On 5 October 1949, a joint exhibition of works by the artists Ludwig Meidner and Else Meidner opened at the Ben Uri Art Gallery. The exhibition was the first solo exhibition of the émigré artists Ludwig and Else Meidner — after a ten-year stay in London. On display were 37 works on paper by Ludwig Meidner from the 1920s-1940s and 19 paintings and 15 drawings by Else Meidner. While Ludwig Meidner presented many works with religious or mystical connotations, Else Meidner showed portraits, landscapes and still lifes. The exhibition was reviewed in the Tribune (21 October 1949), The Jewish Chronicle (14 and 21 October 1949) and Art News and Review (22 October 1949). Although some works were sold, Ludwig Meidner described the exhibition, which closed on 2 November 1949, as a “second-class funeral” (Hodin 1973, 67, translated from German).

The Berlin artists Ludwig Meidner (1884–1966) and Else Meidner (1901–1987) had lived in difficult circumstances in London since 1939. Works by the expressionist Ludwig Meidner had been shown at the defamatory Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich in 1937: his Self-Portrait (1912) was exhibited in the 2nd room on the upper floor under the heading “Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul”, alongside works by Marc Chagall and Lasar Segall, among others (Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst” 1998, 125).  As a Jewish artist and an important representative of the German avant-garde, Meidner feared for his work and his life, so decided to emigrate. First, his son David was sent to England with the Kindertransport in 1938, then Ludwig and Else Meidner followed in August 1939 (Hodin 1973, 44).
Ludwig Meidner initially lived in the Camden Town district (London NW1), while Else Meidner was housed in Sydenham (London SE26). From 1941 they lived in West Heath Drive (London NW11) and from 1947 had their residential studio at 677 Finchley Road, Child's Hill, London NW2. Many emigrants settled in and around Finchley Road, including the artist Oskar Kokoschka (120 Eyre Court, Finchley Road), and cafés and shops selling continental goods sprang up in the area (Pross 2000, 30, 55).

Ludwig and Else Meidner were unable to make a living from their art, so turned to other activities: Else Meidner worked as a maid and Ludwig Meidner hired himself out as a nightwatchman, also sporadically giving drawing lessons. This “struggle for existence” (Ludwig Meidner, in Riedel 2002, 20) reduced the time available for artistic work. Their living and working place at 677 Finchley Road consisted of two cramped rooms on two floors. Else Meidner commented: “It was a difficult time [...]. Ludwig also owned my part of the flat, it actually presented two rooms with a kitchen and bathroom. The bathroom was in the kitchen! And Ludwig washed there and we ate together upstairs. The large room downstairs was well suited as a studio and he wanted it because the upstairs room was too small for him.” (Else Meidner, in Hodin 1979, 21, translated from German) Their output initially remained relatively high even in these precarious conditions, though Else Meidner referred to herself as the biggest collector of her work (ibid., 66) as there were few opportunities for her (or her husband) to show their work. The many self-portraits by Else Meidner created during her lifetime point to the continuity of her work between Berlin and London. These self-portraits were presumably studies of her emotions – and are in the line with the tradition of Rembrandt, an artist Else Meidner admired (Hodin 1979, 50). However, the self-portraits can also be attributed to a lack of money to employ models. A drawing from 1938 shows the artist with her chin propped up, a pensive gesture, her expression bright and friendly. She accentuates the deep-set dark eyes and above all the voluminous hair, which is drawn with energetic circular movements. In general, the strokes are searching, the lines scrawled. Another self-portrait from 1952 again works with light-dark contrasts, showing another gesture from her possible repertoire, with the flat of her hand against her chest. Her sideways gaze is questioning, her eyes oversized and again dark, while her curly hair reaches to her shoulders. The comparison with the 1938 portrait shows that Meidner appears almost ageless in her portraits (Teschner 1998, 25). In this respect one could speak of a synthesis between image and ideal. The exhibition at the Ben Uri Art Gallery also contained portrait studies of her son David and still lifes, in other words works that reflected the immediate surroundings of her life.

Else and Ludwig Meidner found a patron in the emigrated art dealer Siegfried Oppenheimer, who purchased works from them and probably also arranged commissions (Hodin 1979, 26). Oppenheimer and Ludwig Meidner knew each other from the Hutchinson Internment Camp, Isle of Man. Ludwig Meidner was first interned in Huyton Camp, Liverpool, from 1940 to 1941, before being moved to the Isle of Man, where numerous artists were interned, including Kurt Schwitters and Hellmuth Weissenborn.
The Meidners were thus embedded in an emigrant network. Ludwig Meidner maintained close contacts with Jankel Adler, with whom he planned to found a Jewish art society, and he was part of the Ohel Club for Jewish intellectuals in Gower Street, which was organised by the emigrants Alexander and Benjamin Margulies (Out of Chaos 2015, 64).
Around the same time as the Meidners, the Hamburg art historian Rosa Schapire emigrated to London. Schapire and Ludwig Meidner were acquainted with each other. Several portrait studies of the art historian have survived, drawn by the artist in his sketchbook during a visit in 1946. Meidner and Schapire were closely associated with the Expressionist movement - the painter on the side of the producers, the art historian as author, patron and collector. In the early 20th century, Schapire had mainly supported the artists of the “Brücke” community, but had great difficulty popularising Expressionist art in her London exile. The rejection of this art movement in England also hit Ludwig Meidner hard. Only a few exhibition houses exhibited emigrant artists at all, including the Ben Uri Art Gallery for Jewish artists and Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery. The Free German League of Culture (Freier Deutscher Kulturbund) was the main advocate for the interests of emigrants. Although Meidner maintained contacts with the League through his student Fred Uhlman, who took etching lessons from him, he never became a member of the organisation, as he was probably suspicious of the political orientation of this left-wing and communist-influenced association of artists (Adkins 1991, 176).

Like Else Meidner, Ludwig Meidner remained a prolific artist even in English exile. Meidner’s interest in religious themes, which had already been formulated in his early work, continued in London. Narratives of salvation, suffering and redemption, however, were linked to contemporary historical themes, especially the persecution and murder of European Jews by the National Socialists – Meidner’s cycle Leiden der Juden in Polen (1942–45) is particularly worthy of mention, see Behr 2016), but also Memorial to Death and In a Concentration Camp, both of which were shown in December 1946 at the group exhibition Subjects of Jewish Interest at the Ben Uri Art Gallery and dealt with the genocide of the Jews (Subjects of Jewish Interest 1946; Out of Chaos 2015, 64). The racially-motivated persecution he suffered as a Jew, turned Meidner ever more intensely towards the Jewish faith and he maintained contacts with the Jewish Orthodox community in London. The religiously connoted motifs were also reflected in Ludwig Meidner’s works on display at the Ben Uri Art Gallery: the exhibition brochure contains work titles such as Hoshea, The Prophet (1934), Biblical Figure (1935), From the Book of Daniel (1940), In a Synagogue (n.d.) and Jew Praying (n.d.).
Ludwig Meidner was also concerned with urban space, as he had been in his Berlin years. He was interested in social interactions and urban meeting places such as cafés and restaurants, and means of transport such as the Tube. Not infrequently, his urban drawings reveal a fantastical or nightmarish element, for example when animal actors mingle with guests. Mythological or fairytale-like elements are mixed with everyday observations in these works. At the same time, references to English art history can be discerned in some of his works. For example, he developed a particular fondness for caricatures and the ridicule and explored historical caricatures by James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. He was also fascinated by contemporary British caricaturists like Carl Giles, whose cartoons for the Daily Express Meidner collected (Riedel 2016, 84).

The Ben Uri Art Gallery, where Ludwig and Else Meidner’s exhibition took place, was founded as the Ben Uri Art Society in Whitechapel as early as 1915 with the aim of supporting the work of Jewish artists who had migrated to London. After 1933, the Society increasingly opened up to emigrants from the European continent who came to the British capital fleeing National Socialism. However, the Ben Uri Art Society did not yet have its own exhibition space in the 1930s. Only at the beginning of 1944 did it move to a permanent base at 14 Portman Street in the West End, a move that was inaugurated with an opening exhibition. In the following years, the Ben Uri Art Gallery was one of the few places where émigré artists could show their art: the opening exhibition of 1944 included works by the émigré artists Jussuf Abbo, Jankel Adler, and Else Fraenkel. In 1949, when the Meidners’ exhibition opened, the émigré painters Martin Bloch and Josef Hermann also showed their works in a double exhibition. In 1950 the Ben Uri Art Gallery exhibited artworks by the emigrated artists Julius Rosenbaum and Adele Reifenberg together with those of British artist Ruth Collet. Artists were supported not only by exhibitions but also by acquisitions: The Ben Uri Gallery and Museum collection includes three works by Else Meidner and two by Ludwig Meidner. Else Meidner’s Woman with Hat (n.d.) was acquired in 1950, her Portrait of a Bearded Man (n.d.) entered the collection in 1989, Landscape in Yellow (n.d.) in 2009. Ludwig Meidner’s Portrait of a Girl (1921) was acquired in 1950, Portrait of Lilo Gwosdz (1960) came into the collection from the possession of the sitter. In 1960, the Ben Uri Art Gallery left its former premises and, after several relocations, is now located on Boundary Road.

Ludwig Meidner went back to Germany in 1953 – but Else Meidner stayed. A solo exhibition at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in London in 1959 was a deep disappointment for the artist and was, in her eyes, a “bazaar where my work is being sold off” (Else Meidner, 9 November 1959, in Hodin 1979, 90, translated from German). This was followed by solo exhibitions at the Ben Uri Gallery in 1964 and 1972. Although Else Meidner lived in London until the end of her life, exile remained for her a foreign existence in a foreign land. Else Meidner commented: “There are plants that thrive everywhere if you transplant them, but I was never able to put down new roots. My roots have remained in Berlin.” (Else Meidner, in Hodin 1979, 42, translated from German) In Germany, Else Meidner showed her work in 1955 and 1957, among other places, at the Frankfurter Kunstkabinett of Hanna Bekker vom Rath, who maintained contacts with many emigrants, including the art historian Rosa Schapire.