"He taught me form": Janina Baranowska at the Borough
In our recent piece on the women of the Borough Group, Janina Baranowska came up as a different kind of gap. She wasn't forgotten. She had a long, visible career that was recorded almost entirely in a different archive from ours. This post is a first attempt to bring the two records together.
From Grodno to Nazareth
Baranowska was born in Grodno on 28 October 1925, and some of the most vivid material about her life comes from her own account, recorded by the writer Jarosław Koźmiński and published in the Polish émigré press after her death. One of her earliest drawings, made at primary school, showed a military parade in the town, and it was so good that her teacher summoned her father to discuss it. He was an army officer, transferred to Warsaw in spring 1939, and the family were waiting to join him when war broke out. tydzien
What followed is a familiar story to many Polish families in Britain, but it is worth setting out in full. After the Soviet arrival, an NKVD officer ordered her mother out of their Grodno home. Their attempts to reach her father in Warsaw ended in arrest, imprisonment, and deportation to Kazakhstan. After the amnesty that followed the Sikorski–Maisky agreement, she reached Yangiyul in Uzbekistan, headquarters of General Anders's army, where her father's fellow officers took care of her and her sister. She travelled with the army to the Middle East, finished secondary school in Nazareth, took a signals course in Egypt, and was then sent to Scotland. She was still a teenager when she started drawing seriously: in Nazareth she took drawing lessons from the Czech-born painter Vlastimil Hofman. tydzientydzien
At the Borough
She arrived in London in 1946 and won a scholarship to study painting at the Borough Polytechnic, where she found herself in Bomberg's class. The exact dates vary between sources. Art UK gives 1946–49, while the POSK Gallery's biography gives 1947–50. Either way, she was there for roughly three years during the Borough Group's most active period. Janina Baranowska (1925-2022) +2
Her memory of Bomberg's teaching is unusually precise. One of the first exercises in his studio was to draw an illustration turned upside down. When she showed him the finished sketch, he praised it and immediately set her another inverted image. She described it as a simple exercise that was remarkably effective at freeing an untrained eye from convention. The Ben Uri records her as Bomberg's youngest pupil and, by her own claim, his favourite, and credits him with teaching her that form and composition should underpin all drawing and painting. tydzienbenuri
She was also clear about what she didn't get from him. She said that Bomberg never really taught her how to handle colour, but that he taught her form. tydzien
Learning colour elsewhere
She learned colour instead from Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, in his easel painting studio. Looking back, she remembered students at English art schools in the late 1940s and early 1950s working with a narrow palette, producing paintings in muddy browns and greys that did not interest her. Bohusz-Szyszko, by contrast, built his paintings out of colour. Polish sources date this study to 1951–54, at the Polish University Abroad, after her marriage to the architect Maksymilian Baranowski and the birth of her son, followed by a year at Putney School of Art from 1955. tydzienWikipedia
Her remark about the palette is striking next to Edna Mann's story. Mann's husband described her early work as her "mud plum" period, and Mann too moved towards vivid colour and abstraction in later decades. Two women from the same classroom, working in separate worlds, both seem to have found colour by stepping away from the Borough.
The Ben Uri's painting Actaeon Devoured by his Hounds (1968–9) shows both inheritances at once. Its deep palette and heavy impasto echo the expressionism of both Bomberg and Bohusz-Szyszko. It was also the first work by a Polish refugee artist who came to Britain with the Anders Army to enter the Ben Uri Collection. artsy
The Drian connection
Another thread links her to Mann. Baranowska's first solo exhibition was at the Drian Gallery in 1958, one of the first shows at Halima Nałęcz's newly opened gallery, where she exhibited geometric abstraction. Seven years later, Mann held her own first solo show at the same gallery. Nałęcz's Drian, run by an émigré, was one of the few places that showed both of these Bomberg-trained women. tydzien
Her work kept changing. She moved from geometric forms to large, expressive abstractions, applying paint with a palette knife and mixing it with sand or concrete for texture. Then, at one of her own Drian exhibitions, she noticed geometric forms from outside reflected in a window while she could also see what was happening inside. She sketched it straight away, and from 1974 she worked in a style she called "Reflections". From the 1970s her earlier expressionism gave way to lighter tones and tighter formats, often built on a strict geometric grid. That grid has its own Borough echo. The concern with underlying structure that Bomberg drilled into his students never left her work, even as everything else changed. tydzienbenuri
Building institutions
Alongside painting, Baranowska spent decades building the institutions of Polish art in Britain. She was founding secretary of the Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain and its president from 1981 to 1991, and directed the POSK Gallery from 1965 to 2007. By her own account, the POSK Gallery was created for the Association's members, with a guarantee of two free exhibitions a year. benuriapauk
She also designed stained glass. At St Andrew Bobola in Shepherd's Bush, the north transept window commemorating Polish airmen in the Battle of Britain is her design, the result of a 1979 competition run by the Union of Polish Airmen. She designed windows for Holy Trinity Church in Wolverhampton as well. Over her career she took part in some 30 solo and 60 group exhibitions, and her work is held in public and private collections across Britain, Poland, Europe, the United States and the Vatican. She died in London on 1 October 2022. Church of St. Andrew Bobola, Shepherd’s Bush +3
Two records, one classroom
Baranowska's case doesn't fit the usual story of a lost woman artist. Within Polish-émigré art history she is a central, well-documented figure: a teacher's favourite, an exhibiting painter for over half a century, and the director of a gallery for four decades. Within the English-language history of the Borough Group, she barely appears.
This matters for how we read our own archive. The Borough Group's standard cast was largely set by the people who wrote its history, and they wrote from inside a London art world that the Polish community mostly organised itself apart from. Baranowska's story suggests that some of Bomberg's students didn't disappear. They went on to build their careers somewhere our records weren't looking.
One practical lead follows from this. She was born Janina Zbaraszewska, and it isn't yet clear when she married. If any Borough Polytechnic enrolment records or group exhibition lists from the late 1940s survive, she may appear under her maiden name. That is the same problem Dorothy Missen's maiden name, Bergan, poses for our research. Wikipedia
A call to archives
As with the earlier piece, this is an open thread. We would particularly like to hear from anyone who knew Janina Baranowska, from her family, or from colleagues at POSK or the Association of Polish Artists. Above all, we'd like to find any drawings or paintings from her Borough years. Work from Bomberg's classroom by a student who went on to such a different career would be a remarkable thing to see.
Sources consulted: Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, artist overview for Janina Baranowska and catalogue record forActaeon Devoured by his Hounds (1968–9); Art UK artist record; Jarosław Koźmiński, "Janina Baranowska (1925–2022)," Tydzień Polski / MyPolska.UK, 10 November 2022; POSK Gallery and Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain biographies; ArtWay, "Church of St. Andrew Bobola, Shepherd's Bush"; Polish Wikipedia entry for Janina Baranowska; Mirosław Adam Supruniuk, "'Permanence and Liquidity.' Polish Art in Great Britain in the 20th Century," Archiwum Emigracji, vol. 3 (33) 2023.