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Friday 5 December 2008

Art in Exile: Polish Painters in Post-War Britain

Poles apart

John McEwan on Douglas Hall's new book

The artists who integrated most successfully are consequently the better known: Jankel Adler (1895-1949) and Josef Herman (1911-2000). Both were Jews, which possibly made adaptation easier, although individualism was the mark of the exiles. Adler is unique in having made his name before the war, large enough to ensure his inclusion in the Nazis’ Degenerative Art Show. As the sole star in Britain of Ecole de Paris internationalism, forging a style between Klee and Picasso, he had a considerable influence on young and progressive British painters.

Herman quickly carved a niche in socialist post-war England with his unsentimental pictures of fishermen and miners. Left- wing and atheist, he was nonetheless a metaphysician rather than a social realist, recognising the abstract tremors of the spirit out of which all religions have been made. These strange regions of our longing cannot be discarded because we have a bone to pick with theologians and priests.

Herman was elected an honorary RA in 1990.

It is characteristic that Hall mentions the one household name, Feliks Topolski (1907-89), only in passing. As he says, Topolski was a celebrity and that is not his style. By contrast, his chosen painters hardly feature today even in English-language histories of Polish art. The book is also a conscious exercise in what another eccentric artist, David Jones, called anamnesis, ‘the constant need to remember what we are and were’. This altogether good deed has taken 15 years to accomplish and is published by yet another admirably independent spirit, John Sansom of Bristol.

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