‘From the Land of Poland to Schweppshire’: Polish Artists in Great Britain

„Death of Ceasar”, 1970, olej na płótnie, 102 x 153 cm, fot. muzeum.umk.pl, default, 'Death of Ceasar' by Stanisław Frenkiel, 1970, oil on canvas, 102 x 153 cm, photo: muzeum.umk.pl, ‘From the Land of Poland to Schweppshire’: Polish Artists in Great Britain

#photography & visual arts

#visual arts

#photography

Nearly everyone in Poland knows about the Polish artists who lived and worked in France in the 19th and 20th centuries – but the fate of their compatriots on the opposite side of the English Channel is mostly known only to art historians.

That’s a shame, because the Polish community had a rather significant impact on the development of not only painting in the British Isles, but also of... advertising and window dressing! Some artists even gained access to the royal palace.

As the painter Mariusz Bohusz-Szyszko wrote:

Text

We don’t have the Mickiewiczes, the Słowackis, the Krasińskis or the Norwids, but we outshine the ‘great emigration’ in both the quantity and variety of our achievements in many fields of creativity. We also unquestionably surpass the other emigré communities.

Author

Trans. YR

Adam Supruniuk calculates that, between the end of the 19th century and the year 2000, roughly 800 artists either from Poland or of Polish origins were active in the British Isles. It was actually there – and not, as it might seem, in Paris – that the largest, best organised and most diverse Polish creative community flourished. Which doesn’t by any means suggest that it was most appreciated by observers on the banks of the River Wisła.

The long shadow of Paris

Thumbnail — Bus Stop by Halina Korn, ca. 1950, Ben Uri Gallery collection, photo: © Maryla Zulawski

Along the path that led so many migrant Polish artists who were somehow cast by fate onto the shores of Great Britain travels Stanisława de Karłowska. She arrived in England in 1897 along with her husband, the British painter Robert Bevan, whom she had married in Warsaw. The post-impressionist work of de Karłowska was similar to that of the Camden Town Group, which, as a woman, she was not permitted to join. Nonetheless, she became one of the first women to join the London Group, established in 1913.

While most of the 20th-century Polish artists came to Britain fleeing the winds of war, there was a certain common biographical point that linked de Karłowska, the artists of General Anders’ Army and Marek Żuławski, who had arrived in the 1930s. Most of them came to Great Britain for personal reasons or even by accident – and not out of some hope of a promising career, drawn by the lure of artistic fame and famous galleries. Such things were rather to be found across the Channel.

‘After the Second World War, London could not compare in the eyes of Poles with Paris, which had attained and maintained its status as the capital of modernism’, observed Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius. Other artists shared that viewpoint. Halina Korn-Żuławska claimed that ‘every artist wants to have an exhibition in Paris, but Paris is not interested in anything but abstract art’. The road to London ran through Paris.

The mythos of Paris that held fast until the 19th century, obscuring the activity of the British community, gained a new element of political meaning after the war came to an end. It was, after all, in London that the Government-in-Exile of the Polish Republic was situated until the inauguration of Lech Wałęsa as president. For this reason, in the propaganda of the Polish People’s Republic, London played a far greater role than simply that of yet another capital of decadent imperialism. London was always painted in shades of grey (and not the grey of romantic British mists on the moors, but rather that of lung-choking smog) and depicted as overcrowded. It was filled on the one hand with extreme poverty, yet on the other with ostentatious, decadent wealth – and ruled by usurpers entirely detached from reality.

Murawska-Muthesius wrote:

Text

The most scathing caricature of London as a city and as the seat of the Polish diaspora was produced by Jerzy Zaruba, generally known to be an Anglophile. […] His cartoons created an image of Polish London as being inseparably connected with the figure of a loser wedded to a compromised vision of the world – a phony decked out in an old-world tailcoat.

Author

Trans. YR

‘There’s no such city as London. There’s only Lądek, Lądek-Zdrój’ – the famous line from Bareja's film Teddy Bear takes on extra meaning in the context of the relative obscurity of London’s Polish emigré community.

Young (British) Yiddish

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'The Labourer' by Leopold Pilichowski, unknown date, oil on canvas, photo: Wikimedia Commons

Picture image

leopold_pilichowski_the_labourer.jpg

In the latter half of the 19th century, swept along by one of the first waves of Polish migration to the British Isles, many Polish Jews came and settled, chiefly in London’s East End. With time, more and more artists made their presence known.

In 1914, the painter Leopold Pilichowski lived in London. He was a product of the realist tradition of the late 19th century, and he had a textbook education for his time: from the drawing classes of Wojciech Gerson in Warsaw to the Munich Academy and the prestigious private Académie Julian in Paris. His work was typified by scenes of Jewish life – not only that of the pious Hasidim of Eastern Europe’s small towns, but also that of the pioneering settlers in Palestine, which Pilichowski had visited in the 1920s.

The most modern forms were employed, however, not by Pilichowski, but by his wife Lena Pilico, a painter and fabric designer. In consequent generations, genre motifs from the traditional life of the Jews began taking on a more modern look in the works of newer artists. In the 1920s, Isaak Lichtenstein, born in Łódź and co-founder of the Machmadim [Hebrew: Delights] group in Paris – which addressed Jewish themes using contemporary language – passed through England. In his native Łódź, a group with similar ambitions, known as Young Yiddish, was co-founded by Jankiel Adler.

In 1920, Lichtenstein left Łódź for Berlin and – upon the rise to power in Germany of the Nazi Party – moved on to Paris. He experimented with expressionist and cubist forms, collages of various materials, mixed his paints with sand, wax or salt, and began his focus on folkloric and Talmudic themes. When the Nazis displayed his works in their propaganda exhibit entitled Degenerate Art, there was just no need to point out the modernist painter’s ethnic origins.

Adler, serving in the Polish Army, eventually found himself in Scotland where, in January 1941, he was demobilised due to cardiac problems. He settled in Great Britain, where he befriended Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Schwitters and Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. These last dedicated to him the first book published by their publishing house, Gaberbocchus Press. Stefan Themerson writes:

Text

In reproductions of Adler’s old paintings, you can see how there screams out for our attention – before the voice of the painter – the voice of the poet, the musician, the philosopher-scientist standing in wonder upon the frontier of mysticism, a person of conscience, of heart, of scruples and sentiment, a person who cannot forget the society from which he has been torn by fate, the voice of a person who pressurises the painter, shouting, ‘Don’t just remember the colours, lines, textures and composition – remember us, too, the people who remain back here from whence you came, remember us’!

Author

Trans. YR

Survivors

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'The Letter' by Josef Herman, ca. 1940, photo: Flowers Gallery

Picture image

josef_herman_.jpg

In Glasgow, Adler met yet another Polish Jewish painter who arrived with the wartime wave of migrants, Josef Herman. In Glasgow, they both learnt that their entire families (Adler had nine siblings) had perished in the Holocaust. Adler presented Herman with a painting entitled Two Orphans, a grim portrait of two figures with shaven heads, representing the two orphaned artists. Herman also reflected his own experience in his work. In Glasgow in the years 1940 to 1943, he painted a nostalgic series of paintings of scenes of Central European Jewish life reminiscent of the works of Chagall. Some of them, however, come across as exceptionally modern. Etched in a few elegant arcs of almost cartoonish simplicity, the figure of a pensive woman in his work The Letter could readily have come from the brush of a Sanya Kantarovsky. But ominous notes somehow encroach on this otherwise dreamlike nostalgic vision.

Characteristic of this series, perhaps, is the very Chagallesque painting Refugees – bathed in shades of blue, portraying a family of the eponymous refugees amidst the snow-covered roofs of an unidentified town. The painter created this idyllic scene to emphasise only more strongly the fear that underlies it. The black cat that strolls along the rooftops takes on the air of a powerful predator; what would be a common stray instead resembles a large black puma. The mice he has caught, and which lifelessly dangle from his mouth, bleed copiously in the direction of the Jewish family, who are fleeing with their small children and with miserable sacks in their hands. Herman, in his fashion, anticipated the future graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman, in which Jews were portrayed as mice and the Germans as cats.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'The Ghost Town' by Shmuel Dresner, 1982, photo: Ben Uri Collection © Shmuel Dresner

Picture image

shmuel_dresner_the_ghost_town_.jpg

After a few years, Herman finished working through his issues of Jewish identity and memory, and he moved on to London. The nostalgic works of his Scottish period were forgotten for a few decades. The painter began to concentrate instead on painting the people of his new homeland. He painted farmers, fishermen and particularly Welsh coal miners, observed by chance in the almost mystical light of a sunset in the town of Ystradgynlais. He portrayed the miners themselves and also the mining landscape that surrounded them.

In these new paintings, instead of his former shades of blue, Herman employed earth tones accented with deep reds. The figures are coarse, drawn with broken lines and broad splashes of colour. These representations express both extreme toil, as in a Courbet painting, and the almost religious worship of labour as in Millet, blended together in contemporary fashion. The miners become almost mythical heroes, yet the expressionist style of Herman’s canvasses do not at all resemble the naive images of the worker that one might see in socialist-realist portrayals.

In the work of other artists, the experiences of the war and the Holocaust appeared in both metaphorical and literal forms even many decades later. During the 1970s, Josef Karpf created his sculpture Auschwitz -– a shapeless mass of tangled bodies without discernible individual features. By means of a collage of burnt pages, Shmuel Dresner, who at the time of the war was still a child, told the tale of his wartime experiences. He arrived in Great Britain amongst a group of several hundred child survivors rescued from the concentration camps in the closing days of the war.

Fear, longing and grief radiate from the canvas of Alida Melamed Adams, born in Drohobycz in 1937, the last living student of Bruno Schulz – who had been living in Great Britain from 1948 to the present day.

Uniforms & easels

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'Tears' by Alicia Melamed-Adams, 1993, photo: Ben Uri Collection © Alicia Melamed-Adams

Picture image

alicia_melamed-adams_tears.jpg

During the war, various groups of Polish artists arrived in Great Britain. Some came at their own initiative through Western European countries; others were evacuated from France in 1940 or, in later years, from POW and labour camps. There were also those who come to England in 1946, wearing uniforms as members of the First Armoured Division of General Stanisław Maczek or the Second Army Corps of General Władysław Anders – having taken a long, arduous journey from the USSR through Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt and Italy.

The government-in-exile also invested in artistic propaganda, and in the years 1941 to 1943, a travelling exhibition sponsored by the Ministry of Information wound its way through cities, towns and military bases throughout Great Britain. It featured the work of five Polish artists serving in the Tenth Armoured Cavalry Brigade stationed in Scotland: Aleksander Żyw, Zygmunt Haupt, Antoni Wasilewski, Stanisław Mikuła, and Andrzej Wart (Bunsch).

Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, photo: St Christopher Hospice

Without waiting for the courses and schooling offered by the Polish Resettlement Corps, the artists serving in Anders’ Army renewed their artistic studies while still in Italy. In the Soldiers’ Home in the Cecchignoli barracks outside Rome, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko began educating soldier-artists. He was the chief of the arts section of the Department of Culture of the Second Polish Army Corps and the very embodiment of its didactic mission. Not only did he have several years of lecturing at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts behind him, but he also taught courses in painting and mathematics in the POW camp at Choszczno, where he was interned in late September 1939. He continued teaching upon arriving in Britain, the last stop in the journey of Anders’ Army prior to demobilisation. Amongst the rather large group of Polish artists active in London in the 1960s, his students constituted the majority.

In Bohusz-Szyszko’s own work, the tradition of colourism intersected with the experience of war which cannot be ignored, evolving in the direction of expressive exaggeration and distortion. Particularly in his works with biblical motifs, a broad palette of intensive and bright shades of colour combines with a rough texture and the expressive lengthening and morphing of the figures. The interweaving of colouristic sensitivity straight out of the style of Bonnard – a favourite of the Kapist school – with the existential angst of expressionism also flowing noticeably through the works of Bohusz-Szyszko’s students.

Between the throne & the altar

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'The History of the Old Kent Road' by Adam Kossowski, 1965, fragment, photo: Caroline Findlay

Picture image

adam_kossowski_the_history_of_the_old_kent_road.jpg

In the case of Adam Kossowski, his wartime experience affected his later art in a somewhat different way. Arrested by the NKVD – the Soviet secret police – and interned in a Soviet labour camp, Kossowski made an unwritten pact with God. He vowed to dedicate himself to religious art – if only he could make it to freedom. He kept his word. As soon as 1944, upon being released and arriving in the UK, he first produced a series of ‘journalistic’ gouaches portraying his wartime fate. But in later years, he worked primarily in churches rather than in galleries. He developed a characteristic style of ceramic bas-reliefs similar in form to Romanesque art. From time to time, he accepted secular commissions, including what was arguably the most spectacular work of his career: a ceramic mosaic presenting the history of London’s Old Kent Road, from Roman times to the modern era.

Ryszard Demel, already studying in London when Kossowski arrived, resuscitated another long-dormant branch of religious art – stained glass. One of his first commissions was the reconstruction of a mediaeval stained-glass window in St Etheldreda’s Church in Ely Place, London. Although, in the mid-20th century, stained glass might have seemed a craft banished to museum collections, Demel soon moved beyond historical forms and develops his own technique, which he called ‘refractive mosaics’. Rather than cutting out flat pieces of glass, he exhibited slices of glass in cross-section, building compositions in graphic fashion out of hundreds of tiny coloured pixels. The cut and broken edges of glass break up the light, which enters them in many ways. Inspiration struck him by accident as he gazed upon a pile of coloured glass sheets lying across his studio floor:

Text

[The glass] was lying there in sheets, one sheet piled on the other, alongside a window through which the sun was shining. The light passed through the multiple layers of glass, through the entire thickness of the stack and came out the other side enriched, more intense, and with hues far more beautiful than those displayed by light that passed through a single pane of glass.

Author

Trans. YR

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'Rain after the Coronation' by Feliks Topolski, 1959, oil on fibreboard, 120x181,5 cm, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

Picture image

feliks_topolski_mnw_mpw35.jpg

While the artists who arrived in Britain with Anders’ Army often worked on commissions from churches and Polish cultural institutions, Feliks Topolski – one of the few Polish artists (other than Marek Żuławski) living in Britain since the mid-1930s – accepted commissions from members of the Royal Family. Thanks to his wife, Marion Everall, he met, amongst others, George Bernard Shaw; in 1938, he illustrated Shaw’s Pygmalion. Much like the fictional Professor Higgins, who introduced the impoverished flower girl Eliza to the elegant salons of London in the tale which would later come to the silver screen in 1964 as My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn, Shaw opened the doors of British upper-class salons to the Polish-born Topolski. Soon after, members of the Royal Family and other prominent members of society could be counted amongst the artist’s clients. At the request of Prince Philip himself, Topolski painted the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II for Buckingham Palace.

The image of the Queen also appears in Topolski’s magnum opus – Memoir of the 20th Century – a series of monumental acrylic paintings portraying key figures and events of the 20th century. Amongst them is the bombardment of the English capital. Unlike other Polish artists, who were interned in Soviet labour camps or on the front lines somewhere deep in Europe at the time of the Battle of Britain, Topolski actually watched the bombardment of London from the perspective of a city resident. After one of those bombardments on a May evening in 1941, Topolski was injured and ended up in hospital for several days. As a journalist-artist for the Illustrated London News, he documented the course of the war, travelling to Egypt, Syria, China, India and elsewhere.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'Shrinking Travel Time' by George Him, photo: a poster for American Overseas Airlines 1948 © The Estates of George Him / Jan Le Witt

Picture image

shrinking_travel_time_kopia.jpg

Polish artists also worked for the Polish Government-in-Exile. Posters for the government were designed by, amongst others, the stellar graphic-arts duo Lewitt-Him, who worked in London starting in 1937. In the 1930s, they won great popularity back in Poland for their illustrations for Julian Tuwim’s volume of poems for children; they also designed an iconic cover for the poetry journal Skamander (April-June 1937), which employs a play on words comparing the titular river, Skamander, with the word ‘skafander’ (a diving bell). After two decades together, the artists decided to start solo careers. In the 1950s, George Him (né Jerzy Himmelfarb) created the extraordinarily popular advertising campaign for the Schweppes beverage company – ‘County of Schweppshire’ – which was in use for over a dozen years.

The pharmacist, Mondrian & the centaur

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'Swimming Pool' by Marek Żuławski, 1982, photo: The Tatra Museum

Picture image

Marek Żuławski, "Basen / Swimming Pool", 1982, fot. Muzeum Tatrzańskie

But the other 800 or so Polish artists in London didn’t get commissions from the Prince, nor could they realistically expect lucrative commercial orders. So Polish artists quickly joined forces and created several self-help organisations. The idea of creating a Union of Polish Artists in Great Britain arose in the mind of Piotr Potworowski while the war was yet underway (the Association of Polish Graphic Artists in Great Britain was ultimately established in 1957). In 1949, Grupa 49, a group connected more by social ties than by programmatic principles, was formed, gathering together – for the most part – former students of Bohusz-Szyszko. The group existed for a decade and held its final exhibition in the then-newly established Grabowski Gallery.

The Grabowski Gallery was one of a small number of exhibit spaces managed by Polish emigrés who popped up on the London arts scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Its founder, Mateusz Grabowski, was a pharmacist from Poland. The gallery in Chelsea was not, in his case, a for-profit enterprise. On the contrary, rather than making a profit from the gallery, Grabowski pumped income from his pharmacies and his export business sending medications to Poland into his gallery. Thanks to that fact, he gained tremendous symbolic capital and he could permit himself an unfettered freedom of experimentation.

As in the case of other leading galleries set up by Poles at that time, the Grabowski Gallery was not a Polish community gallery per se, although it significantly supported fellow Poles; the work of Polish artists constituted only about one-third of its collections. Amongst those were works both by Polish emigré artists and by artists living in Poland. Amongst the artists exhibiting at the Grabowski Gallery were the likes of Henryk Stażewski, Wojciech Fangor or Magdalena Abakanowicz. Grabowski also tried to pierce the iron curtain that divided the artist community in Poland itself from that in the Polish diaspora. In 1964, the gallery organised an exhibit entitled Two Worlds – the first exhibition bringing together the work of Polish artists in Poland and in Britain.

British art critics took note of the exhibition and reviewed it favourably. Although it became a major cultural event, that fact turned out to have no commercial impact whatsoever. Not a single painting was sold. Potential Polish collectors simply weren’t interested in Polish artists – of whom there was no shortage in London. Stanisław Frenkiel wrote in frustration:

Text

It’s been calculated recently that Polish organisations in metropolitan London possess capital of about one million pounds, including restaurants, bars and conference halls. There are at least ten buildings with large auditoriums decorated with conventional junk: uninspired graphics, coats of arms, panoramas of lost cities […] portraits of highlanders smoking pipes and similar exemplars of folk kitsch. One can count on the fingers of one hand the number of artworks in such locales that have actually been purchased from contemporary artists. […] Meanwhile, there are truly worthy artists in London who are living in dark holes lit only with gas lamps, washing dishes in restaurants or nightclubs or painting railroad cars, artists whose work no one appreciates except for their closest friends.

Author

Trans. YR

The pharmacist and gallery owner, however, was also interested in what was new and exciting on the British art scene. In the early 1960s, that meant pop art and new forms of geometric abstraction. It was here that some of the first exhibits of op art took place; the British pop art star Pauline Boty also had her first solo exhibit at the Grabowski Gallery.

The Grabowski Gallery functioned until 1975. Its end was brought about by the gallery owner’s personal tragedy: the death of his son, the painter Andrzej Grabowski. Stanisław Frenkiel says that the gallery was closed ‘out of grief’. And a year later, Mateusz Grabowski himself died.

In 1957, the Drian Gallery opened. It was founded by Halima Nałęcz (née Halina Maria Nowhońska), a painter born in the Vilnius area who came to Great Britain with Anders’ Army. The name of the gallery was not – as is customary – taken from the name of the owner, but rather from the name of... the painter Piet Mondrian, of whom Nałęcz was a great fan. This was also a program statement: geometric abstraction was the apple of Nałęcz’s eye.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

'Tom O’Shanter', ca. 2000, oil on canvas, 91 x 121,5 cm, photo: muzeum.umk.pl

Picture image

„Tom O’Shanter”, ok. 2000, olej na płótnie, 91 x 121,5 cm, fot. muzeum.umk.pl

London’s third most important Polish gallery was also established by a painter from the Vilnius area, who arrived in Britain during wartime as an officer of the Polish Air Force. The Centaur Gallery was established by Jan Wieliczko and his British wife, Dinah Wieliczko. Its program was exceptionally diverse. While painting was the most prominent element in its collection, the gallery also featured folk art, design, and haute couture.

On the gallery scene, the London community anticipated events in People’s Poland by a decade. In Poland, there were, of course, the now-legendary Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, Pod Mona Lisa in Wrocław and Krzysztofory in Kraków. But under the conditions of a centrally planned economy, there was no chance of maintaining private commercial galleries – such galleries could open only after the economy was loosened up in 1977, with Piotr Nowicki’s Gallery of Modern Art.

When, in the Third Polish Republic, the most important contemporary galleries developed, such as the Foksal Gallery Foundation or the Raster gallery, at that same time, the era of Polish galleries in London was drawing to a close. It came to a symbolic ending with the turn of the millennium, when Halima Nałęcz locked the door of the Drian Gallery for the very last time in the year 2000.

Written by Piotr Policht, Feb 2021, translated by Yale Reisner, Apr 2021

Sources: 'Spojrzenie Zimnowojennego Podróżnika: Szkicownik Londyński Jana Lenicy z 1954 r.' by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, 'Pamiętnik Sztuk Pięknych', vol. 9 (2015), p. 69-76; 'From Adler to Żuławski: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain', Ben Uri Research Unit (London 2020); '"Trwałość i Płynność": Sztuka Polska w Wielkiej Brytanii w XX Wieku - Wstęp do Opisu' by Mirosław Adam Supruniuk", Archiwum Emigracji : studia, szkice, dokumenty", nr. 1-2 (7-8) (2006), p. 127-159; 'Co drugi dzień wernisaż: polskie wydarzenia artystyczne w Wielkiej Brytanii w roku 1959’ by Mirosław Adam Supruniuk, "Archiwum Emigracji : studia, szkice, dokumenty", nr 1-2 (12-13) (2010), p. 187-241; 'Zmierzch polskich galerii sztuki w XX-wiecznym Londynie' by Jan Wiktor Sienkiewicz, "Roczniki Humanistyczne", vol. XLVIII-XLIX (2000-2001), z. 4, p. 277-301; 'Podróż ku światłu. Ryszard Demel − ostatni artysta generała Władysława Andersa' by Jan Wiktor Sienkiewicz, "Niepodległość i Pamięć", nr 25/2 (62) (2018) p. 139-160; 'Pamiętniki Feliksa Topolskiego' by Monika Szczygieł-Gajewska, "Sztuka Europy Wschodniej", vol. 3, (2015), p. 357-364

Language English

Polish visual artist

polish art abroad

polish culture in great britain

polish emigre culture