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The Ben Uri gallery in London is staging from June 22 until September 9, 2012  an exhibition titled “The Inspiration of Decadence: Dodo Rediscovered - Berlin to London 1907-1998”, featuring Berlin émigré artist, Dodo Burgner (1907-1998) in the broader context of her émigré peers.

The exhibition provides a fascinating glimpse into Berlin's bohemian society of the 1920s and 1930s, set against the contrasting reality of a struggling émigré existence in post-War London.

Born in Berlin in 1907 as Dörte Clara Wolff and brought up in a comfortable upper middle-class Jewish environment, Dodo drew constantly from a young age, prior to enrolling in the prestigious Reimann Schule for artists/designers.

The early works on display derive from her burgeoning career in Weimar Berlin, first as a student and subsequently as a freelance fashion designer and illustrator. Her exotic and playful student costume designs from the mid-1920s often echo the spirit of negrophilia which flourished simultaneously in Berlin and Paris, inspired by Josephine Baker's scandalous cabaret.  

Subtly-toned fashion designs evoke the carefree gaiety of the 1920s, juxtaposed against caustic illustrations for the German satirical magazine ULK, whose complex and atmospheric compositions are drawn in the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) style, characterized by intense colour. They narrate the sophisticated life of the modern urbanite, as much as the increasing estrangement of the sexes, and expose the superficiality of the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the period, with which Dodo was only too familiar.

As contemporary photographs of her suggest, Dodo was powerfully attractive, often posing against a backdrop of glamorous pre-War locations, with one or other of the two men who featured so prominently in her tangled personal life. 1928 saw the beginning of a particularly turbulent phase. Shifting between poles of happiness and despair, Dodo produced an intimate group of intense, and sometimes brutal, ‘unconscious' drawings during Jungian psychoanalysis in Zürich. Although there are scant allusions to the wider political situation and the rise of National Socialism, the emotions captured in these works suggest universal themes of alienation, guilt and separation.

In this summer of London's Olympic Games, there is a poignant echo in that Dodo was forced to leave Berlin in 1936, just as the Nazis mounted their own showcase Olympics in her native city. Dodo's situation stabilized after 1938 as she settled into the life of an exile in London.  The exhibition closes with examples from her post-war oeuvre. Although she lived in London for nearly 60 years, her output was limited in comparison with the abundance of the continental years, perhaps because her mood and emotions were no longer fierce or challenging.

The exhibition further puts in context Dodo's oeuvre with works by émigrés from the Ben Uri collection, a number of whom also contributed to ULK, including one of Weimar's most savage artist critics, Georg Grosz, and less well-known figures, such as Katerina Wilczynski and Julius Rosenbaum, who are now almost unknown in this country. Visions of Berlin's bohemian society contrast dramatically with snapshots of the difficult life of émigrés in post-war London by Eva Frankfurther and Frederich Feigl. Dodo's applied art is complemented by costume designs and illustrations by Viennese émigrées, Margareta Berger Hamerschlag and Bettina Ehrlich, and by illustrations by Berlin-born Susan Einzig, best known for Tom's Midnight Garden (1958). Dodo's life drawings are shown alongside an early nude study by Frank Auerbach – also a Berlin émigré.