Sketch of a Woman in Profile

In this loose sketch, Klinghoffer captures a woman’s profile with delicate, soft layers of graphite. The empty rendering and generalisation of her hair and outfit create an intriguing contrast between detail and assumption.

Clara Klinghoffer

Painter Clara (née Chaje Esther) Klinghoffer was born into a Jewish family in Szerzezec (now Lemberg), a village near Lwów (now Lviv), in Polish Galicia, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Ukraine) in 1900. She moved to England with her family at the age of three, settling first in Manchester, before moving to London’s East End. She drew from a young age, briefly taking classes at the John Cass Institute in Aldgate in 1914, before moving to the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Duncan Grant and Bernard Meninsky (1915-18), where she quickly established a reputation as the new ‘girl genius’, then completed her studies at the Slade School of Fine Art (1918-20).

While still a student, she held her first exhibition at the Hampstead Art Gallery in 1920. Further solo exhibitions followed at the Leicester Galleries, London (1923, 1932), the Redfern Gallery, London (1926, 1929, 1938) and Godfrey Phillips Galleries, London (1929); she also exhibited with the Goupil Gallery salons – where her drawings, including many studies of women (often based on her six sisters) and children, were frequently likened to Raphael – the New English Art Club, the London Group, the Women’s International Club, the Royal Academy and the Carnegie International.

In 1923 and 1927 her work was included in two prestigious exhibitions of ‘Jewish art’ (although she disliked this label) at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and at Ben Uri Gallery in 1935 – her painting ‘The Girl in the Green Sari’ was acquired for the collection the same year (the first accessioned work by a female artist).

In 1926 she married Dutch journalist Joop Stoppelman and moved with him to Paris in 1928. Following her solo exhibition in Amsterdam in 1928, they moved to Holland with their children in 1930. In 1939, aware of the imminent threat of German invasion, the family moved again, this time to America and Klinghoffer subsequently split her life between London and New York, where she held solo exhibitions in 1941, 1951, 1958 and 1958.

In her later years, however, her work suffered from the decline in demand for figurative painting; her final solo show was in Mexico City in 1969. Clara Klinghoffer died in London, England in 1970. A private exhibition was held in London in 1972, with further retrospectives at the Belgrave Gallery, London in 1976 and Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle in 1977.

Klinghoffer’s work is represented in many UK collections including Aberdeen Art Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate.