Klinghoffer was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Szczerzec, located near Lwów, Ukraine, then known as Lemberg, it fell under the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the time pogroms in the area were increasing and economic prospects were grim for the young family. Clara’s father determined to move to America but in the event settled in Manchester in 1900, his wife and daughter joining him three years later. After some years in menial jobs he moved to London’s East End where slowly his prospects improved.
Initially managing a draper’s shop he began his own business trading in cloth aided by his enterprising wife Chana. Clara had sketched from an early age and whilst thirteen one of her mother’s clients had spotted her drawings in the shop and impressed upon Clara’s mother the talent they demonstrated. The decision was made to send Clara to art school and with some difficulty the money was found. At fourteen she was enrolled at the Sir John Cass Institute in Aldgate and a short time later she applied to the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Southampton Row. On arrival at the latter Clara’s portfolio immediately impressed her tutor, Bernard Meninsky, who compared her anatomical drawing to Da Vinci. Hyperbole it may have been but there is no doubt her teachers considered her a prodigy, and her work was often hung on the class walls as an example to her fellow students. The school’s walls were covered with prints of the Italian masters, and they were to prove an increasing influence on the young Clara. Meninsky proved an open door to the avante garde circles of the day, introducing her to Thérèse Lessore, Wyndham Lewis and Jacob Epstein who became a close friend.
She attended the Slade for two years from 1919 under Henry Tonks and Frederick Brown. There she excelled at figure studies, winning second prize for Figure Drawing in her first year and the Orpen Bursary. Another Slade tutor was the post-Impressionist painter Alfred Wolmark and it was through his efforts that she was offered a solo exhibition at the Hampstead Gallery in 1920. The collection of fifty-three drawings and paintings, mainly employing her six sisters as models, was widely lauded in the press. The Sunday Times’ critic compared her rendering of flesh to the tenderness of Renoir and The Daily Graphic hailed her debut with the headline, "Girl Who Draws Like Raphael – Success At 19”, a soubriquet that followed her through press articles for most of her life. The success of the show launched her into the public eye and portrait commissions and invitations to exhibit flooded in. Throughout the ensuing decade she showed at the Goupil Galleries’ Salons, Women's International Art Club and the New English Art Club where she was elected a member in 1934, and the Royal Academy. Solo shows were held by both the Leicester, Grosvenor and Redfern Galleries and she was selected for the 1924 Venice Biennale..
She was much in demand as a portrait painter and her practice flourished. Sitters included her friend Lucien Pissarro, and his daughter Orovida; Albert Schweitzer; Sarah Churchill, Vivien Leigh and Sybil Thorndike. Fellow Slade student Jim Ede commissioned Clara to paint his wife Helen, a painting purchased by the Fitzwilliam in 1983 to hang permanently at Kettles Yard. Manchester City Art Gallery purchased a portrait from the 1934 New English Art Club and Aberdeen Art Gallery acquired a head and shoulders of her sister Rachel in 1936. The Chantrey Bequest purchased ‘The Old Troubadour’ for the Tate from the 1933 Royal Academy Summer Show. Although the National Portrait Gallery acquired several of Clara’s portraits for their permanent collection they were all acceded during the 1980s.
In 1926 Clara married Joseph Stoppelman a Dutch journalist, honeymooning in the Côte d’Azur seaside town of Menton, via a short stop in Avignon. The climate and environment suited them both and they stayed longer than planned. However, unconvinced of the local medical facilities Clara, now pregnant, returned to London to give birth. Money was tight in the Stoppelman household and Joop, as her husband was known, took a position as secretary to an American industrialist. It meant moving the family to Paris where they were briefly settled before the Wall Street Crash. Fortunately, he was headhunted by an American publicist firm looking to open a Dutch branch. Clara moved happily as she felt Amsterdam was in easy reach of her London galleries and two years earlier she had held a successful solo show in the city.
International events again overtook the growing young family. The Nazis were on the rise in Germany and Clara discovered her maid had passed on information about the Stoppelmans to the German embassy. Antisemitism was rife and by the end of the decade it was clear that war was coming. The decision was made to move back to London, putting the bulkier belongings and Clara’s paintings in store in Haarlem they were to be plundered and lost forever during the occupation. 1938 saw her final solo show at the Redfern Gallery and after a brief stay with the Klinghoffer family, it was felt that America would be the place to see out hostilities.
Settled in New York, Clara continued to paint and exhibit. In 1941 a Park Avenue gallery held a successful solo show but the writing was on the wall for representational artists. Abstract expressionism dominated the post war art scene on both sides of the Atlantic and skilled, subtle realists of the Clara Klinghoffer mould were discarded for the very qualities for which they were once celebrated.
Sales were thin and her old galleries had moved with the prevailing tastes but a visit to Mexico in 1952 provided a new impetus to her work. The light and colour of the country proved a tonic and for two decades she painted the people and landscapes with a deep affection. In the late 1960s her work was shown in a number of solo exhibitions in galleries in New Jersey and in 1969 what was to be her final exhibition in the Mexican/North American Cultural Institute in Mexico City. Returning to London the following year she was diagnosed with cancer and died shortly after.
A number of exhibitions and retrospectives were held in London in the 1970s, two under the auspices of Irving Grose at the Belgrave Gallery, a dealer on a mission to revive the reputations of talented painters neglected by the vagaries of prevailing fashion.
The market stirrings in Clara Klinghoffer’s work in the last few years may or may not lead to a vertical rise in her stock value. A major sale of one of her portraits of Pratima Tagore at Frieze Masters recently pushed her record into the high five figures and one or two surprising provincial saleroom prices have certainly sparked renewed interest.
A significant release of works from her estate collection in America over the last decade has allowed us to mount the current exhibition, a large enough body of work to reappraise an artist of Clara Klinghoffer’s stature is a rare luxury and we are privileged to be able to introduce her to a new audience.
"...if ever there was an artist who for some time has been unjustly forgotten, it is Clara Klinghoffer...While the temporary eclipse of her reputation is not, given the trends in the visual arts, surprising, it is certainly lamentable. She was a portrait painter of sensitive talent and, above all, a fine draughtsman…. When much more celebrated artists are forgotten, she will be remembered." Terence Mullally writing in the Daily Telegraph 1981
