Giant JW3 artwork paints a vibrant picture of Jewish London
Abseilers install Leon Fenster's glorious depiction of the city's communal history
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
The artist Leon Fenster now walks around London eyeing up likely spaces for one of his gigantic artworks — buoyed with the success of his newest installation on the walls of JW3, the stories and legends of Jewish London.
Fenster, who was brought up in Edgware and Stanmore before his family went to live for a time in Philadelphia, is an architect, an artist, and a storyteller who delights in humour. In April last year he and JW3’s chief executive, Raymond Simonson, sat with the centre’s director of programming, William Galinski, to discuss possible projects.
“If you had a free hand to do anything you wanted, what would you do?” Galinski asked Fenster. And Fenster’s eyes lit up as he waved at the blank wall of the five storeys of flats which face on to JW3. “I’ve always been looking for bigger and bigger walls to tell bigger and bigger stories. That was a space crying out to be filled.”
And so, after all necessary permission had been achieved from Camden Council and a grant was made by Arts Council England, a framework went up on the wall and Fenster set to create, earlier this year, a riotous, multi-coloured painting in which we can see — well, just about everyone.
For visitors to the centre, the great joy of the JW3 artwork will be identifying who is who and what is being represented. Fenster has a jokey imagination, so we are treated to a depiction of the barmitzvah that Benjamin Disraeli never had, and a Transport for London Palwin kiddush wine bus stop with the “bus numbers” 10, 11, 4 and 4a.
High above the Finchley Road, the painting is topped with police on horses in the Battle of Cable Street. One of the many myths of Cable Street, says Fenster, is that children threw marbles at the horses in order to make them slip: his JW3 version shows kids with water pistols.
“The whole idea,” says Fenster “is that the entire mural takes place within a theatre.” Thus we see JW3 founder Dame Vivien Duffield clutching a potted plant, while Oliver Cromwell “opens up the theatre to show how he let the Jews be readmitted to England”. Dame Vivien’s plant, he says, is a nod to the new garden she has created at the Clore Gallery.
Elsewhere there is a fantastic cornucopia of Jewish London, from a black cab to Amy Winehouse, from politicians and entertainers to Bevis Marks Synagogue (and Sephardi rabbi Joseph Dweck), from Sigmund Freud to former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Landmarks in the folk memory of Jewish Londoners include Bloom’s restaurant and the fondly remembered Russian “schvitz” baths. There are Beatles in the mix with their first manager Brian Epstein, and a cheeky pinch of Marc Chagall’s flying acrobats from his 1950 artwork The Dance and the Circus, which adorned the now defunct Watergate Theatre.
Here is Dame Maureen Lipman in her notorious incarnation as British Telecom’s Beattie, with a phone in each hand; and here, perched on a ladder, is David Baddiel. Here are Karl Marx and the fashion designer Michael Fish, and a youthful Nicholas Winton brings Jewish children to Liverpool Street station.
Planes dive at the foot of the painting, during the London Blitz, and the bombs are warded off by a giant Golem. And anyone wondering about the signpost to “Middle Dinthorpe” should look at Gary Sinyor’s groundbreaking film Leon The Pig Farmer with its Lower, Middle and Upper Dinthorpe villages.
There’s even St Paul’s Cathedral complete with a Hebrew sign saying, “This is not St Paul’s Synagogue” — because, says Fenster, opponents of Jewish readmission to England falsely claimed that Jews had bought the cathedral and were going to turn it into a shul.
Fenster himself is among the 150-plus faces and places, as a sort if “Where’s Wally?” puzzle. Cheerfully, he admits to waking up every morning and thinking “I should have put X person in!” but jokes he might do a second version with different figures.
For now, however, the mounting frame on the block of JW3 flats is permanent and the work itself is temporary. Galinski, watching with other JW3 personnel as it was put in place by intrepid abseilers on Friday morning, says the weatherproofed artwork will probably stay in place for about six months.
And for those wanting to figure out for themselves just who is who on this ambitious project, go to leonfenster.com/jewishlondon — each image is accompanied by an explanation of their story. As you might say… watch this space.
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