Franciszka & Stefan Themerson (The Themersons)

She – a painter, set designer, illustrator, he – a writer, poet, composer. Artists and filmmakers. Together they created films that were a milestone in the development of Polish avant-garde cinematography, ran the Gaberbocchus Press publishing house in post-war exile and organised an international artistic community around themselves.

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Franciszka & Stefan Themerson, photo: Wikimedia.org

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Franciszka Themerson was born on 28 June 1907 in Warsaw into an artistic family – her mother, Łucja Kaufman, and sister, Maryla Chaykin, were pianists, and her father, Jakub Weinles, was a painter. Franciszka first studied at the conservatory and later, between 1924 and 1931, at the Academy of Fine Arts (back then known as the School of Fine Arts).

Stefan Themerson was born on 25 January 1901 in Płock. He was the son of the physician and social activist Mieczysław Themerson and Ludwika Themerson. He spent World War I with his family in Russia. In 1928, he moved to Warsaw to study – initially he studied physics, which he later abandoned in favour of architecture.

They met in 1929 and married two years later. What brought them together was their interest in avant-garde filmmaking, a field that, at the time, was a field for formal experimentation on the borderline between art and engineering.

They made five films together between the wars – for years it was thought that only the last of these, The Life of a Good Man (1937), had survived. About the others, only some information was available from which we can partly imagine them. The Themersons’ first film was The Pharmacy, made in 1930. It lasted four minutes; it was while making this film that the Themersons developed their famous technique. They placed objects on tracing paper on a special table and then filmed them from underneath using positive film. This method was a modified version of the pre-existing photogram technique, until then only used in photography. Themerson endearingly recalled the first public showing of the film:

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Someone asked: ‘and what are these water drops doing on the screen?’ I didn’t know how to speak when I have nothing to say. I had nothing to say about the drops, so I kept quiet. Then it was considered that I was conceited. I was not conceited. I was unashamedly a young provincial boy who knew what he wanted, but fortunately was completely unaware of the huge obstacles that were piling up around him.

The second film was Europe (1932), a screen adaptation of a poem written by Anatol Stern. The poet recalled his first meeting with Themerson, during which the young artist proposed that Europe should be transferred to the screen:

Naturally, I accepted the proposal with easily understandable enthusiasm. To encounter this kind of proposal in a country that considered the experimental films of René Clair, Man Ray and Buñuel to be faddish and miraculous – was a wonderful, heartening surprise. We discussed the film script. Then Stefan and Franciszka Themerson brought me the finished script. I made almost no corrections to it; frankly, I was so exasperated that I could not even afford to be critical of the Themersons’ work. I was well acquainted with the thorny path of the creators of new art in Poland.

Screenings of this film were supplemented by declamations of Stern’s poem or gramophone music. It was lost during World War II, although the Themersons, at the request of Józef Robakowski, reconstructed its cutting list in the 1970s. Europe was found in 2019 [sic!] in the Berlin Bundesarchiv by the Pilecki Institute. A public screening took place in April 2020 at Tate Modern.

In 1933, Drobiazg Melodyjny [A Melodic Trifle] was made – a commercial that the Themersons made for a leather-ware company. The commercial was soundtracked and was shown in cinemas before screenings. In 1935 they made Short Circuit, commissioned by the Institute of Social Affairs. Today we would call it a social campaign – the Themersons’ film was meant to warn male and female viewers of the dangers of using electricity. The music for the film was composed by Witold Lutosławski.

The Themersons’ last pre-war film, The Adventure of a Good Citizen, was made in 1937. In this, as the filmmakers called it in the subtitle, 'irrational humoresque’, the title character accidentally overhears a sentence addressed to two men carrying a wardrobe (this motif would be used 19 years later by Roman Polański in his etude): ‘There won’t be a hole in heaven if you walk backwards’, which prompts him to start a walking tour, backwards of course. The music for the film was composed by Stefan Kisielewski.

American artist Bruce Checefsky has reconstructed The Pharmacy and A Melodic Trifle – the results of his work can be seen in the film library of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

In 1935, together with filmmakers who had previously been associated with the Start group, which was dissolved by the authorities, they founded the Film Authors’ Cooperative, which also included Wanda Jakubowska, Aleksander Ford and Stanisław Wohl. The Themersons also edited the trilingual magazine f.a, published in Polish, French and English and devoted to artistic film.

The couple did not limit their joint activities to film alone; together they also created children’s books. Simplifying, one could say that Stefan wrote them and Franciszka illustrated them. However, as Adriana Prodeus, author of a biography of the Themersons, pointed out in an interview by Jakub Majmurek for Krytyka Polityczna:

These were not simply illustrations. For the Themersons, the book was artistically a unity. A graphic text. The text, the typography, the illustrations were as important as the word. Yes, Franciszka did illustrations for other books, for example Dancing with a Needle and Thread by Brzechwa or Flammarion’s publications, but this was a commisional activity. When they went to France and then to England, that’s what they mainly did for a living. Their own books – not only for children but also for adults – were a visual and textual whole.

At the end of 1937, the Themersons moved to Paris. World War II found them there. After its outbreak, Franciszka began working as an illustrator and cartographer for the Polish Government in Exile – this enabled her to go to London in 1940. Stefan was drafted into the army; he managed to join his wife in 1942. Their two-year separation is documented in the book Niewysłane Listy. Listy, Dzienniki, Rysunki, Dokumenty. 1940-1942 [Unsent Letters: Letters, Diaries, Drawings, Documents. 1940-1942].

In 1943, they made Calling Mr. Smith in England, an experimental poetic-documentary film intended to draw England’s eyes to the horrors of war taking place in Poland. British censors forced changes on the filmmakers – among other things, a shot showing a young girl hanging from a gallows was deemed too shocking. Two years later, in 1945, they made their last film, The Eye and the Ear, an attempt to translate four of Karol Szymanowski’s five songs Słopiewnie (Opus 46 bis) to words by Julian Tuwim into film language.

In 1948 they founded Gaberbocchus Press, a publishing house whose name was a reference to the word ‘Jabberwocky’ invented by Lewis Carroll, which was also the title of one of his novels. Over the 31 years of its existence, they published more than 60 books, including Bertrand Russell, Raymond Queneau, Anatole Stern and Themerson himself. Their most famous work was Alfred Jarry’s Ubu the King, published in English for the first time, with which Françoise was very fascinated – she designed the costumes and set design for the staging directed by Michael Meschke at Stockholm’s Marionetteatern in 1964, and in turn her comic strip Ubu, based on the famous play, was published in 1970.

In 1957, the Common Room was established – a regular meeting place for artists, scientists, intellectuals, where readings, presentations of literary works, concerts, exhibitions and discussions took place. As with their pre-war activities in Poland, the Themersons felt perfectly at home in the role of organisers and animators; they preferred to create new groups on their own terms rather than join existing ones.

In addition to this, Françoise produced paintings, drawings, designed sets and costumes (in addition to the aforementioned Ubu the King, she also produced Brecht’s Threepenny Opera for the Marionetteatern), and taught at Bath Academy of Art and Wimbledon School of Art. She described her paintings as bi-abstract; as she explained in a 1957 Common Room lecture, ever since she had finished her formal training, she had continually tried to find her own visual language. She was not keen on expressionism or abstract expressionism. Eventually, she developed a painting style that she herself called bi-abstractionism. As the artist herself recounted, it began when she decided to include in her paintings... gentlemen in bowler hats – the representatives of the English upper class she had met while emigrating:

And then something strange happened. My gentlemen in bowler hats started to change. They started to forget about their bowler hats, about being important. They stopped being funny. Here and there they dared to show after themselves that they were capable of suffering. They stopped being gentlemen – they became men, and sometimes women. They were no longer ashamed to express fears or worries, and did so without an expressionistic intrusion into the audience’s feelings.

Source: readings from F. Themerson, Obrazy Bi-abstrakcyjne, trans. K. Kopcińska

In the same reading, Themerson described how pleased she was when one critic called her paintings ‘white contemporary cave paintings’.

Stefan, on the other hand, was involved in writing. He started already in the 1930s with children’s books. During his wartime separation from Franciszka, he also wrote poems (published in 1943 in the volume Dno Nieba [The Bottom of Heaven]). After arriving in London, he initially collaborated with émigré publications, publishing, among other things, in the monthly magazine Nowa Polska, edited by Antoni Słonimski, the short story Bayamus, czyli Teatr Poezji Semantycznej [Bayamus: The Theatre of Semantic Poetry] in 1946.

It was in this text that the concept of ‘semantic poetry’, with which Themerson is still associated today, emerged. As Paulina Matysiak wrote:

It [semantic poetry] stemmed partly from experiments in typography […] and partly from the critique of meanings and the semantic analyses carried out. The concept aimed to strive for precision and clarity of expression, a return to the original meanings of words. Ultimately, this led to the replacement of words with their dictionary definitions and to a non-linear layout. Semantic Poetry is ‘a kind of writing poetry in words stripped of all connotative halos, taken as straightforwardly as provided by the dictionary.

P. Matysiak, Przestrzeń Nie(o)pisana. Stefana Themersona Strategia Artystyczna

He began writing his first novel, Professor Mmaa's Lecture, in 1942. It was eventually published in 1953 in English, of course by Gaberbocchus Press. It is a philosophical tale in which Themerson looks at the human race from the perspective of ... termites. The writer himself prepared the English translation, the foreword was in turn written by the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wrote about the book:

It is firm, full of expression, panache and virulent humour. I cannot promise the reader that he or she will tear their sides off laughing, but I can promise them the tart pleasure of analysing nonsense.

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Stefan Themerson in front of a painting by Franciszka Themerson, photo courtesy of the CCA Warsaw

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Themerson made contact with the English philosopher by post, sending him his texts. The correspondence quickly developed into a private acquaintance. The Polish artist remained under the intellectual influence of Russell, to whom he wrote (even before they met in person): ‘Long ago your books became a part of me, as an element sometimes invigorating and sometimes driving me mad’.

In his later work, Themerson followed the path he had set for himself when he wrote Professor Mmaa's Lecture – he subjected the genre of the philosophical poem to transformations, either by seriously addressing the problems of the field or by lightlymocking it. Just as the Lecture... remained a full-blooded novel thanks to its compelling, carefully constructed world of termites, in his other books Themerson also combined philosophical considerations with humorous plot.

Themerson wrote some of his works in English – he was fascinated by the possibilities offered by creating in a foreign language. Tom Harris, The Mystery of the Sardine and Hobson’s Island were published in Polish in translations by Ewa Krasińska, Irena Szymańska and Ewa Kraskowska, respectively. In turn, Cardinal Pölätüo and Professor Mmaa's Lecture were translated into English by Themerson himself. Almost all of Themerson’s books were published in England by Gaberbocchus Press. The exceptions are the last two novels, The Mystery of the Sardine and Hobson’s Island, which were published by Faber and Faber.

As Marcin Giżycki, co-curator of Themerson Days, said in an interview with Szum Magazine:

The entirety of Themerson’s writing [...] is one great moral treatise. The motif of decent behaviour and a kind of ethics of nature [...] appears not only [...] in his essays, but also, or perhaps above all, in his novels. The message is essentially simple, while the form is remarkable.

In 1972, Themerson also composed the seminal opera Saint Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. Its libretto and score is, as one might expect from Themerson, an intermedia collage of diverse elements.

The Themersons died in London in 1988 – Franciszka in June, Stefan in September. The guardian of their legacy is Jasia Reichardt, an art historian and curator as well as niece of Franciszka. Arranged by her and volunteers, the Themersons’ archive was purchased by the National Library and found its way to Poland in 2015.

Translated by Patryk M. Grabowski

Sources:

Janusz Lachowski, Anatol Stern i Stefan Themerson. O Europie, a także przyjaźni dwóch awangardzistów na podstawie ich korespondencji wzajemnej z lat 1959–1968, Rocznik Biblioteki Narodowej, 2015, TOME XLVI, p. 269-288;

Themersonowie. Pies wykłada historię sztuki, interview by Jakub Majmurek with Adriana Prodeus, Krytyka Polityczna;

Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, catalogue of the exhibition organized by the Art Museum in Łódź, 1982;

Notatki do krótkiej opowieści o życiu i twórczości Themersonów;

Themersonowie – film i opowieść, Małgorzata Sady, Konteksty 1:97-102;

Podstawianie nogi, Karolina Iwaszkiewicz and Adam Pluszka, Dwutygodnik;

Interview with Marcin Giżycki, co-curator of Themerson Days in Warsaw, Szum Magazin

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