Lesser Ury's name was established in the 1880's with his images of Berlin street scenes that depicted a city undergoing the transformation to Modernity. Ury was Jewish and a believer. The paintings of biblical themes are not so well known. It was his good fortune that he died in 1931; he was spared witnessing the downfall of Germany and the annihilation of the Jewish people. After his death, the fate of his oeuvre was unsure; it was declared 'entartet' (degenerate) by the Nazis and many works were destroyed. A large amount was however, preserved by those private collectors who hid his works or emigrated, taking artworks with them to England, the USA and Israel.

In the 1930's Tanya Ury's parents fled Nazi Germany to England, where she was born and lived, until she moved to Germany to practise art in 1993. After the war, the art of Lesser Ury was largely forgotten. Thanks to three retrospectives in Berlin (1995 and 2002 in the Käthe-Kollwitz Museum, and 2002 in the Centrum Judaicum) Tanya Ury was able to acquaint herself with a collection of Lesser Ury's work that had been gathered together from many sources abroad.

In the 89 years that separate the two, pictured Ury's, two world wars have occurred; Germany was divided and has again been reunited. Berlin is now experiencing a rebirth and expansion as it did during the Fin de Siècle of the 19th century; as a consequence, Lesser Ury's Berlin cityscapes are once more much in demand. Tentatively and in recent years, Jewish artists have been returning to live and work in Germany. Whether the reanimation of a Jewish culture in Germany is possible now, and whether this attempt is Frankensteinian and bound to fail, are questions that lesser is me more or less pose.

Tanya Ury

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