The rabbi comes home

The Ben Uri Gallery - the London Jewish Museum of Art - is back in business. In the past month, this almost-moribund repository of rare and important art has acquired a new gallery on Boundary Road, NW8, just behind the former Saatchi Gallery. And it has managed, in the nick of time, to buy an important work by Mark Gertler, the early 20th century Bloomsbury genius, just before it was to be auctioned at Sotheby's. It is hard to decide which act is more worthy of celebration.

It is certainly time to look again at the work of Mark Gertler. A recent biography by Sarah MacDougall places him as a working-class boy from the East End, very much aware of his Jewish roots, educated at the Slade, and celebrated by the likes of Virginia Woolf and Henry Moore. He was even mythologised into fiction by DH Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. But, with self-doubt always at odds with the intensity of his practice, he took his life at the age of 48.

The painting in question, The Rabbi and Rabbitzin (1914), is quintessential Gertler. It's a strong image, painted in watercolour with such a robustness that it might appear as if it were effected in oils. The spirit of Gertler has never been far away from the Ben Uri. Indeed, they share much of the same history.

Ben Uri began as an art society in 1915, to exhibit Jewish artists living in Britain. This remit itself meant that the Ben Uri bore witness to several waves of immigration from Europe and became a home for many intellectual movements of the 20th century. The collection of more than 1,000 works includes major examples by such British artists as Simeon Solomon, Claude Rogers, Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer and, of course, Gertler. It also contains the work of European masters like Camille Pissarro, Marc Chagall and Ludwig Meidner. In 1995 the society was granted full museum status, before vacating premises in Soho.

Eighteen years ago, however, Ben Uri was widely seen as having jeopardised its future: it sold what is generally considered to be Gertler's greatest painting, The Merry-Go-Round, to the Tate in 1984. The work had been donated to the collection by Leicester City Council in 1945. Its sale amounted to a dereliction of public responsibility, and the huge press furore resulted in the sacking of Agi Katz, Ben Uri's respected curator.

David Glasser, Ben Uri's new chairman, remarks that, at the time, "it was sold for entirely the wrong reasons, with entirely the correct result". The painting stayed in the public domain, perhaps more visibly than it ever had been, but Ben Uri paid the price. The following 10 years saw the gallery move steadily into decline, a shadow of a noble past.

When it formally became a museum, Ben Uri established a constitution that would never allow such de-acquisition again. Its slow rehabilitation began in earnest not, I would suggest, at the busy opening night of the new gallery, but when the new acquisition came to atone for the one that got away. A sense of return, perhaps.

At the Sotheby's auction on 3 July, it was clear that several major collectors-were determined to fight for the picture. When the auctioneer announced that The Rabbi and Rabbitzin had been withdrawn from sale, he remarked that the work had been "saved for the nation". A spontaneous round of applause rang out in the auction room.

How could this tiny museum, with few resources and a handful of staff (mostly volunteers), afford to pre-empt bidding against a roomful of avid collectors and public institutions? So few Gertlers come on to the market that a painting can comfortably sell for more than £100,000.

The answer lies in the tenacity of Glasser and his board, together with the remarkable efforts of several public bodies. The National Art Collections Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Resource V&A Purchase Fund worked together to cut through the red tape and secure the cash in less than seven working days. Most Lottery applications take four years; this one came through in a week.