Born in 1891, Bernard Meninsky was central to the great generation of 20th century Anglo-Jewish artists which included Bomberg, Gertler, Kramer and Rosenberg. But he remains perhaps the least known today. Major critical appreciation eluded Meninsky during his lifetime - despite the power of his dark, atmospheric landscapes of the 1920's and 30's, the tenderness of his "mother and child" series and the magic of the visionary, pastoral world of his later years. As John Russell Taylor, art critic of The Times, shows in this first significant study of his life and art, Meninsky has always defied easy classification.

Meninsky has latterly been dubbed a Neo-Romantic, and significantly his work was well represented in the Barbican exhibition A Paradise Lost. And yet even this convenient tag tells only part of the story. The flow and sculptural solidity of his draughtsmanship - and even more the monumentality of his figures in land scape - have more in common with the spirit of Picasso than with the contorted lines of the English Neo-Romantics proper.

Much of Meninsky's life was devoted to teaching, but as a man he was shy, retiring and neurotic. He was a man of many secrets, who finally took his own life at the age of 58. In spite of all this, he had a blazing talent, resolving the torments of his life into an art of elegaic grace and rare visionary power. He was an early friend of Bomberg, Gertler and Epstein, and was praised and recommended by Sickert. He worked with Gordon Craig and was collected by Ivor Novello, and during the Second World War he lived in the Oxford of Tolkein, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. He also went through a complete mental breakdown and came out the other side, his art strengthened and deepened. If finally the darkness closed round him again, his story is its own kind of triumph. And the art endures, to move and delight future generations.