Some of the most memorable drawings have been created in extremis by artists from migrant or refugee backgrounds. These artists are forced to use cheap, adaptable materials found readily to hand, often owing to impoverished circumstances or the upheavals and restrictions of war.

This story explores the interplay of the medium of drawing with refugee experiences and artistic languages through drawings from the Ben Uri Collection, which focuses on Jewish, refugee and immigrant contributions to British visual culture since 1900 and is home to many such examples.

The trauma of the Great War

Among the most poignant drawings in the Ben Uri Collection is a work by Isaac Rosenberg. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Rosenberg was raised in great poverty in London's Whitechapel, the poorest of the so-called 'Whitechapel boys'. This group were from similar backgrounds and included David Bomberg and Mark Gertler, Rosenberg's fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Rosenberg was often unable to afford models and his oeuvre includes many self-portraits, which he observed in a tiny mirror propped up on a corner of the table in the family kitchen that served him as an informal studio. They range from melancholic sketches in the Romantic tradition to leaner, bolder likenesses that display a new bravura confidence and mark his transition to modernism. Self Portrait in Steel Helmet – a stark, unsentimental work executed in black chalk, gouache and wash on paper – was to be both his final self-portrait and his last finished work as an artist.

Although a pacifist by conviction, Rosenberg enlisted in October 1915 for financial reasons. From then on, drawing became his primary means of visual expression and rapid sketches often appeared on scraps of paper alongside poems or in letters home. Self Portrait in Steel Helmet, in which he stares out unflinchingly at the viewer, relates closely to a sketch of himself wearing a tin helmet that Rosenberg made in a letter (c.1916, Imperial War Museum). In the note, he joked to his family that he was wearing 'The New Fashion boiler hat – the trench hat.'

These 'Tommy' hats or steel helmets were issued in June 1916 while the troops were in billets prior to their first experience of trench warfare. The gouache portrait, with its touches of yellow picking out the buttons on his khaki tunic and gleam at the front of his helmet, was probably created at this time. It is executed on crumpled, poor-quality brown paper, possibly salvaged from a parcel sent from home; the artwork's fragile surface – torn, scarred, and too delicate to restore – documents this important part of its own and its maker's traumatic history.

A few months later, in 1917, Rosenberg spent his only leave home toying with his already completed portrait of former sweatshop worker and aspiring actress Sonia Cohen, with whom he was deeply in love. By then Sonia had given birth to a child by Rosenberg's friend John Rodker. The artist modelled her on Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna.

After returning to France, Rosenberg was killed while on patrol on 1st April 1918 at the age of 27. Despite publishing only two short collections of poetry during his lifetime, he is now regarded as one of the finest war poets of his generation. His portraits – particularly his self-portraits – are greatly prized.

Fellow 'Whitechapel boy' David Bomberg also underwent a harrowing experience during the First World War, enlisting and serving as a sapper in the trenches. This was compounded by his subsequent disastrous experience as a war artist. Even before he signed up, Bomberg had visualised the crush, fatigue and boredom undergone by new recruits – whose accommodation often included a shared iron bed – in a powerful, darkly inked drawing, Billet.

Although he maintained his artistic independence, Bomberg also demonstrated his close association with the visual language of the emerging Vorticist movement. While Bomberg shared with them a preference for sharp edges and a restless energy, he always kept the human figure at the heart of his compositions.

In 1917 Bomberg received a commission from the Canadian War Memorials Fund to commemorate an incident in which a company of Canadian soldiers dug tunnels under the German trenches to lay explosives for a surprise assault on the enemy defences at Ypres, France. In preparation for the final painting, he made a series of sketches including the tiny pencil, ink and wash drawing on paper titled Sappers Under Hill 60.

Like Rosenberg, Bomberg favoured simple, inexpensive drawing materials that were readily to hand and portable – pencil, pen and ink and brown wash – and was similarly economical with his forms. Here, his tiny, blocky figures are dwarfed by the dominant, complex structures of struts, girders and pulleys that formed part of the suffocating underground environment.

Study for 'Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, Hill 60, St Eloi'

Bomberg transferred this claustrophobia to his finished painting, but the commission ended badly with the rejection of his modernist methods as 'a futurist abortion'. He was forced to produce a second, more naturalistic version as a compromise, resulting in a long-lasting personal post-war disenchantment that only retreated when he temporarily left England for Jerusalem in 1920.

The Second World War and its aftermath

With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and the subsequent upheavals of the Second World War, a new influx of displaced artists sought safety in Britain. Once again, many made drawings with meagre, often improvised materials, telling stories at once personal and universal, informed by their own critical experiences as refugees.

Following increasing antisemitism in his native land, Polish-Jewish artist Josef Herman left Warsaw in 1938, never to return. Fleeing Europe via Brussels and France, he ended up in Glasgow, where he remained until 1943. Lonely and speaking no English, he soon began a series of nostalgic drawings to evoke his lost Warsaw. He worked instinctively from memory, which guided his use of line: 'What use is there in the discussion of a vertical, a horizontal or a curve,' he mused, 'when without the human imprint no line makes any sense: it is all a matter of feeling.'

At first light-hearted and humorous, these drawings, which he called a 'Memory of Memories', variously depicted family life, Jewish customs and the everyday street life of his native city – such as Musicians, freely drawn with pen and ink in a lively, informal style. Shortly afterwards, Herman introduced ink washes, dragging a wet brush over the lines to create atmosphere, adding, 'not only a variety of tones but also an accidental play of lights, not unlike the reflection of a broken moon on dark waters.'

After receiving the news that his entire family had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, the series darkened to include images of pogroms, cycles of destruction, loss and grief. Couple depicts two figures, possibly the artist's parents, looking out towards the viewer. Drawn in pen and ink, it is generously swept with wash which has a distancing effect like a blurred and fading family photograph. The family connection is further suggested by Herman's moving inscription on the drawing, when gifting it to a friend, as 'a fragment of myself'.

In Refugees, Herman captures the bewildering experience of displacement. Three generations of one family sit exhausted among their meagre belongings. Yet Herman suggests their closeness – even resilience – by uniting their bodies and luggage in one continuous line. On the far left, the father rests while his arm supports his wife, who leans on him while turning towards her child, whose folded body and resting head echo her mother. She is supported by her grandfather, his arm protectively drawn around her, while he looks out with huge, haunted eyes. Touches of rich, primary colour in gouache, sparingly used as a wash, provide a counterpoint to the poverty of Herman's subjects.

Refugees formerly belonged to Hungarian refugee and gallerist Agi Katz, a close friend, and dealer of Herman's, who championed Jewish refugee artists. Thus, the drawing passed, as Herman himself remarked, directly from one refugee to another.

Post-war poverty

Post-war, materials remained in short supply for some time and artists, once again, adapted to circumstances. Painter Frank Auerbach famously restricted himself to a palette of black and white, drawing and rubbing vigorously at the surfaces of his heavily worked, large-scale, closely observed charcoal portraits.

In contrast, in terms of scale and technique, are the tiny pen-and-ink sketches made by his fellow Saint Martin's School of Art student Eva Frankfurther. Like Auerbach, Frankfurther was a German-Jewish child refugee from Nazism, who arrived in England a few months before the outbreak of war. Her profile study of a refugee wearing a fedora hat employs fluid lines, firm outlines, stippling and extensive areas of wash.

Like Herman, Frankfurther drew on cheap sheets of paper, probably torn from the sketchbook that accompanied her everywhere, forming a 'Whitechapel diary' that is, in many respects, a corollary to Herman's 'Memory of Memories' series. Frankfurther, too, memorised faces or poses and completed her sketches afterwards, but hers were always based on real, observed subjects. Auerbach recalled how her work was 'full of feeling for people' and rejected 'professional tricks or gloss.'

This is pronounced in a pair of head-and-shoulders portraits of impoverished, elderly subjects, Old Woman of the East End and Elderly Jew of the East End, this time presented in three-quarter view. Both are executed in thinned, dry oil paint on paper, used to great effect as a drawing medium, introducing touches of subdued colour to underpin the predominantly brown palette. Frankfurther concentrates on the faces and expressions, carving hollowed eyes, sunken cheeks and furrowed brows that suggest not only poverty and ageing but reflect their 'stark struggles' – the inner lives of her subjects.

Both the composition and subjects show her enduring admiration for Rembrandt, and her preference, like Herman, for modest subjects – refugees, immigrants and workers. Her work reflects 1950s Britain, through which she lived and worked, her concern with the realist tradition, but also the German heritage from which she was an exile. Her instinctive sympathy for those on the margins of society was due, at least in part, to her own experience as a refugee and an outsider.

Sarah MacDougall, Director of Scholarship, Ben Uri

This content is funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

Further reading

Monica Bohm-Duchen, 'Eva Frankfurther' in Beate Planskoy (ed.), Eva Frankfurther: Paintings, Lithographs and Drawings, Peter Halban, 2001

Josef Herman, 'Memory of Memories': The Glasgow Drawing 1940–43, Third Eye Centre, 1985

Annie Rosenberg, 'In Memory of my Dear Brother' in Jean Liddiard (ed.), Isaac Rosenberg: Poetry Out of My Head and Heart – Unpublished Letters and Poem Versions, Enitharmon Press, 2007