Bernard Meninsky (25 July 1891–12 February 1950) was a British painter of figures and landscapes in oils, watercolour and gouache, a draughtsman and a teacher.
Biography
Early life and education
Meninsky was born in Konotop, modern-day Ukraine, where his father was a tailor and the family were Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian Jews. They moved to Liverpool when Bernard was six weeks old. The family name was apparently 'Menushkin'.
Although Meninsky left school at the age of eleven, his talent for art was demonstrated by the sale of a drawing to a local comic postcard business. While working as an errand boy during the day, he attended free classes in art in the evenings, and these enabled him to gain a place at the Liverpool School of Art. He studied there from 1906 to 1911, being financed by a succession of scholarships. He attended summer courses at the Royal College of Art, London, in August 1909 and August 1910, and in 1911 he won a scholarship to study at the Académie Julian in Paris for three months.
The Slade School and after
With financial support from the Liverpool Jewish community and the Jewish Educational Aid Society (JEAS), Meninsky studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1912. His contemporaries there included David Bomberg, Isaac Rosenberg, Jacob Kramer and William Roberts. Roberts would become a lifelong friend and later a colleague at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Another important contact Meninsky made at this time was Walter Sickert, who hosted 'at homes' for Slade and ex-Slade students in his Fitzroy Street studio.
In the autumn of 1912 Roger Fry's Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition opened at the Grafton Galleries, London, and was seen by the public as scandalous in its modernism. Meninsky's tutors at the Slade, Henry Tonks and Wilson Steer, also rejected the cubist work on display at the Grafton. While Bomberg and Roberts would go on to explore their own brand of 'English Cubism' in their immediate post-Slade years, Meninsky's work was less radical – though he had nevertheless 'been bowled over most completely by the greatness of Cézanne'.
In 1913 Meninsky left the Slade to work as a 'pupil/teacher' for Edward Gordon Craig at his theatre school in Florence. Unfortunately he found Craig 'an unexpectedly hard and unreasonable task-master'. Returning to London a few months later, he began teaching life drawing at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. The principal of the Central, F. V. Burridge, had been head of the Liverpool School of Art when Meninsky had been a prize-winning student there. Teaching would be a passion of Meninsky's, and his relationship with the Central School would be important to him throughout his life.
World War I
In the summer of 1914 Meninsky's work was exhibited in the 'Jewish Section' of 'Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements' at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London's East End. During World War I Meninsky exhibited with the New English Art Club, the Friday Club and, from November 1916, with the London Group – an organisation that he would be associated with throughout his career.
In the first quarter of 1918 he married Margaret ('Peggy') O'Connor in Marylebone Register Office, and their son David was born later that year.
Meninsky had enlisted as a private in the Royal Fusiliers in January 1918, and worked in a clerical capacity in the regiment. He applied to be a war artist under the scheme run by the British War Memorials Committee (BWMC), and was released from military duties for an initial four-month period from May 1918. He was discharged from military service in August 1918, due to neurasthenia. Meninsky completed The Arrival of a Leave Train, Victoria Station, 1918 and at least five other related works before the end of 1918, all of which are now in the Imperial War Museum collection. The Arrival of a Leave Train, Victoria Station, 1918 wes included in the major exhibition of war art held at the National Gallery, London, in late 1919 and early 1920.
Mother and Child
After the war ended, Meninsky resumed teaching at the Central School and also accepted Walter Sickert’s invitation to take over his life class at the Westminster School of Art. When it came to light that Meninsky was still on the BWMC contract, he was required to extend his involvement with the war artist scheme for a further period.