Franciszka Themerson: a painter who ‘carried her world within her’

In 1949, the artist Franciszka Themerson drew a comic picture of herself the wrong way up, titled: Am I standing on my head? Or, is the world upside down? The Soviet Union had just tested its first atomic bomb, marking the beginning of the Cold War and raising the potential for nuclear Armageddon. Themerson’s pen-and-ink self-portrait, depicting herself hanging inverted in space, wide-eyed, with hair like needles, was her small way of making sense of ‘this strange universe’ in which she found herself.

How does an artist respond to a world gone mad? By taking a knife to the complacency and emptiness of high culture, as the Dadaists did in 1917, or in an abstract spatter of paint echoing the spray of machine-gun fire? Themerson, an artist, illustrator and filmmaker, made the decision to laugh — to enrich and enliven the vale of tears with a little savage fantasy.

For the next 40 years, until her death in 1988, Themerson adopted a deliberately artless technique to express her horror at the world. She drew flat-headed thinkers with atrophied limbs; soft, paunchy bodies toppling into abstract voids; formless faces imprisoned in a mesh of grooves made using the stick end of her paintbrush. Some of her works were unequivocal, such as a 1975 depiction of a gurning, priapic general, titled Napoleon as Seen by the Duke of Wellington, or Vice Versa; while others were little more than a couple of spidery lines connected by a wild, roving eye.

As a Pole in London, she found the British predilection for small talk and avoiding the issue maddening. ‘I was completely entangled in this strange world, half Lewis Carroll, half Eugène Ionesco. I sometimes felt hopelessly lost,’ she recalled. She articulated her frustration in works such as Two Pious Persons Making Their Way to Heaven, One Propellered, One Helicoptered, with a Little Angel Below (1951), now in the Tate collection, which depicts a pair of portly figures in an abstract landscape.

At times, the artist kept her palette deliberately austere, only using white, black and grey to provide a ‘strange counterbalance’, she said, ‘to all the human silliness and self-importance’. The oil paint, however, was often glutinous and visceral. The art critic Nick Wadley wrote that he could never decide if Themerson’s figures were trying to escape the morass, ‘caught up in some Kafkaesque cycle of things’, or if it was the artist trying to ‘elbow, scratch, argue, draw her way into this viscous turgid stuff of life’.

Themerson was born into a family of artists in Warsaw, Poland, in 1907. Her mother Łucja was a pianist, and her father was the painter Jakub Weinles. A highly strung child, at five Franciszka became distraught at a self-portrait when she couldn’t make her pencilled eyes ‘look at me with the same intensity as my eyes in the mirror’. Eyes remained her focus: it was a revelation to discover, at the age of seven, that by adding a single detailed eye to an empty face a whole surreal world might emerge.

At 17, Franciszka enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw, graduating as its best student in 1931. An exhibition of early drawings and paintings, currently running at the Ben Uri Gallery in London until 23 May 2025, reveals a prodigiously talented artist with the instincts of a storyteller.

It was also in 1931 that she married a young writer, Stefan Themerson, and together they worked on experimental films incorporating diverse techniques such as photograms, mirrored surfaces and animation, with the mystery and elasticity of a dream. Inevitably, the couple were drawn to Paris, and in 1938 they left Poland for what was then Europe’s centre of ideas and artistic liberation.

Their time in Paris was short-lived. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Stefan enlisted in the Polish 3rd Infantry Brigade, while Franciszka got a job as a cartographer with the Polish government-in-exile. As Paris fell, Franciszka fled to London with her colleagues. Stefan’s division was disbanded and he spent the next two years trying to secure a passage to the United Kingdom.

For their families in Warsaw, the situation was critical. Franciszka’s 12-year-old niece Jasia came to England in 1946, but the rest of the family died in the Holocaust. ‘Times are bad here,’ Franciszka wrote in one of her many ‘unposted letters’ to Stefan. ‘I seem unable to do anything to convince myself that I’ll survive. Perhaps I just don’t know how to anymore.’

It was a book of drawings by Edward Lear that brought Franciszka back to her craft, as she discovered in his joyous semi-doodles a way to exorcise her own ‘psychic storms’. Unlike her father, who was renowned for his paintings of Jewish life and the trauma the community had suffered, Franciszka avoided emotive content in her art. ‘It haunts her paintings nonetheless,’ says the artist’s niece, Jasia Reichardt.

Eleven Persons and One Donkey Moving Forwards (1947) is a case in point. Exhibited in Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965, at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in 2022, and now offered in the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale on 19 March 2025, the work is something of a puzzle. The figures seem to be in a great hurry, although it is unclear what they are racing towards or from. Angus Granlund, senior specialist in Modern British and Irish Art, believes the clue is in Themerson’s own circumstances. ‘The painting is indicative of the time in which it was made,’ he says. ‘By 1947, the war was over. It was a time for regeneration and regrowth — to keep moving forwards.’

When Stefan and Franciszka were finally reunited in 1942, they settled in Maida Vale in London and established a kind of European avant-garde in exile, where thoughts about art and science could be exchanged. Italo Calvino and Bertrand Russell became regular visitors, and Reichardt remembers discovering Stefan’s great friend Kurt Schwitters in the bathroom, constructing one of his Dadaist readymades. According to Reichardt, the Themersons saw themselves as mediators between different disciplines and different worlds. ‘They liked to break down the boundaries between things,’ she says.

In 1948, they set up the Gaberbocchus Press (taking its name from the Latin title for Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem ‘Jabberwocky’) to publish translations of modern European literature, such as Alfred Jarry’s scathing political satire Ubu Roi. They also invited contributions from writers and poets in the UK, such as Stevie Smith and C.H. Sisson. Illustrated in Franciszka’s unmistakable surreal style, the books became known as ‘best lookers’ as opposed to ‘best sellers’, perhaps the most popular of them being Bertrand Russell’s subversive The Good Citizen’s Alphabet.

Reichardt believes that, over the years, the Themersons found that in London they could do what they really wanted to do, and so they remained in the UK for the rest of their lives. ‘Stefan once said that artists and writers carry their own world within themselves,’ she says, ‘and I think that is true.’

The Modern British and Irish Art sales are on view at Christie’s in London until 19 March 2025, followed by the Evening Sale on 19 March and the Day Sale on 20 March

Themerson is currently the subject of two exhibitions in London: Franciszka Themerson: Walking Backwards at Tate Britain until 30 March 2025; and Franciszka Themerson: Stories from the Life at the Ben Uri Gallery & Museum until 23 May