Polly Binder pays a blinder

Pearl Binder's family name was Binderofski. Her father, a tailor, moved to Britain from Eastern Europe in 1890. She was born in Salford fourteen years later.

She ended her life as Baroness Elwyn-Jones. Her husband, Elwyn Jones, was a barrister and Labour politician who, in 1964, became attorney-general. A  decade later, he was appointed Lord Chancllor and made a life peer.

This blog is about Pearl Binder's art: politically committed, wonderfully humorous, sharply observed and deftly executed.

It's part of a much bigger - and enthusiatically recommended - 'Comrades in Art' exhibition at the Towner Gallery in (I know it's a strange location given the subject matter) Eastbourne.

Pearl Binder's drawings and lithographs depicting the Jewish East End of London in the early 1930s are particularly enthralling. Here we have 'Jewish Restaurant, Brick Lane' and 'Jewish Bookshop, Wentworth Street'.
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She is known particuarly as a book illustrator. But she also wrote, sculpted, made stained glass ... and was a champion of the Pearly Kings and Queens, one of the enduring emblems of Cockney working class life in inner London.

She was also, in 1933, a founder member of the left-wing, communist leaning, Artists' International Association, which is the focus of this exhibition.

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There is a mischief about her art which is really appealing. Take these examples -

If you can get down to the Towner Gallery, then go! The exhibition is on until October.