Eva Frankfurther

Eva Frankfurther (10 February 1930 – January 1959) was a German-born British artist known for her depictions of the immigrant communities of the East End of London in the 1950s.

Biography Frankfurther was born in the Dahlem district of Berlin to a Jewish family. Her father, Paul, was a businessman while her mother, Henriette, was an economics graduate. Henriette died of cancer 18 months after Eva was born and her father remarried in 1934. The family fled to Britain in 1939 to avoid persecution under the Nazis. The children, Eva and her two siblings, left Berlin six months before their parents and spent some time in Haslemere, being looked after by German refugee teachers, before their parents arrived in England during August 1939. There she studied life drawing under Roland Vivian Pitchforth and was held in great esteem by her fellow students, who included Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. As a student, Frankfurther had spent some summers in America. After graduating in 1951, she visited Italy, where she painted numerous portraits of street beggars and pilgrims, and then, briefly, Paris. Frankfurther also painted portraits of the local East End population. The same gallery hosted a memorial exhibition in 1962 and included examples of her work in their 2014 Refiguring the 50s exhibition and held a one-person show of her work in 2017.

Exhibitions Posthumous exhibitions: 1962, Ben Uri Gallery 1979, Clare College, Cambridge 1980, Bedford Central Library 1981, Margaret Fisher Gallery, London 2001, Boundary Gallery, London