You may know her as a fashion designer and you may recall her fabulously cool store in Hampstead, but Nicole Farhi gave up fashion in favour of sculpture more than a decade ago.
Given that her new exhibition, J’Accuse, is named for allegations of antisemitism levelled against the French by novelist Emile Zola, there was never any doubt that Jewish victims of injustice would loom large in her latest work.
But it was not the wrongly-accused soldier Alfred Dreyfus who inspired Zola’s open letter and Farhi’s commemoration in clay of appallingly-treated innocents from all over the world, but a more recent Jewish victim – mother of two Ethel Rosenberg, executed as a spy in New York more than 70 years ago.
“I was so upset when I read what happened to this woman who was innocent of the crimes she was accused of, I had to go and sculpt a small head of her to get rid of my emotion,” says the designer, who works out of the Hampstead home she shares with her husband, the playwright Sir David Hare.
“In spite of having nothing to do with passing information to the Russians, she was put on the electric chair. It was a botched execution; smoke was coming out of her head when she was not even dead – it was too awful.”
The horror is reflected in Farhi’s interpretation: “She is the only figure in my collection who is completely white, because she was made dead in the worst possible way. While all the other figures show signs of life with colour in their faces I just saw her in ashes, white as a sheet.”
Ethel Rosenberg. Photo: Iona Wolff
From Rosenberg, Farhi’s thoughts turned to the Dreyfus scandal which consumed a France notorious for antisemitism. In 1894, Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of being a German spy and imprisoned on Devil’s Island for five years, long after evidence of a cover-up proved his innocence.
Although the artist born in Nice remembers only one incident of antisemitism growing up in France – “I was horrified to hear one of my cousins called a ‘bad Jew’ during a fight with another girl at school” – Farhi has been thinking about it for a while, sculpting Anne Frank for a previous collection, Pioneers, “because she taught us so much of what we know about the Holocaust”.
Anne Frank is not in this show, as the subjects in J’Accuse are specifically victims of a flawed legal system. “They include a 14-year-old boy executed in South Carolina for a crime he did not commit, like a girl hanged in public in Iran. The series reflects my pain, anger and frustration that I could not do anything for them but sculpt, and I wanted people to remember them.”
Meir Tobianski. Photo: Iona Wolff
Another Jew commemorated who was the victim not of antisemitism but politics is Major Meir Tobianski, an officer in the Israeli Defence Force accused of spying for Jordan during the 1948 Arab-Israel War. “He was court-martialled, convicted of treason and executed the next day. Too late it was realised the accusation was false. It was a grave miscarriage of justice with no procedure in place to prevent wrongful conviction.”
Although one might expect all the hostages taken by Hamas to have been commemorated by Farhi, they are not on show at London’s Pitzhanger Gallery. “I don’t want to talk about the war because I am too upset,” says the 78-year-old, who lost relatives in the Holocaust.
She was helped in her mission to expose flawed legal systems around the world by law firm Mischon de Reya, which is sponsoring the show: “I know some of the lawyers there and they helped me with my research. In some places, when mistakes were recognised the law was changed. In England the death penalty was abolished because of what happened to Timothy Evans and others, and in New York they don’t use the electric chair anymore. But in South Carolina they are carrying on – they executed someone just two months ago.”
Alfred Dreyfus. Photo: Iona Wolff
Farhi is particularly incensed by the case of Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh, hanged in Iran for no proven crime “except being raped time and time again for years, and the judge did not want to believe her. Out of frustration she removed her hijab, and he condemned her to be hanged in public”.
It was playwrights’ busts created in miniature for her husband which started Farhi, who has been sculpting for 35 years and studied under Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, on her themed series.
“I do these little heads for my own pleasure; I have done pioneers, my favourite writers and now I am doing women in art. They are generally very joyful, and it feels like a great way to spend my life.”
Certainly more than flipping through magazines to follow fashion, although Farhi makes an exception for American Vogue, as editor Anna Wintour, one of her early subjects – “for a series I called From the Neck Up because I spent years dressing people from the neck down”, has become a friend.
Anne Frank. Photo: Iona Wolff
But the interest in what’s in Vogue does not extend to her own wardrobe; Farhi has long been bored of clothes shopping. “My daughter gets them for me or I go to Uniqlo, or Toast if I really need something.” Really, after a lifetime of dreaming up her own garments? “I spent 40 years doing it; I’ve turned the page,” she shrugs.
She hopes all her figures will end up in a museum, ideally the National Portrait Gallery. There are 150 so far; some standing sentry on the steps of her elegant Hampstead staircase, others arranged in rows in her studio, yet more in the custody of family and friends. “Whether they ever reach the 1,000 I originally envisaged depends on how long I live!” she says.
J’Accuse is at the Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, Ealing until June 15. pitzhanger.org.uk
