A Picasso painting that will go on public dispaly for the first time. Lewis Elton has given his art collection, mainly acquired by his own parents with Jewish reparation money to Surrey University.
The former owners smile down at a table covered in treasures including sparkling lithographs and lino cuts by Picasso, Cocteau and Chagall, which used to hang on the walls of their home. “Very nice to see them again,” Lewis Elton, father of the comedian Ben Elton, said. “They really are quite good, aren’t they?” his wife Mary agreed.
The collection now owned by the University of Surrey goes on display for the first time at the Lightbox in Woking this week, and has a poignant history. Most of the pictures were bought by his parents using reparation paid to Jews by Germany. Elton continued both the collecting and the family academic tradition, becoming professor of physics and then of higher education at Surrey, while his brother Geoffrey became regius professor of history at Cambridge.
The family survived the Holocaust thanks to a casual piece of anti-semitism which probably saved all their lives. He spent much of his childhood in Prague, where his father Victor Ehrenberg was professor of ancient history. Ehrenberg always intended to return to Germany, but failed to get a post in Tubingen. Years later they discovered somebody had scrawled across his file “Wir haben genug Juden” – we have enough Jews – in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. It seemed a devastating rejection, but as a result the whole family managed to escape Prague in 1939 a month before Hitler invaded, and were classed as “friendly” Czechs rather than “enemy aliens” and so avoided the internment which became the fate of many refugees to Britain. The family name changed on advice when his brother served in the armed forces in the war, so he and the children, including the youngest, the comedian Ben,, became Eltons.
His parents loved music and art, and the pictures they collected included many by artists such as Paul Klee and Jean Cocteau damned as “degenerate” by the Nazis. Elton started mounting exhibitions in the university using the proceeds of the physics department coffee machine– which he insisted on moving when the campus transferred to Guildford – when he saw the shoulders of a Tahitian lovely in a Gauguin print on the wall dripping with spilled coffee: “We must have some real art on the walls, and teach them to appreciate it,” he determined on the spot. “There was never any problem getting artists,” he recalled, “you just had to ask them, they were queueing up to exhibit with us.” He and his wife, a teacher, bought works by many exhibitors very cheaply, and he now wonders if he should have acquired something by a promising young painter called David Hockney.
The Eltons intended to bequeath the collection, but have given it now after moving from a large family home. While a permanent home is being prepared at the university, it is on display at Lightbox in Woking. There hasn’t been so much as a whimper from their children at losing the chance of inheriting a Picasso, they insist: “They’re glad that so many more people will now see and enjoy them as we have.”
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