Teenage Raphael | Clara Klinghoffer at Crossing Borders

It’s 1915, and the painter Bernard Meninsky, life drawing tutor at London’s Central School of Arts + Crafts, has been charged with looking through the portfolio of a fifteen-year-old girl, Clara Klinghoffer. A task which, one would imagine, he was expecting to be humdrum, turned out to be anything but. “Good Lord,” he stated. “That child draws like da Vinci.” 

Clara Klinghoffer (1900-1970), Bananas, 1923, 91 x 71 cm; 35 3/4 x 28 inches. Provenance: the artist’s estate. Courtesy Jack Wakefield

Klinghoffer was subsequently offered a place at the Slade, and in 1919, on the recommendation of her mentor Jacob Epstein, she was given a solo exhibition at Hampstead Gallery. The reviews were tremendous. The Daily Graphic art critic, under the headline ‘Girl who Draws like Raphael – Success at Nineteen’, wrote ‘Miss Clara Klinghoffer must be regarded as a new star… If she elects to do a thing, it is done with masterful force’. Other reviewers compared her to Hals and Rembrandt.

Largely a portrait artist, she went on to enjoy solo exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries (1926, 1932) the Redfern Gallery (1926, 1929, 1938), and the Goupil Gallery salons. Of her portrait of Lucien Pissarro, painted in 1928, The Times reported: ‘[It is] one of the most successful paintings we have ever seen. It positively simmers with the temperamental qualities of a veteran artist.’

Klinghoffer’s 1923 painting Bananas, of an East End peddler, is included in the exhibition Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, at British Art Fair 2023. She is one of several Jewish artists featured in the show who were displaced from Europe during the twentieth century, moving with her parents from Lemberg/Lviv to London in 1903 to escape the pogroms that were becoming increasingly common in the Russian Empire.

It wasn’t the last time that the artist had to escape religious persecution. In 1939, having moved to Amsterdam with her husband Joop Stoppelman, she again had to flee, again to London, before settling in New York. Much of her artwork, placed in storage in Haarlem, was looted by the Nazis. After the war she divided her time between New York and London, but – as abstract expressionism came to the fore – her reputation faded.

Klinghoffer died in 1970 in London, largely forgotten by the art world. But not entirely. In 1981, reviewing an exhibition of her work at Campbell & Franks in London, Terence Mulally wrote, in the Daily Telegraph: ‘If ever there was an artist who has been for some time unjustly forgotten, it is Clara Klinghoffer… when much more celebrated artists are forgotten, she will be remembered.’

Of Bananas, Colin Gleadell, co-curator of the show, author and art market expert writes: ‘This work has come from the artist’s estate and has never been at auction. Nothing as good by her has ever been at auction before so this is going to break a sales record for her if it sells.’