Alfred Aaron Wolmark Art

Alfred Aaron Wolmark R.A. 1877-1961, was a portrait and decorative genre subject painter. Born in Warsaw and travelled to England in 1894 where he remained. He was a painter of impre...

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...