In 1937 a twenty-two year old
young woman arrived in London as a Jewish refugee from Nazi
Germany, an experience that would have a profound influence
on her life and lead, following her death in 2001, to the
founding of the Alice Schwab Trust, established in her name
to help support and educate young refugees and asylum
seekers, a consciousness with abundant resonances in
today’s world. In August 2018, Blue House Gallery will
mount an exhibition of works-on-paper from Alice Schwab’s
private art collection, assembled from the 1930s to the
1980s, and particularly strong in German and British artists
of the period. Alice Schwab’s discerning eye, passion for
the work of her contemporaries and generally modest purse,
led her away from the flashy and ostentatious and towards
small and exquisite works of the two principal periods of
her collection, German work of the Neue Sachlickite / New
Objectivity movement including Margaret Kroch-Frishman,
Lotte Reisenstein and Bernard Reder, and British printmakers
of the nineteen sixties onwards that included David Hockney,
Michael Rothenstein, Adrian Heath and John Piper. The
connection between the Schwab Collection and Schull’s Blue
House Gallery may seem improbable but the link is that the
second-only woman rabbi in the UK, Baroness Julia Neuberger
DBE, a member of the UK House of Lords and a former
Chancellor of the University of Ulster (1994-2000) is both a
longtime resident of Schull and Alice Schwab’s daughter.
Julia, as custodian of her mother’s art collection,
offered this prestigious exhibition to the Gallery, with
funds from the exhibition going to the Trust to aid young
people who have shared Alice Schwab’s experience of
displacement.

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