The artist Marek Zulawski, translation & Polish-British culture

Hi,

The Halina Korn exhibition in Toruń comes to an end this week. I'm sorry to say I was unable to see it - a planned trip was cancelled due to sickness. In fact, I think most of February has been spent in the company of influenza and RSV 🤷‍♂️. If you missed it too, you can see a few photos from the exhibition here.

But I thought it would be appropriate to translate something about Halina and her art for today's newsletter. It's my father's memories of the exhibition held in her honour a couple of years after her death, possibly the last one since the current one. 

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Everything that emerged in 1950s London found expression in her work

Self-portrait by Halina Korn, 1953, courtesy of UMK

Life is surrounded by death. Death is surrounded by life. 17th May 1981, it's the opening of Halinka’s posthumous exhibition at Camden Arts Centre in London. 

It took me a long time to prepare — cleaning and varnishing the paintings, making frames. The catalogue came out well. It contains all the necessary details, dimensions and dates. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to ascertain which picture was painted when. I had to compare old catalogues and her own irregular notes in various little notebooks — they were all incomplete, all starting with bold lettering that gave way to thin and fearful script, always followed by blank pages, and then the cycle would start again. The tragic story of her life…  

Victor Musgrave wrote the introduction to the catalogue. Very good, heartfelt. Did something once connect them that was more than just friendship? Victor had a gallery and exhibited Halinka’s paintings. In 1960, Halinka painted an excellent portrait of him, which I've now given to him. He was delighted and, while opening the exhibition, claimed he'd never posed for Halinka — that she had painted him from memory. Interesting.

The opening was splendid. Crowded. The first painting was bought by Sophie Johnson. I noticed her right away. Petite, very pale and refined. Grey hair smoothly combed to the back. She's the mother of a remarkable dancer, but otherwise mysterious. No one knows her story or even her maiden name. But everyone knows how ready she is to help the lost and unhappy. She also makes truly beautiful collages from colourful reproductions and photographs, which she cuts out from French magazines using nail scissors. They're assembled masterfully — you'd have to touch them with your fingers to guess they were glued together. They look like paintings — like landscapes taken from a dream. Her first exhibition at Drian Galleries was an extraordinary success. In her home, which is exquisitely furnished, she doesn’t know where to keep her works. She stores them under the table and doesn’t show them to anyone. She's modest and goes to church just to light candles at saints' altars.

But what I want to tell you, Maria, is what I think of Halinka’s paintings, because it's now, at this posthumous exhibition of hers, that you’ve had your first chance to see them all in their entirety. Halinka’s painting is consistent. It has style and gravity. I remember how angry she was when critics wrote that her paintings were satirical and proof of a great sense of humour. 

“I don't have a sense of humour at all,” she would say, “and if someone finds my paintings funny, that’s their own fault. I’d like to paint academically, but I don’t know how.”  

'Gay Fox Party at Paddington Green' by Halina Korn, 1950s, courtesy of UMK

So she painted the world and the people around her in her own way. With all seriousness and all love. I knew this a long time ago, but others can only seen it now. Some of her paintings are even deeply unsettling, even though they're devoid of tragic scenes. 

A young man in black kneeling before naked, headless and pink shop mannequins, or women in a laundrette frozen in anticipation, or a lone black dog — The Beast — acting like the guardian of a menacing secret, and above all her last painting, created in the sanatorium under pressure from a doctor: an orderly in a white coat standing against a black wall — his gaze attentive, indifferent, but terrifying in its attentiveness and indifference — a symbol of her ultimate defeat. But what a painting! Despite its small size, it's monumental. Despite being painted with only three colours, it's incredibly colourful. A painting impossible to forget.

Indeed, there aren't any joyful paintings at her exhibition. All of them are shrouded in an aura of unease. Despite being blessed with freshness of vision and innocence of hand, Halina Korn — who, fortunately, never attended any fine arts school — was not a primitive painter. Her paintings are extraordinarily expressive in form and sophisticated in colour. Victor Musgrave rightly emphasised in his catalogue introduction that many of the world’s greatest artists were self-taught. Her sense of composition was infallible. 

She didn’t paint directly from nature. “Nature moves,” she would say. She painted and sculpted from the memory of what she intensely observed. She painted her experience of nature, or — as they say — she painted from memory. And yet the human figures she painted and sculpted are so strikingly accurate in their movement, clothing and expression that they can be treated not only as works of art but also as sociological documents of the era. 

Everything that emerged in 1950s London found expression in her work. The customs of the salon and the street, narrow trousers, the first nylon blouses, stripteases, call girls… Authenticity transformed into symbol, translated into art, and filled with poetic content. Not sentimental, but poetic. An awkward drawing can gain a strange eloquence, her always flat and locally-applied colours acquire a physical — and metaphysical — vibration as a tool for mood creation. Because Halinka — incredibly sensitive to her surroundings and to everything happening in her life — was above all aware of the emotions that colour even the most ordinary scenes she observed.

As for technique? “Can you paint with your finger?” she asked timidly at the very beginning of her short, twenty-year painting career. She was convinced that in painting, just as in chess or tennis, there exist inviolable rules. “Paint with whatever you want,” I replied, “as long as you don’t imitate anyone.” There was no need to caution her. She carried within her the fullness of her own vision and probably wouldn’t have been able to imitate anyone. 

Now, varnishing her paintings after so many years ago, I was amazed by their technical perfection. She applied paint patiently, multiple times, then smoothed it with her fingers. I can still see her washing her hands, smeared up to the knuckles… As a result, the surfaces of her paintings are as smooth as enamel. There’s absolutely zero unevenness in Halinka’s paintings for dust and dirt to settle into, the kind that weakens the colour of works made by painters fond of rough textures. Because texture means lumps and grooves. Lumps catch light, and of course light devours colour, while also casting shadows into the grooves, which in turn obscure it. What happens is the vibrancy of each patch of colour is reduced by its uneven texture. A smooth surface is always more colourful than a rough one.

Halinka’s paintings are undoubtedly realistic. But she doesn’t use realistic methods like perspective or shadows to define forms. She doesn’t make use of impasto or glazes. Her realism is liberated from merely imitating nature and respects the flatness of the canvas.

Halina & Marek in their Warwick Avenue studio, circa 1958, via UMK

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Animal Farm's Polish roots

Fun fact: the first language George Orwell's Animal Farm was translated into was Polish. But it also seems that Orwell himself was influenced by a Polish book when writing his famed animal story. The British Library has a curious little article about all these connections and more.

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That's all for this week. Many thanks for reading. If you want to support the newsletter, please forward it to a friend or donate here.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / TranslatePolishMemoirs.com / Other stuff

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