Airbrushed from Art History referred both to Polish Symbolism and to the sacrum period in Polish Art but there is a further aspect of Polish Art which can be considered, Polish painters in Post-War Britain as documented by Douglas Hall in his book Art In Exile.
Hall writes that the number of displaced artists from Poland coming to Britain as exiles from war and persecution before or after 1939 was perhaps greater than from any other country. In Art In Exile he tells the stories of ten such artists as well as giving reviewing the context from which they came and their reception in England and Scotland. As a result, there are also links to my post on Exiles, Migrations and Orientalism. Hall writes that:
"Recent critical orthodoxy in this country still has little respect for the expression of the individual’s life experience, philosophy or psychic state, since it places an overwhelming emphasis on generational or supposed communal values. To remember the exiles is to be reminded that other nations have permitted or encouraged a greater personal involvement and responsibility on the part of the individual artist. In a sense this book is an exercise in what David Jones called ‘anamnesis’, the constant need to remember what we are and were. Since the present order puts little value on the art of the day before yesterday, the book is first of all an attempt to keep alive, revive or reinforce some reputations, but even more importantly it is to remind ourselves, through the experience of the exiles among us, that there have been other ways of feeling, other ways of understanding history, other ways of using creative ability for other expressive purposes."
Among those featured in the book is Marian Bohusz-Szyszko who had been teaching Polish servicemen in Rome to paint prior to his arrival in Britain in 1947:
"Bohusz-Szyszko immediately set about creating the conditions in which he could continue his teaching mission, at first in a reception camp, later at various addresses in London and finally at the St Christopher Hospice at Sydenham. The classes became known as the Polish School of Painting, and were eventually taken under the wing of The Polish University Abroad. The relatively younger artists, including [Stanislaw] Frenkiel, founded in 1948 the Young Artists Association … A group calling themselves Group 49 took its place a year later and mainly consisted of pupils of Bohusz-Szyszko … In 1955, with Polish artists beginning to be more successful commercially, a society was formed with the neutral title of The Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain (APA) … Although APA was intended to be a broad church, the pupils of Marian Bohusz were still the most important element. The spiritual intensity of Bohusz’s work … was almost impossible to pass on to others, and without it the overall impression of APA is of a conservative body whose members had little desire to rock any boats. [Henryk] Gotlib and [Zdzislaw] Ruszkowski were early members, but dropped out. Frenkiel stayed the course and was for a time Secretary; his work, unique in any context, stands out even more sharply in this one."
"Bohusz-Szyszko, the Catholic, found release in a search for transcendence, which he achieved with a devotional bounty of paint parallel, only, to Expressionism." "You will not find the name Marian Bohusz-Szyszko in any history of modern art, under the heading of Expressionism, or any other. Perhaps more than any other artist in this book Bohusz demonstrates that the most emphatic artistic personality is not enough by itself to commend notice … Sadly it seems that Bohusz’s religious visions did blind the art world of his time to the extraordinary quality of his work."
"The very last visitor to an exhibition of his work at the Drian Gallery in 1963 was Doctor Cicely Saunders, who was then in process of creating what became the St Christopher’s Hospice at Sydenham. Dr Saunders was struck by the spiritual depth and intensity of the work, and immediately bought a painting, Christ Calming the Waters, with the intention of placing it in the chapel of the Hospice. She wrote to the artist to enquire about its origins, and from that exchange of letters began a relationship with the late Dr (later Dame) Saunders and the Hospice movement which lasted until his death. The Hospice, open to all but conducted with the ideal in mind of a contemplative and spiritual Christianity, provided a focus for Buhusz’s own inclinations. Over the years after the opening of St Christopher’s Hospice in 1967, a growing number of his paintings found their proper place there until there are now over eighty. About ten years later he was officially recognised as artist-in-residence and provided with a studio where he continued to teach students at the weekends. His marriage to Dame Cicely in 1980 sealed the relationship with the Hospice, and it was there that, in his 94th year, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko died on 23 January 1995."
Henryk Gotlib’s "Polish Triptych is a work of imagination and exists on a plane of its own, intended by Gotlib to transcend the limitations both of traditional history and religious painting and of modern art, employing aspects of both." The subject of his Crucifixion "was suggested to him by an unexpected view of one of his own paintings which was already almost completed, and which he then converted into its present form. But if he did not originally intend it, he was open to a vision of it. Gotlib was not a believer and his Crucifixion does not have a standard iconography. Christ hangs forward from an ill-defined cross against a jagged mountain, his head wreathed not in thorns but in white … In The Holy Man … the hermit … Thin … sits naked on the ground, his hands between his knees, his head in its mass of black hair thrust down on his hunched shoulders … at the outset of his late period … Gotlib’s introspection … focused his mind on mortality. The great monument to this mood is Rembrandt in Heaven … Rembrandt is … brought before … the suffering Christ, naked and weary, wearing a vast crown of thorns which somehow echoes Rembrandt’s cap. It is the same crown of thorns that the Christ-like figure in the Warsaw triptych wore, a figure modelled by Gotlib himself."
In 1960 Alexander Zyw began a new phase of his work turning "to the study of small insignificant fragments of nature that were in no way already pictorial .. In the process the materiality of the original object gave way to an intangible presence so lightly painted as to seem almost breathed on the canvas." From 1967 - 72 Zyw worked on a nature cycle using the elements of water, air and fire. The last element he addressed was fire in the form of a meteor and for this he used a pebble "which showed signs of being created, like the meteor, by extreme heat or pressure, being penetrated by deep holes":
"the pebble of Meteor was intensely anthropomorphic, for its deep holes suggested the cavities and orifices of a skull … A friend and patron, who must have seen the way the work was going, offered to commission a Crucifixion triptych, intending the usual iconography of Crucifixion, Deposition and Ascension. By his own account, Zyw went back to his studio, looked at a large red Meteor canvas, and saw a huge head of Christ … Zyw never painted a Crucifixion in a direct way, but adopting the meteor subject was a solution to the project for a triptych, which he realised between 1981 and 1986 … After the Meteor sequence and its sequel the triptych, Zyw felt one more metamorphosis well up from his imagination. This was the subject he called Fiat Lux (let there be light) … Giovanni Cavazzini suggests that Fiat Lux is the final yielding by Zyw to a spiritual, even religious tension that had been evident for some time, and this permitted him to find in this pebble ‘the dawn of the world’."
Stanislaw Frenkiel met Georges Rouault in Paris and was influenced by his "earlier works in watercolour and graphic media" from which he learned "the religious significance":
"of … outcasts of society, the abused as well as their abusers, whom Rouault portrayed with equal ruthlessness as if equally corrupted in the flesh, but all holding out the possibility of redemption and regeneration. The lesson was not lost on the young man with a well developed knowledge of the flesh and the consequences of its vulnerability. The sense of the dual nature of fleshly existence remained with him always, and was the driving force behind his mature work."
"What Anthony Dyson calls ‘Frenkiel’s essential preoccupation with making the ordinary extraordinary’ had been with him almost from the beginning." "Lawrence Bradshaw assessed Frenkiel … as ‘an actor-producer, who invents his own dramas, selects his own cast and creates his own happenings’."
"All his work is imbued with the concept of original sin and redemption":
"As a Roman Catholic he realised that the central mystery of his faith was God’s will to re-unite divided humanity by the act of redemption … For Frenkiel the sinful part of humanity had a positive value; being a sinner himself, he took comfort in the belief that Catholicism was the religion of sinners. ‘In order to be forgiven, you have to sin,’ as he once unguardedly put it. He often made use of expressions like ‘the spirituality of sensory experience’ or ‘the legitimacy of desire’. He had no time for the Protestant fear of contamination, comparing it to an artist’s not wanting to get his hands dirty, whereas he himself revelled in the sensual satisfaction of handling paint and being ‘contaminated’ by it. All this is the background both to Frenkiel’s unconstrained Expressionism and his joyful and not so joyful depictions of erring humanity, mainly female. His views were not a smokescreen for voyeurism as a cynic might suggest. ‘The crux of all that I have been trying to do is to find some kind of saving element in disgrace,’ he told Dyson."
Marek Zulawski’s Christ of Belsen:
"shows the emaciated body of Christ lying across the whole width of the canvas, at the foot of the cross of which only the base is seen. He lies on a white cloth, the sky is red, there is nothing else. The brushmarks are hard and angular. In the aftermath of war or horrific events there are broadly two directions artists may take in order to cope (other than to ignore it, as many do): the gritty depiction of horror, though never gritty enough, or the expression of emotion through the veil of abstraction. The Christ of Zulawski forcibly drives a path between these extremes. It is realist in as far as its subject is unequivocal, the feelings it is meant to evoke unequivocally plain, mesmerising in its intensity, yet formalised and hauntingly beautiful … Eleven years Zulawski later took … this stylisation of agony to a high pitch in a number of paintings of Ecce Homo."
Finally, Adam Kossowski did the greater part of his work "for the purposes of the Roman Catholic Church" as for twenty-five years "he worked at the Carmelite Priory at Aylesford in Kent, making mainly reliefs in painted ceramic."
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The Holmes Brothers - Pledging My Love.
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