 'Maternity and Other Figure Subjects by Bernard Meninsky' was held at the Goupil Gallery, Regent Street, London, in May 1919,The Times, 20 May 1919. leading to the publication of Mother and Child: Twenty-Eight Drawings by Bernard Meninsky by the publisher John Lane in the following year.Westminster Gazette, 9 April 1920.
The end of a marriage
In the spring of 1919 Meninsky's wife was pregnant again, and their second son, Philip, was born in November 1919.At Ancestry.co.uk, ‘England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1916-2007’ shows Philip Meninsky's birth to have been registered in Fulham in last quarter of 1919; ‘England and Wales, Death Index, 1989-2021’ clarifies his birth date as 1 November 1919. When Philip was barely six months old, Margaret Meninsky walked out on her husband and children.John Russell Taylor, 1990, p. 40. Meninsky acted swiftly to foster his children. David was placed with Meninsky's sister Katie in Liverpool, and Philip was placed with a retired nanny in Hertfordshire. Philip's placement was initially a six-month arrangement, but it lasted for the first 18 years of his life.Philip Meninsky, 'My Father', in A Singular Vision: Drawings and Paintings by Bernard Meninsky, p. 15.
In the winter of 1922 Meninsky tried to put his personal troubles behind him by means of an extended caravan trip to the south of France with a friend, Stuart Edmonds. The stimulus of the Mediterranean light encouraged him to work more on landscape painting.John Russell Taylor, 1990, p. 57. Upon returning to London Meninsky immersed himself in his teaching and took an active organisational role in the London Group, which was now headed by Roger Fry.Ancestry.co.uk 'London, England, Electoral Registers, 1832–1965' records Meninsky sharing a studio at 18 Fitzroy Street, London, in 1921. The 'Bloomsbury artists' Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Fry dominated the London Group shows of the 1920s, and to some extent Meninsky's work shares their 'English Post-Impressionist' aesthetic.Sarah MacDougall, 'The Early Years of The London Group, 1913–28', pp. 33–6. Throughout the 1920s Meninsky worked in the familiar genres – still life, landscape, the nude – avoiding narrative and focusing on form.Fry's aesthetic is spelt out in his Vision and Design, Chatto & Windus, 1920.
A new start Meninsky visited his son Philip from time to time, sometimes with a female companion.Philip Meninsky, 'My Father', p. 15. He saw David, in Liverpool, less frequently. Meninsky's biographer John Russell Taylor writes that 'as a man and so as a teacher, Meninsky was moody and unpredictable. Often he could be jovial and enthusiastic, but sometimes he could be cruelly dismimissive.'John Russell Taylor, 1990, p. 54. In 1923 Meninsky was elected to the New English Art Club, and he exhibited regularly with them as well as with the London Group. Although his ex-student and latterly friend Morris Kestelman described his 'pervasive melancholy', Meninsky could also 'shine in company' and was a 'brilliant conversationalist', holding his own with intellectual friends such as Helen Darbishire and Emanuel Miller.John Russell Taylor, 1990, p. 60.
In the mid-1920s Meninsky arranged for his friend William Roberts to share his life class duties at the Central School, and in this capacity they worked together for the next 25 years. Meninsky's financial circumstances were similar to those of the Robertses. Referring back to these times, William Roberts's wife, Sarah (née Kramer), described the realities of being an artist's wife, 'living in poverty, from hand to mouth … Living in a room or rooms, sharing a lavatory, with a sink maybe on a landing … "People today can't imagine just how poor we were in those days."'Pauline Pauker, 'Sarah: An Anecdotal Memoir of Sarah Roberts, Wife, Model, Muse and Defender of William Roberts RA', William Roberts Society, 2012, pp. 10–11.
The burden placed on artists such as Meninsky struggling to support children was immense. It was difficult to sell work in the post-war economic recession. Meninsky had pledged to repay his Slade loan from the JEAS, which now amounted to £80. He was, however, not in a position to do so, and his offer of paintings and drawings in compensation was rejected. The debt remained unpaid at his death.Monica Bohm-Duchen, 2001, pp. 24–7.