AUCTIONEERS Greenslade Taylor Hunt will be auctioning more than 40 works by Czech Expressionist artist Ernest Neuschul on Thursday, February 1.

No fewer than 41 paintings will be coming to auction for the first time at The Octagon Salerooms, East Reach, Taunton. The sale commences at 3.30pm following the regular monthly antiques auction.

They will be on view this Saturday (January 27) from 9am-12.30pm and on Tuesday, January 30, and Wednesday, January 31, from 9am-5pm.

Peter Rixon, who is organising the sale, said: “This is an important body of reflective work from an artist who lived through a momentous period of European history. As both a reactionary and

a refugee Neuschul recorded the rapidly changing world with deep dignity and humanity.”

Ernest Neuschul was born of Jewish parents in 1895 in Usti nad Labem in the Czech Republic. He studied in Prague and later Vienna, where he was attracted by the paintings of Klimt and Egon

Schiele and the expressionistic works of Oskar Kokoschka.

At the outbreak of World War I Neuschul avoided conscription, moving to Cracow, Poland, in 1916. After the war ended he moved to Berlin, joining the Academy of Arts where he won the Rome prize

for outstanding achievement. In 1919 Neuschul’s first one-man exhibition opened in Prague.

He settled in Berlin, a city he loved, embarking upon an energetically productive period, painting under the post-war influence of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement. In 1926

he joined the Novembergruppe, first founded in 1918 and a vigorous opponent of Fascism. Neuschul’s work during the late 1920s took a more hard-edged and socially committed look at day-to-day life under the Weimar Republic.

In 1932 Neuschul became Professor of Fine Arts at Berlin’s Academy of Fine Art and was also elected chairman of the Novembergruppe. The Nazis closed down an exhibition of his work the following

year and he lost his teaching post as a result of his Jewish background and radical political views.

In 1935 Neuschul was invited to exhibit and work in the Soviet Union, painting portraits of steelworkers and revolutionary figures and even gaining a double portrait commission of Stalin and

Dimitroff.

In 1937 however, several of Neuschul’s paintings on exhibition in Usti were disfigured with swastikas, a grim foretaste of what awaited him and his family if they remained. Neuschul, his wife

and child fled the Nazis on the last train out of Czechoslovakia, arriving in London in 1939 and settling in Wales for the duration of the war.

In 1959, a one-man exhibition was held at the Betzalel National Museum in Jerusalem and in 1966 a major retrospective exhibition in Berlin with the title ‘From the New Objectivity to the New

Non-Objectivity’. He died in London in 1968.

In 1989 the Leicestershire Museum UK (who hold a substantial collection of 20th Century German art) put on a retrospective, while in 2001 a major retrospective was held in Regensburg

and Brno. Neuschul played an important part in the history of German art between the world wars.