Mother and Child
This conversation is connected to Mother and Child.
A woman cradles an infant against her chest, her heavy form filling the entire canvas. The figures are drawn in thick black contour lines over flat areas of brown, ochre, pink, and dark red, with the woman's face built from angular, mask-like planes — her expression tender, her eyes filled with tears. The handling is rough, the paint thin in places, almost stained. The composition references Picasso's Guernica, which Adler would have seen in Paris before the war. He was a Polish-Jewish painter who fled Germany in 1933 and spent the war years in exile in Britain. He painted the mother-and-child subject repeatedly during this period, separated from his partner Betty and daughter Nina and unaware of the fate of his family in Poland. This work was possibly a reworking of an earlier, now-lost Madonna and Child from his time in Scotland, and was exhibited three times between 1941 and 1942 in Glasgow.