Jakub Adler was born of Jewish parentage in the suburb of Tuszyn, Łódź, Poland on 26 July 1895. He was the eighth of ten children born to Eliasz Adler, a timber and coal dealer, and his wife, Hana Laja, née Fiter. At one point in his youth, Adler considered becoming a rabbi, but in 1912 commenced training as an engraver with his uncle in Belgrade. In 1914 he moved to Barmen in the Wupper Valley of North Rhine-Westphalia, (now Wupperthal) in Germany, where he lived for a time with his sister. There, he studied painting at the Barmen Kunstgewerbeschule under Professor Gustav Wiethücher. He grew up in the traditions of Hasidic Jewry, which had a lasting influence on his subject matter. In 1918, he came into contact with Das Junge Rheinland, a group of artists based in Dusseldorf. That same year, he visited Poland, and co-founded the Jewish artistic association Ing Idisz (‘Young Yiddish’), an association of painters and writers in Łódź, dedicated to the expression of their Jewish identity. The few surviving works produced by Adler from that period, all in an Expressionist style, with the human figure subjected to elongated and distorted proportions, reveal his own response to these concerns. In 1920 he returned briefly to Berlin; in 1921 he returned to Barmen, and in 1922 he settled in Düsseldorf. There, he executed the frescoes for the Düsseldorf Planetarium and was appointed teacher at the Akademie der Künste. One of his paintings was awarded a gold medal at the exhibition ‘Deutsche Kunst Düsseldorf’ in 1928. He then formed a friendship with Paul Klee, who had a nearby studio. It was probably from Klee that Adler learnt the technique of ‘offset’ monotype which he later passed to many young British artists after the Second World War. He then began to develop a more arbitrary, Expressionistic style under the influence of both Klee and Pablo Picasso. In 1929 and 1930 he went on study trips in Mallorca and other places in Spain. During the Reichstag elections of July 1932, he published with a group of Leftist artists and intellectuals an urgent appeal against the policy of the National Socialists and advocating Communism. With the rise to power of the Nazi Party in 1933, Adler left Germany and settled in Paris, where he encountered Pablo Picasso. He also had a short spell at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17. Adler, whose oeuvre was mostly figurative – Cubist-organoid, often with harsh contours, was stylistically influenced by Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. He frequently worked in a mixed technique, employing thick layers of paint – unlike Picasso and Léger – so that the surfaces seem sgrafitto. He enjoyed experimenting with materials, for example sand admixtures. His inventory of images included motifs from Jewish folk art and Hebrew calligraphy. A major retrospective of his work was held in Warsaw in 1935. In the period 1935-37 Adler briefly returned to Poland. During those years, he also travelled widely, in Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Balkans and the Soviet Union. In 1937 25 of his works were seized from public collections by the Nazis and four were shown in the Entartete Künst (Degenerate Art) exhibition at the Mannheim Künsthalle. In 1940 Adler enlisted in the ranks of the Polish Army of the West and was evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk that summer, following the Fall of France. In 1941 he was discharged for health reasons. He then lived in a wooden house behind the old pottery at Millburn Street in Kirkudbright, later settling in London, where he obtained a studio in Bedford Gardens above the ‘Two Roberts’ Colquhoun and MacBryde, whom he already knew from Scotland. John Minton also had a studio there and Adler thus became an artistic link between the European avant-garde and a number of young British painters including Keith Vaughan, Prunella Clough, Benjamin Creme, Michael Ayrton and the playwright Dylan Thomas. Adler’s’s work was exhibited in London at the Redfern, Lefevre and Gimpel Fils galleries. He also exhibited at the Knoedler in New York. Adler died at Aldbourne in Wiltshire on 25 April 1949 at the age of 53 years, in the bitter knowledge that all nine of his brothers and sisters had perished in the Holocaust. For that very reason, he would not permit his work to be shown in Germany during his lifetime. The Arts Council gave Adler a memorial show in 1953. There were major shows of his work held in Düsseldorf, Tel-Aviv and Łódź in 1980.