THE great thing about Annely Juda Fine Art is that visitors have always had a clear idea what they were likely to see there. Not because the gallery has ever lacked enterprise in what it showed, but because it immediately mapped out for itself a territory which, initially at least, was covered by no other London gallery. And that territory reflected the personal taste and enthusiasm, not to mention the encyclopaedic special knowledge, of its creator.
Annely Juda was known for more than 30 years as one of the most dedicated and formidable of London art dealers. The gallery that bore her name opened in a Fitzrovia mews in 1968, and moved to within a stone’s throw of Bond Street, in 1990. Many preferred the old Tottenham Mews gallery — much less glossy than Dering Street, it seemed somehow to match better the spirit of Middle European advanced thinking about art which pervaded Juda’s taste and attitude to what she championed and, hopefully, from time to time, sold to a sluggish British public in the Seventies.
Annely Brauer was born in Kassel, Germany, in 1914, into a cultivated and intellectual Jewish family. She went to high school in Kassel until 1933, when her family saw the writing on the wall for Jews in the newly Nazi Germany. By the following year they had left for Palestine, where the young Annely remained for three years, before moving to London to study in the Reimann School of Art and Design.
In 1939 she graduated, and married. For the next 16 years she all but vanished from the public record, possibly (though it is difficult to imagine it of her) restricting her energies to being a wife and mother. The Judas had three children: two daughters and, between them in age, a son David, who was later to be her partner and right-hand man in the gallery.
After spending some time with her family in Cologne where her husband was a bookseller, Juda returned to Britain. Divorced in 1955, she plunged back immediately into the art world, first of all administering the Eric Estorick Collection of contemporary art, then working for two years at the Kaplan Gallery, before opening, with other directors, a gallery of her own, the Molton Gallery. It is a reasonable guess that she was never happy with less than total control — a much later partnership rapidly came to grief because she found herself incapable of working in double harness and had little patience with the British tradition of elegant amateurism in art dealing. In 1963 she moved into another, similar situation with the Hamilton Gallery, which lasted a whole five years.
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She finally went solo and Annely Juda Fine Art opened in 1968. She brought two advantages to the new venture: fully formed tastes, and a business sense that permitted her to persuade the most unlikely customers to acclimatise themselves to geometrical abstraction. How she acquired this taste — very extraordinary in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s — remains something of a mystery, but very rapidly she opened at the gallery an epoch-making exhibition, The Non Objective World 1914-1924, a concept that was enlarged in subsequent years to include 1924-39 in 1971, and 1939-55 the following year.
The first of these exhibitions proved revelatory to some new-money collectors who came to the art market only lightly burdened with conservative prejudices. If they liked it, they bought it, and the classic works of Malevich, Popova, Gabo, Kandinsky, El Lissitzky and Tatlin had their own austere and elegant beauty which Juda was ideally placed to put over, confining her stock strictly to top-quality work and infecting others with her own enthusiasm.
Later editions added the Dutch artists of De Stijl to the list, in particular the work of Vordemberge-Gilderwart.
These historical excursions were satisfying on a number of levels, not least that of business: many of Juda Fine Art’s clients came from abroad, but the Non-Objective shows — the phrase comes from Malevich — also helped to revolutionise taste at home. But inevitably with a historic specialisation, there is progressively less and less first-rate material available. In any case, Juda saw contemporary art as necessarily part of a continuum, and believed that any gallery worth its salt had a duty to show and encourage living art as well.
More current artists were constantly added to the gallery’s list: Kenneth and Mary Martin, Tàpies, Caro, the Christos and even someone as removed from geometrical abstraction as David Hockney.
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Extending the gallery’s repertoire of living artists was the main purpose of the ill-fated alliance with the Rowan Gallery in 1982. Juda was soon reported to be asking Alec Hood, director of the Rowan Gallery, if it wasn’t time that he considered retirement — although as a matter of cold fact he was several years younger than her.
The galleries divorced in 1985, and Annely Juda Fine Art moved alone to new galleries in Dering Street in 1990. As time went on David Juda came to play a more and more prominent part in the direction of the gallery, but even in her nineties Annely was still a presence in the business. In 1998 she was appointed CBE.
Annely Juda is survived by her son and two daughters.
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Annely Juda, CBE, art gallery director, was born on September 23, 1914. She died on August 13, 2006, aged 91.