Ha-Ga (Anna Gosławska-Lipińska)

A cartoonist and illustrator, a long-time contributor to ‘Szpilki’, where she published her most characteristic satirical drawings, she was born on 22 October 1915 in Moscow and died on 14 April 1975 in Warsaw.

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Ha-Ga, photo: archive of Zuzanna Lipińska

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Anna Gosławska, as that was her real name, was born as the youngest of three children of Eugenia and Kazimierz Gosławski in Moscow, where she spent her earliest childhood. She grew up in free Poland, where her family returned soon after independence. They settled in Zielonka, near Warsaw. It was then that she met her future husband, Eryk Lipiński, also a satirist, editor and founder of the Warsaw Museum of Caricature, whose family soon moved next door to the Gosławski family, and the boy became friends with Anna’s older brother, Zbyszek.

She studied at Warsaw’s School of Fine Arts (now the Academy of Fine Arts) from 1935 to 1939 in the painting studio of Tadeusz Pruszkowski, a member of Rytm (Rhythm) and Bractwo św. Łukasza (St. Luke’s Brotherhood), who evoked the Baroque masters in his works and was a popular portraitist of political notables. She never formally completed her studies – she took a semester off in her final year, and war broke out a few months later.

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'– I can’t agree to any pre-marital romancing. – Okay. Let me know as soon as you get married.' Anna Gosławska-Lipińska, illustration from the book 'Ha Ha Ha-Ga', published by Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, photo: Eryk Lipiński Museum of Caricature

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Anna Gosławska-Lipińska, rysunek z książki "Ha Ha Ha-Ga", wydawca: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, fot. Muzeum Karykatury im. Eryka Lipińskiego

She made her debut as a student, collaborating with Lipiński, who founded Szpilki (Pins) in late 1935 together with the journalist and Polish Socialist Party activist Zbigniew Mitzner. The new satirical magazine was intended to fill a market niche as a magazine with a distinctly progressive, anti-fascist and anti-Sanation slant. Because of this political character, Szpilki often fell victim in the initial period to cuts by the Sanation movement’s censorship. Ha-Ga began to publish her first drawings in the magazine as early as 1936, during which time an impressive group of other cartoonists, including Bronisław Wojciech Linke and Maja Berezowska, and authors, with Stanisław Jerzy Lec and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński at the forefront, also became associated with the magazine.

Her style was still developing at the time, but she already appeared under her permanent pseudonym, written slightly differently: Ha-ga. She was still far from the peak of her popularity, but she quickly became part of the capital’s artistic and cafe life, making friends with Witold Gombrowicz and Julian Tuwim, among others. Her friendship with the poet began while she was still in high school, when she and her friend Wanda Nebelska wrote him a fan letter and then went to the Banda Theatre to get Tuwim’s autograph. Even after the war, Ha-Ga collaborated with the poet she’d befriended, illustrating several of his works.

She married Lipiński in July 1938. The decision may have been precipitated by practical reasons – as Agata Napiórska, Ha-Ga’s biographer, describes it, Eryk rented his partner’s former room from Gosławska’s mother, as both of them were not making a living, but his mother agreed to let both of them sleep there only after their relationship was formalised. In 1940, Lipiński was caught in a roundup and sent to the Auschwitz death camp in one of the first transports of Polish prisoners. Thanks to Ha-Ga and her visit to the prison on Szucha Avenue, he was released from the camp after a few months. It was not possible to save her father, who was sent to the same camp and died three days after his arrival.

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Cover & illustrations by Anna Gosławska-Lipińska for La Fontaine’s ‘Fables’, Nasza Księgarnia Publishers, 1959, photo reproductions: Dagmara Smolna, Arkadiusz Podstawka / Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu

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Shortly after the war, she and her husband stayed in Częstochowa, where they ran a tailor’s workshop together, then in Kraków, where they lived in the former studio of Olga Boznańska. Finally, they both ended up in Łódź, to which the bulk of artistic life had decamped for a time after 1945 from Warsaw, which had been ruined in the uprising. During this period, in September 1946, the daughter of the Lipińskis, Zuzanna, was born, named in honour of Zuzanna Ginczanka, who was murdered by the Nazis. She and Lipiński remained married until 1962, although they continued working together professionally.

In 1945, Łódź also saw the rebirth of Szpilki, again with Lipiński as editor-in-chief, this time no longer subject to Sanation’s censorship but more cautious – its satire focused mainly on moral issues. For Ha-Ga, however, this was an opportunity to spread her wings. By this time, her distinctive drawing style had fully crystallised, with characters that had big eyes but not over-emphasised physical features, with attention to detail in terms of costumes, objects and scenery. As the artist’s daughter recalled, her style emerged somewhat by accident – Ha-Ga gradually simplified forms, not feeling confident in realistic drawing. In 1947, with the editorial team of Szpilki, the Lipiński family returned to Warsaw, which was being rebuilt.

From 1945, her drawings appeared in the magazine as a regular column, two per issue, under the editorial foreword, gaining great popularity among readers. As Beata Tyszkiewicz recalled:

Her drawings were the hallmark of ‘Szpilki’. Just as in ‘Przekrój’ one always looked first at Zbigniew Lengren’s drawings of Professor Filutek, so in ‘Szpilki’ one looked first at Ha-Ga’s drawings.

Over the following decades, these numbered nearly 4,000.

Ha-Ga occasionally drew political caricatures, though these were rather exceptions. Instead of hitting at the ‘enemies of the regime’, she preferred to look at everyday life, capturing and processing snippets of conversations heard on the street, in cafés or shops, and sometimes situations from her own life. She was more willing to use witty wordplay than vicious satire. Although there was no shortage of female book illustrators in communist Poland, she was one of the few women in satirical circles. ‘She often said that history is written by men and women are not allowed a voice’ – recalled her daughter Zuzanna. However, as Dorota Jarecka wrote, the secondary position of women satirists at the time also had its advantages:

There were many things Ha-Ga did not have to do. This saved her from what most male cartoonists could not avoid – propaganda. Satire in the immediate post-war years was really in a dreadful position.

As Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius has pointed out, her drawings were also proto-feminist. Ha-Ga was not a satirist who excelled in transgressions and playing with moral taboos – her drawings were characterised by subtle, not virulent, humour. Zuzanna Lipińska stated: ‘Ha-Ga’s humour was never aggressive – it was harmless.’ At the same time, the heroes and heroines resembled each other, and female characters were given an identity not by their corporeality but by their clothing. The latter was often remarkably sophisticated for communist Poland, straight out of French fashion magazines, reflecting the aestheticism of the author, who personally attached great importance to her clothes. She kept a stack of Elle magazines on a side table by her bath, and among the things that remained after her death was a silk scarf from Dior. The world of her illustrations is a bit like the world of Éric Rohmer’s films – ordinary, yet highly polished in terms of costumes and interiors, which do as much to define the characters as does the dialogue at the heart of the performances.

The characters in her drawings are not without flaws, of course, as is the case in satire. They can be vain and spiteful, betray partners and slander friends. Yet Ha-Ga depicts human weaknesses and vices with forbearance or even a certain tenderness and does not speak from the position of a harsh moralist. One could identify with her characters instead of finding in them a smarting caricature. And because of the stylistically enhanced world, which had little in common with the communist era and was always full of the most fashionable clothes and modern furniture, one would even like to see one’s own reflection in them. In this respect, Ha-Ga was unique – a satirist who simultaneously exposed the absurdities of interpersonal relationships and created an idealised world.

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The younger generation which gave Szpilki its character in the Gierek era drew in a completely different way, aiming for a blunter, more thickly drawn, non-aestheticised style. When Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz took over the editorial helm of Szpilki in 1970, he brought this young guard of cartoonists – Andrzej Krauze, Andrzej Dudziński and Andrzej Mleczko – into the magazine, in addition to numerous reprints from the foreign press. Apart from Berezowska, who occasionally published her drawings in the magazine, Ha-Ga remained the only representative of the old line-up of Szpilki.

In 1946, she also began occasionally publishing drawings in Przekrój (Cross-Section). From the very beginning, she also cooperated with Świerszczyk (Cricket), a children’s magazine, and was even offered the position of the magazine’s art editor, but she ultimately did not become one. She stopped publishing drawings in Świerszczyk in 1962, when a new generation of illustrators (Józef Wilkoń, Danuta Konwicka and Bohdan Butenko) became part of the magazine that was initially illustrated entirely by Ha-Ga, Lipiński and Olga Siemaszko.

However, it is not certain that this was the reason why the drawings of the still popular artist suddenly disappeared completely. As Agata Napiórska suggests, purely social reasons may have played a role in the end of Ha-Ga’s cooperation with Świerszczyk – the circle of acquaintances of artists associated with the magazine after Ha-Ga and Eryk Lipiński’s divorce split into two camps that year. It is possible that Ha-Ga found herself outside the orbit of the circle deciding on the shape of the magazine, which was still influenced by its former artistic director, Olga Siemaszko, Lipiński’s friend. The parting of ways may also have influenced the smaller number of drawings published in Szpilki at the time, although Ha-Ga continued her collaboration with the magazine to the very end. A pair of her drawings appeared in Szpilki for the last time less than a week after her death.

In addition to satirical drawings, she occasionally worked as an illustrator. Together with Lipiński, she illustrated Jan Brzechwa’s book Opowiedział dzięcioł sowie (The Woodpecker Told the Owl), first published in 1946 by Czytelnik Publishers and also, in praise of the idea of cooperation, put on the screen five years later by Władysław Nehrebecki and the famous Studio Filmów Rysunkowych (Animated Films Studio) in Bielsko-Biała. Also involved in the production of this short animation were Ha-Ga and her husband, who were responsible for the character and set designs. A new edition of the book was published in the late 1960s, this time with fresh illustrations drawn by Ha-Ga alone.

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Poster designed by Ha-Ga, photo: Muzeum Karykatury im. Eryka Lipińskiego / www.muzeumkarykatury.pl

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In the 1950s, she also designed posters, mainly for films, but she did not develop her career in this direction – she made only ten in total. Faced with a dwindling number of press commissions, the artist looked for other ways to earn money. In the mid-1960s, she began creating ceramic animal figurines. She painted the earthenware figurines with gouache and sold them in Desa for small amounts, but she produced a lot. She also made a living by painting botanical postcards of plants from Łazienki Park and designed album covers for the bands Niebiesko-Czarni and Czerwone Gitary. Occasionally, in the last years of her life, she also drew for foreign magazines.

Towards the end of her life, she started to doubt the validity of the career path she had chosen and regretted focusing on a repetitive formula, avoiding artistic risks and the exploration of new areas. Anna Niesterowicz said: ‘Her style of drawing is finesse and a trap – she created a brand so distinctive that she could no longer afford to do anything else’. Agata Napiórska, in turn, wrote:

Ha-Ga worked with the rhythm of an artisan – regularly, piece by piece, for decades she did the same work over and over again. She excelled in her little field. She did not surprise. Only occasionally would she allow herself to take a sideways leap, such as children’s illustration, posters, ceramics, advertisements.

Years later, Ha-Ga’s work was brought to the attention of a new generation of viewers thanks to, among others, the aforementioned Anna Niesterowicz, who, in 2008, together with Zuzanna Lipińska, prepared a monographic exhibition of Ha-Ga at the Museum of Caricature founded by Lipiński and today bearing his name and then co-edited the book Ha Ha Ha-Ga, published on the artist’s 100th birthday.

In February 2023, Agata Napiórska’s biography of the artist, Ha-Ga: Obrazki z życia (Ha-Ga: Images from Life), was published by Marginesy Publishers. The biographer not only discusses the development of Ha-Ga’s work but above all creates a nuanced portrait of her, her family and friendship relations against the background of the pre- and post-war artistic life of Warsaw.

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