Mark Gertler

Mark Gertler was born Marks Gertler on 9 December 1891 in Spitalfields, London, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents. He attended local schools on Settles Street and Deal Street between 1897 and 1906 and left formal schooling at fourteen.

In 1906 he began evening art classes at Regent Street Polytechnic, then in 1907 took up an apprenticeship with the stained-glass makers Clayton and Bell while continuing to study art at night. A scholarship from the Jewish Education Aid Society allowed him to enter the Slade School of Fine Art in 1908, where he studied to about 1911, winning a two-year Slade scholarship in 1909 and a British Institution scholarship in 1911. No degree was conferred; the Slade functioned at the time as a professional art school rather than a degree-granting institution.

At the Slade and after, Gertler moved in and around the Bloomsbury circle, and his relationship with the painter Dora Carrington was a defining, difficult thread in his personal life. He began exhibiting with the Friday Club around 1910 and 1911, showed with the New English Art Club from 1911, and was elected to the London Group in 1915. His 1916 painting Merry-Go-Round became his best-known work and a landmark of British anti-war imagery. Gertler held his first solo exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, London, in 1921.

Gertler suffered from tuberculosis earlier in his life and from recurring depression in his later years. He held a final exhibition in London in 1939, in the months before his death; specific attendance and sales figures for that show are not confirmed in the sources reviewed here. On 23 June 1939 he died by suicide, gassing himself in his studio at 5 Grove Terrace, Highgate, London; he was buried at Willesden Jewish Cemetery. His obituary in The Times called his death a serious loss to British art and judged that a considered list of the half-dozen most important painters under fifty working in England would have included him.

Contemporary critics recognized Gertler early. When he showed jointly with John Currie at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea in December 1912, reviewers reportedly called the pair two artists of the future. The painter and critic C. R. W. Nevinson, recalling the Slade years in his 1938 memoir Paint and Prejudice, described Gertler as "the genius of the place... the most serious, single-minded artist I have ever come across." Merry-Go-Round is widely reported to have drawn praise from D. H. Lawrence as the best modern picture he had seen, though the exact publication and date of that remark are not established in the available sources. At his death, The Times obituary placed him among the half-dozen most important English painters under fifty. Later institutional attention, including a Tate room display in 2018 and a 2026 Ben Uri exhibition drawn from the Luke Gertler bequest and major UK collections, has kept his critical standing anchored in museums even as his auction presence stays modest.

Gertler's auction record is The Violinist, which sold for GBP 542,500 (about USD 850,640) at Christie's London in June 2015, reported at the time as a new world record for the artist. As of mid-2026 no later sale has surpassed that price. His market is otherwise thin by volume: works on paper and smaller paintings typically trade well under six figures, and results depend heavily on subject, with East End and figure subjects generally commanding more interest than still lifes. Piano Nobile is the gallery most consistently associated with handling his work in the current market.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Gertler, so authentication relies on exhibition history, provenance research, and the expertise of dealers such as Piano Nobile, who handle his market regularly. His work sits in more than forty UK public collections, a density that argues for durable institutional interest, but his auction record, set in 2015 at GBP 542,500, has stood for over a decade in a market with relatively few high-value transactions. Collectors should treat any single sale result with caution given that thin trading history and the fact that sources vary slightly on the exact record price, and should expect subject matter and exhibition provenance to matter more for Gertler than for artists with deeper repeat-sale data.