The collection of Jewish and immigrant art at London’s Ben Uri Museum is about to get a vast new audience.

The gallery will be the museum partner for this month’s London Art Fair — an honour only extended to one institution per year.

“It will enable us to talk to 20,000 people in a week whom we might otherwise take two years to reach,” said chair of trustees David Glasser, who is bringing art by Anglo-Jewish greats including David Bomberg and Frank Auerbach to the show, as well as works by artists from Nigeria, India, Turkey, Iran, the US and Europe.

Ben Uri has also been invited to become a member of the World Art Foundations, positioning it alongside great global collections including Maeght, Solomon Guggenheim, J Paul Getty, Henry Moore and Louis Vuitton.

Frank Auerbach, Morning Crescent, Summer Morning II

Frank Auerbach's Mornington Crescent

It is a recognition of the substantial investment and astute acquisitions that have transformed Ben Uri from a Jewish community art society into a museum holding the work of immigrants born in 45 different countries, said Mr Glasser.

Ben Uri was founded in Whitechapel in 1915 by a Russian Jewish émigré to support refugees and other artists working outside the mainstream.

“It has been an often difficult journey to reposition what was an 85-year-old stalwart of the Jewish community from within the community to the centre of the mainstream art museum sector,” said Mr Glasser.

Ben Uri was without a home for six years after closing in 1995 and now has premises in Boundary Road, St John’s Wood.

It has elevated its academic status with a research unit and pioneered digital partnerships with leading institutions, as well as promoting touring exhibitions of prime holdings such as its set of Chagall lithographs, currently on show in Winchester.

Mr Glasser points to a digital partnership with the National Gallery pairing one of Ben Uri’s Auerbach works with the National’s Sunflowers by Van Gogh as another acknowledgement of the quality of the museum’s collection.

David Glasser

David Glasser

Auerbach’s colourful Mornington Crescent landscape will be a star exhibit at the London Art Fair, along with Eva Frankfurther’s painting of West Indian waitresses, which was a poster image for the recent Barbican show of post-war artists working in Britain.

Other striking images include a self-portrait by Isaac Rosenberg in a steel helmet — he died in the First World War -— and a portrait of Orovida Pissarro, granddaughter of the founding Impressionist, by Clara Klinghoffer.

The 30 paintings going to the London fair, which runs from 18 to 22 January at the Business Design Centre in Islington, North London, are highlights of Ben Uri’s 880-strong collection by 380 artists, including Chaim Soutine, Mark Gertler, Jacob Epstein and Sonia Delaunay.

“Ben Uri brings huge credit and recognition to the Jewish community and we hope they are as proud of us as we are to represent them,” said Mr Glasser.