Erica Brausen, 1908-1992

Erica Brausen was born in Dusseldorf in 1908. After completing her education and with the rise of Hitler she left for Paris in the 1930s. She worked in a bookshop and began to organise displays of contemporary art. A friendship with the Catalan artist Joan Miro led her to Majorca where she ran a bar which was frequented by writers and artists. During the Spanish Civil War she used her contacts with the US navy to help some of her Jewish and socialist friends to escape and slipped away herself on a fishing boat. She arrived, penniless, in London about the time of the outbreak of the Second World War.

In London she met again many of her former friends and began organising small art exhibitions but, as a German citizen, she was not able to work until a homosexual friend agreed to marry her to give her status. Her first real work in London began with the Redfern Gallery. Then in 1946 she met an American millionaire banker, Arthur Jeffress and he offered to finance her in a gallery of her own.

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