The route from the Caspian Sea up to Monte Cassino, Ancona, Bologna and Rome, covered alongside General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps by Tadeusz Wojnarski, both a soldier and painter at the same time, gives the impression of being much more safer and friendly than the nightmare of the Soviet prisons and gulags, which he had experienced in the “inhuman land” in the years 1939-1942¹. All the above can be decoded from his artistic works – drawings, sketches and watercolour compositions. In 1942, by joining the Polish Army emerging on the territory of the Soviet Union, following the Sikorski-Majski agreement, he actually saved his life. He was nineteen years old at that time, fighting with a chronic physical incapacity resulting from a leg disease. Together with thousands of Poles, who found themselves in 1940 (and in the following years) deep within the territory of the Soviet Russia, while in exile, the young Wojnarski experienced the hell of mortal threats, poverty and humiliation. Indeed, similar suffering has been part and parcel of the experience of millions of his compatriots, whose lives were forcefully directed in 1939 by the war reality².

Tadeusz Wojnarski was born in Warsaw on 12 September 1922. His father, Witold, was a legal adviser in the Department of Health Service, whereas his mother, Eugenia née Bernat, took care of the household and brought up children. The outbreak of the war in September 1939 surprised Wojnarski precisely at the moment when he was to start his final year at the Tadeusz Rejtan secondary school in Warsaw. As can be read in the Memoir Card (Żałobna karta), published after the artist’s death in 1999,

Tadeusz was never to see his father again, after he had been drafted to the army in 1939. Together with his mother and his younger brother, they were evacuated to the east. When at the beginning of 1940 Tadeusz tries to return to his native Warsaw, the Soviets stop him at the German-Russian borderline and send him to prison in Odessa as a spy. From there, he is deported to work in the Siberian forests. As if by miracle, he manages to leave this “inhuman land” in March 1942 accompanying the Polish Army under General Władysław Anders from Uzbekistan to Persia. Next, in Iraq he joins the military officer’s school in Khanaqin. He also passes his secondary school examinations in the Cadets School at Barbara Camp in Palestine³.

Wojnarski’s natural inborn talent for visual arts came to the surface after he had been freed from the gulag – during his journey through the Soviet Union. The first sketches, drawings and drawing exercises which offered a lot of joy to the emerging and gifted artist were the portraits of people in his surroundings. The creation of an image of a human face, revealing a variety of emotional states, being simultaneously a reflection and a testimony to the actual reality, became a very interesting activity to him. In the Swiss collection belonging to the painter’s family, there is merely one work from that period, but one especially important for the evaluation of the talent of the then nineteen-year-old artist. It is a portrait of a Young Uzbek (pic. 13), created on 23 January 1942 in Namangan, Uzbekistan, just before Wojnarski joined General Anders’s Army ⁴. However, it should be noted that Wojnarski had already devoted time to the creation of drawings and paintings before, in the autumn of 1941, during his stay at hospital in Chelyabinsk⁵. As the artist remembers himself:

The person who ordered this portrait (pic. 13) did not like one detail of the clothing in the picture. So, I painted a new portrait and I kept the first one as the only memory of my work from that time⁶.

Apart from one more small sketch, this is the oldest documented picture by Wojnarski. Since then, it accompanied the young artists among his luggage – from the Soviet Russia, through Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Africa, up to Italy, Spain and Switzerland.

This small-scale early work, made in the gouache technique, is a testimony to more than an emergence of an artistic talent. Given the fact that before 1939 Wojnarski did not take any drawing lessons, that is, was not familiar with the rules of composition and the skill of using a model for drawing, we have here an exceptionally mature work. The front-facing position of the model, with his academically accurate proportions and, most probably, well-rendered individual features of the sitter, builds up a composition that is monumental in its expression – and all this is condensed in a small sketch. Focused straight on the viewer, the eyes of the model seem to give away a sense of inner contemplation and deep reflection. This mood is underscored by especially minimalistic colour scheme (even if we assume that the artist was deprived of wider technical possibilities in the form of a broad palette of colours), restricted to the deep blue of a traditional Uzbek uniform and to a deep brown of the cap, slightly-slanted to the left.

Even though Wojnarski did not then put to paper any pictures of the Soviet reality of the gulags and labour camps, the impressions and experiences from that time, deeply imprinted in his memory, resurface with increased strength in his later work. From the perspective of time and distance of an adult man, the nightmare of those events was embedded in a series of drawings and paintings created by the artist in charcoal and in the gouache technique at the beginning of the 1990s (pic. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14). The works were presented to a wider audience in 1992 at the exhibition at the Polish Museum in Rapperswil⁷, and then in the year 1998 they were used as illustrations to Wojnarski’s published memoirs entitled Stories from Early Youth [Opowiadania z wczesnej młodości]. Indeed, they were already published in instalments in the years 1974 – 1981 on the pages of “Nasza Gazetka” under the pseudonym of Jan Pył.

However, the most precious works preserved from Wojnarski’s artistic output by his family include works that the artists created already as a soldier of the Polish II Corps on his journey starting from the Soviet imprisonment, through the Near and Middle East, Africa, up to the Apennine Peninsula and during an almost year-long contact with Rome’s Academy di Belle Art in 1946⁸. At present, those work are on display at temporary exhibitions in Switzerland, Italy and Poland. It should be emphasized here that the development of Wojnarski’s painting talent, which he discovered already in his Soviet imprisonment, was not abandoned during military trainings, which, as a soldier, he had to undergo at the camps in Iraq in the ranks of the 2nd Carpathian Light Artillery Regiment (2 Karpacki Pułk Artylerii Lekkiej). On the contrary, as an artist, he could fulfil here his potential and exercise his skills while working, among others, on large-scale formats of stage sets painted on large panneau constructed from plywood and paper, designed for the military theatre, or in the series of caricature portraits of his brothers in arms drawn for the booklet In Memory (Ku pamięci) (pic. 15, 16, 17, 18). Shortly after that, already in Palestine, at the military Barbara Camp, where Wojnarski was preparing for his secondary school final examinations, he drew another series of caricatures, this time representing the teaching staff of the Junak Cadets School. They were even published in the magazine “Brave” [Junak] and its supplement entitled “We take the floor – examination courses APW⁹ (pic. 19, 20, 21).

Those caricature-portraits demonstrate a significant artistic skill of a young adept of the arts and, what is more important, apart from his synthetical methodology of representing faces, testify to his unique ability of rendering their characteristic features and their psychological depth in a painterly way. A true showpiece of this kind seems to be a self-caricature of the artist, in which he represented his right profile in an almost portrait-like manner, with a uniquely synthetical line¹⁰.

Towards the end of 1943, the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division, accompanied by a group of several artists from Ander’s II Corps, found themselves on the Apennine Peninsula. Due to Wojnarski’s pending school leaving examination session (he received his general certificate of secondary education on 26 February 1944), Wojnarski joined his friends who were already staying in the south of Italy in March 1944. Soon, in May 1944, all of them took active part in the Battle of Monte Cassino. For the first time since leaving the Soviet imprisonment, a real confrontation of Polish soldiers with the Wehrmacht forces became an exceptionally meaningful and important source of frontline-rooted painterly subjects, not least because of its historical and documentary value. Such subjects were taken up, apart from Wojnarski, by other artists such as Stanisław Westwalewicz, Stanisław Gliwa¹¹, Mikołaj Portus¹², Tadeusz Wąs¹³, Karol Badura¹⁴, Stanisław Gliwa or Roman Burdyłło¹⁵ (who died during the fights for the Benedictine Monastery).

Within less than a month before the first attempt by the soldiers of the Polish II Corps to assault the hilltop defences of Monte Cassino, Wojnarski was delegated – as he remembered – to the frontline on the River Sangro. It was there, some seventy kilometres from the hill of Monte Cassino, where he created his first composition on the Italian ground, picturing the view of a small-town Italian street (pic. 23). This banal representation, as it might seem, in which the perspective was recreated splendidly by depicting a road leading inside the picture, became a pretext for Wojnarski to demonstrate his current skills at building a composition. Indeed, a lightened colour scheme of the work, with its broken pinks and juicy greens of the spring is a testimony to the artist’s great sensitivity to colour and the intensive light of southern Europe. Another scene, created in April 1944, is equally painterly. It presents a ravine at the artillery positions at Monte Cassino (pic. 24), which is a display of painting mastery of a young artists in the difficult watercolour technique.

After the victorious Battle of Monte Cassino, Wojnarski’s artillery regiment initiated a “pursuit” of the Germans at the Adriatic frontline. On its way, the artillery regiment in which the artist served, followed the infantry and sapper units at a distance of a few kilometres. It offered the painter an opportunity to get to know the surrounding scenery, inasmuch as it was possible. Hence, the subjects of the works in the artists’ portfolio began to include landscapes with Italian towns or “portraits” of architecture, the best example of which can be the watercolour depicting a house nearby the River Chienti (pic. 25), where a military council of the Polish II Corps took place, regarding plans to attack Ancona, located further away at a distance of 45 kilometres. Other subjects, such as the depiction of a military vehicle (pic. 27), intimate interiors of orchards at Ancona and Loreto, or the images of Monte Conero, located to the south-east of Ancona (pic. 28), also became important subjects in his work. Suffice it say, Monte Conero was frequently used as a subject by various Italian painters, just to mention Attilio Alfieri¹⁶.

All the above compositions provide a registry and an artistic documentary of a common, everyday life beyond the frontlines. They contribute considerably to the largest collection of compositions by painters of the Polish II Corps, owned by the Pontifical Institute of Ecclesiastical Studies in Rome and also to be found in the collection of the Emigration Archives of the University Library in Toruń¹⁷. In both of these locations one can find sketches and drawings by Karol Badura¹⁸, Zygmunt Turkiewicz¹⁹, Jan Marian Kościałkowski²⁰, Aleksander Werner²¹ and Henryk Siedlanowski²², drawn “live” at Monte Cassino. They include most often fragments of battleground scenes or ruins of the Benedictine monastery – caught both during impromptu and thoroughly-studied sessions. From the historical and documentary point of view, the most precious works are those created by Zygmunt Turkiewicz, of which a selected group featured in the first edition of Melchior Wańkowicz’s book Monte Cassino, or indeed those by Wojnarski, especially numerous portraits of his fellow-soldiers and brothers in arms²³.

What is significant in the case of Wojnarski, his portraits, being the work of his hands, indeed exude the biggest strength and truth. The artist himself, as it seems, must have believed in his work and enjoyed it considerably. In the bust-like portrait compositions of his frontline fellow-soldiers (but also in his self-portraits) poised with a face on to the front or three-quarters to the right or left, the painter is communicating to us the whole truth about the emotional states that those faces are experiencing – especially the then increasingly-diminishing hope of returning to a free homeland of their dreams. The need to portrait his acquaintances from the army became for him a kind of mission to register their personality, especially during the difficult military operations related to the breaking of the Gothic Front in August 1944. Incidentally, the operation was carried out by the soldiers of the Polish II Corps at the same time when the Warsaw Uprising was starting in the capital of Poland. For numerous former classmates of the artist from his schooldays who took part in the uprising²⁴, it was soon to end with a massive defeat.

In October and November 1944, the 3^rd Carpathian Rifle Division (3 Dywizja Strzelców Karpackich) “fought fiercely at the River Montone nearby Trebbio and Forli”, where the objective for the Poles was to provide support for the Allied units, which on the Via Emilia (leading from Piacenza up to Rimini) unsuccessfully tried to take back Forli²⁵. It was especially then and as if with some extra speed and spurred by his unique artistic creativity that Wojnarski was making portraits of his fellow soldiers²⁶. The works coming from that period started to demonstrate a much greater expressionistic character in their execution and were full of strength in their message. (pic. 33, 34, 35). A decisive, clearly drawn line-contour evolved into a much more dynamic, vibrating and fluidic one, leading the portrayed compositions towards an expressionistic character. This vector of the artistic mannerism is additionally emphasized by abstract, painted in dynamic brushstrokes, multicoloured backgrounds. And the often-wavy hairstyles of young men, underscored by blacks and browns, are made complete by the deep greens of military uniforms. This is not to say that Wojnarski painted only men – he also portrayed women, like in the picture of 31 January 1945 (pic. 47).

A similar method of building a composition and a colour palette appeared in his watercolour paintings representing mountainous landscapes, as can be observed, for instance, in the work depicting the surroundings of Rocca San Casciano, located near Modigliana (pic. 38). Expressionistic direction and the reduction of detail in favour of painterly quality of the picture can be distinctly observed in the sketch drawing entitled At the Italian Fireplace of 11 January 1945 (pic. 43) and also in other works, for instance in a watercolour of 2 February 1945, illustrating the fortified shelters on the River Senio (pic. 42) or in a landscape representing the railway line (perhaps in the Lamone Valley), created on 13 February 1945 (pic. 44). At that time, all the above compositions remained private property of the young artist. The self-taught artist did not have enough power to distribute or popularize his works, even to make them published on the pages of the frontline newspapers²⁷.

However, Wojnarski’s senior colleagues had an opportunity to reprints their sketches, drawings and painting on the pages of numerous newspapers in the Polish language published at that time in Italy. They were usually educated in the academies of fine arts in pre-war Poland. For instance, the military newspaper “Łazik” published caricatures by Włodzimierz Kowańko and very talented paper craftsman Władysław Szomański²⁸, who created in their own style, mannerism and satirical approach and whose works were, in fact, close to Wojnarski’s compositions. Eugeniusz Markowski²⁹, in turn, created illustrations to the Roman weekly “Il Travaso”. At that time, he was associated with the group Libera Associazione Arti Figurative and with the Art Club in Rome.

The freeing of Bologna and the signing of surrender by the German Army in Italy on 29 April 1945 and further the announcement of the unconditional capitulation by the Wehrmacht forces on 8 May 1945 in Berlin did not unfortunately bring the long-awaited victory to the Polish soldiers serving at the Polish II Corps under General Anders. On the strength of the agreement ratified by the Big Three at the Yalta Conference on 4 February 1945, Poland became converted into a Soviet-controlled satellite state and “moved away” from its soldiers for the next almost half a century.

Since May 1945 Wojnarski was witness to the fact that, simultaneously with the inevitably approaching defeat of the Third Reich, numerous people joined the Corps. They were mostly male, former soldiers, but also civilians, who did not experience the frontline fighting, but who did not want (just like Anders’s soldiers) to return to Poland under the Communist regime³⁰. They included, among others, Polish soldiers freed from POW camps (including the Home Army soldiers), as well as civilians, who found themselves on the German territory during the war. There were also refugees from the Polish territories occupied by the Germans – just like in the case of Ryszard Demel, Wojnarski’s future fellow student from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, who as a worker of the German postal service managed to escape while delivering post on the territory of northern Italy and then joined the Polish II Corps³¹.

At that time, Wojnarski was trying to find his place in the post-war reality. Partly due to a stroke of luck and partly due to his own resourcefulness, he was accepted in the second year of studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome (Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma). A detailed description of that artistic “adventure” (albeit lasting only for a few months) with Rome’s academy that was to prove key in his life can be found in Wojnarski’s memoirs entitled Stories from Later Youth [Opowiadania z późniejszej młodości], being a continuation of Stories from Early Youth. The collection is soon to be published³², together with critical apparatus and scholarly analyses. As the future artists says in them:

Saying farewell to the battery [in which he served in the Corps – JWS] and arrival to Rome occurred at the beginning of 1946. For a relatively short time, I was the only Polish student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. I also did not stay for too long in the officers hotel as the massive wave of Polish students which arrived at Italian universities changed my position too³³.

The procedure of enrolling in Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts was conducted at an express pace. Thanks to a fortunate encounter with Karol Badura, who had already been well-versed in administrative formalities regarding the rules for enrolling foreign students into the academy, Wojnarski was soon able to write the following words in his Stories:

…[F]ollowing a trace of a previously passed exam, due to the fact that the matter was especially urgent, having paid some small administrative fee, I had in my pocket a much-desired proof, to the effect that at some point in the past, in some place, I had already started studies in the area of the Arts³⁴.

Not long before Wojnarski joined the academy, Prof. Marian Bohusz-Szyszko also arrived in Rome. He had joined the Corps in 1945 (after his release from a POW camp) and by the decision of General Anders he was appointed as supervisor of soldiers-students-artists who were preparing to enrol in artistic studies in Italy³⁵. Practically since May 1945, the command of the Polish II Corps, which was located in Cecchignoli near Rome, started organizing academic centres for the soldiers of the Corps in several Italian cities: Bologna, Milan, Turin and Rome. Artists and candidates to artistic studies, including Wojnarski, were delegated to Rome³⁶. Until November 1946, just like the other Polish students in Rome, Wojnarski maintained close relations with Bohusz-Szyszko – also outside the environment of the Accademia di Belle Arti. What is also significant inasmuch as it testifies to the young artist’s organizational skills, at that time, Wojnarski was a “leader” of the group pf Polish artists-students remaining under the supervision Marian Bohusz-Szyszko. The latter, even though he was formally a professor at Rome’s Academy, due to his authority and pedagogical talent, was treated by the soldiers of the Corps in the same way as the Italian academic teachers. Wojnarski remembers:

The classes at the Academy were practically limited to the hours before midday. The way we organized the rest of the day was up to us. Near Piazza di Spagna there was … Circolo Artistico, where in the afternoon one could practice the drawing of the nude. I have quite a few sketches from that time (cf. pic. 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 123, 124). From the organizational perspective, the Corps assigned different tutors to various student groups. For the painters, it was Prof. Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, a painter, who was also a renowned mathematician and also assisted students who had problems in that field. He organized lectures for us, irrespective of the curriculum of the Italian Academy, and took us on trips around Rome’s museums³⁷.

By the end of 1945, the group of artists gathered around General Anders counted eleven officers and thirty sex NCOs and privates³⁸. Apart from Tadeusz Wojnarski, the group included: Jerzy Stocki (Sosnowski), Hilary Braun, Karol Badura, Marian Kościałkowski, Stefan Łukaczyński, Jerzy Olszański, Ignacy Paprotny, Mikołaj Portus, Władysław Wiliński, Antoni Dobrowolski, Władysław Kraszewski, Marian Panas, Nikander Kukso, Tadeusz Walik, Aleksander Werner, Wiesław Łabędzki, Piotr Macuk, Kazimierz Halski, Napoleon Kołosowski, Kazimierz Stachiewicz, Adam Kobierski, Kazimierz Kowieski, Stanisław Brunsztein, Stanisław Dewoniuk, Arpad Marschalko, Jan Wojciech Nowicki-Osęki, Emil Wronka, Józef Kubiak, Tadeusz Beutlich, Stanisław Dominicki, Ryszard Demel, Kazimierz Dźwig, Józef Konarski, Janusz Eichler, Antoni Mikalski, Leon Piesowocki, Czesław Politowicz, Wacław Twarowski, Leon Śmieciuszewski, Stefan Starzyński, Alojzy Mazur, Benon Paszkowski, Władysław Markiewicz, Henryk Paar, Mirosław Sokołowski, Piotr Kaufman and – outside the list – a volunteer Irena Duch-Chylak.

The future students of Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts were accommodated in the Academic Centre in Cecchignoli near Rome, where on 17 February 1946 during an assembly of Student Association, Prof. Marian Bohusz-Szyszko was granted formal supervision over the Polish group. Apart from providing supervision and giving lectures on history of art, Prof. Marian Bohusz-Szyszko earned special respect among his students by organizing trips and study tours around Italy, among others to Assisi, Orvieto, Padua, Sienna, Florence and Venice, which is also mentioned by Wojnarski in his Stories³⁹. On the other hand, Dr Karolina Lanckorońska received a group pf volunteer female-students under her supervision⁴⁰. It is also worth emphasizing that the command of the Polish II Corps used their own funds to provide the aspiring Polish painters with brushes, cardboard, canvas and paints. The list of students who received such assistance in April 1946, together with Wojnarski, included seventeen names⁴¹.

While organizing life in the centre, the command of the Corps established a committee with a view to verifying the education and skills of the candidates to Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts. The Poles, including Wojnarski, took the exam with Prof. Amerigo Bartoli. The Polish adepts of art also practised at painting studios of masters such as Ferruccio Ferazzi, Giuseppe Piccolo and Carlo Sievero. The lectures on history of art were delivered by Prof. Mario Rivosecchi, with whom Wojnarski was certainly in good relations and whose classes he definitely participated in (there is photographic documentation from that period in possession of the artist’s family). His academic experiences Bartoli’s studio Wojnarski remembers as follows:

For me personally the most important lessons were those I received from Prof. Bartoli. During the war, I “got hold” of a wooden box with oil paints. Maybe it was not entirely honest, as in fact, I found that box in an attic of some abandoned house and as I found it very appealing, I simply took it with me. This is something I am rather ashamed of, but it proved itself to be very useful for painting in the Academy. So, I squeezed out onto the palette, which also belonged with the whole set, a wide array of beautiful paints and I tried to focus on the subject set by the Professor: a nude of sitting girl. It soon turned out that I was not mature enough to be in the second year, but I put on a brave face in my own way and waited for the Professor’s opinion. He would not come every day, but when he appeared for the first time, I was not at all confident regarding my skills. At that time, I was waiting, being slightly tense, for his “instruction”. Professor Bartoli, a person of low height but rather broad, looked for some time at the poised model, then at my painterly endeavours, then at my palette which I was holding in my hand with unceasing satisfaction. I imagined that such a set, previously owned by some Italian, most probably a painter, must have been of a high quality. That is why Professor’s verdict sounded incredible to my ears: “Well, well, it is understandable, that your painting looks like this. Let me give you a piece of advice. Of the paints you have on your palette, I would leave only those:…” Here followed an excruciating lesson: the paints that my Professor indicated as worth using were the so-called “earthen colours” or natural colours. Ochre, natural and burn sienna, umber, Pozzuoli red, emerald green, earth green, ultramarine, white… “And maybe eventually this one…”. He pointed to black. “As for the rest, I advise you to remove them from your palette and never use them again. But please, do not treat it as an order. I would rather you took it as a piece of advice from an old painter. All the Old Masters from the past painted primarily with earthen colours”. If I were to tell you that I was not shattered by that advice, I would lie. Of course, I was shocked, but when I remembered a series of painting by Titian or other Renaissance painters, I realized that apart from earthen colours, one could find only rare and expensive paints such as carmine, lapis lazuli or others. Colours created by way of chemical processes were not known. Out of respect for Prof. Bartoli’s authority, I followed his advice and since then I started my private “war on colours” or rather made a whole series of attempts to work with such a limited palette⁴².

This somewhat lengthy quote from Wojnarski’s memories regarding his time at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome is especially important, or perhaps I should say ground-breaking. It is a testimony to the fact that there existed other experiences of Polish artists living in Rome than those already familiar in the form of expressive, dynamic and saturated with lively colours perspective on painting which Prof. Marian Bohusz-Szyszko shared with his students in Rome. Therefore, Wojnarski’s experience is both exceptionally enriching and highly complimentary to that of his teacher. Szyszko’s early pre-war explorations of colour, close to the tendencies drawn from the output of the Paris Committee, already during WWII and especially since his stay in Rome in 1945, started to evolve towards an expressionistic mode and dynamic composition underscored by the texture of the paint and its rich colour tones.

An enormously important artistic experience which had a profound influence on Wojnarski’s artistic mannerism and his skills was also contact with fellow artists. He was under a huge spell of Aleksander Werner’s “line” on which he relied in his drawings – already of an unmistakable shape, confident and unequivocally recognizable (cf. pic. 116, 117, 124, 125, 129, 139, 143, 164, 174 and numerous others). Wojnarski emphasized that fact by saying:

At that time Alek had a special influence on me [Aleksander Werner – JWS]. He had his own, very original style in sketching houses, streets and corners, which was actually very good when applied to any subject. He made his drawings with pen and ink, but they were so extremely simple and yet so very telling that I immediately fell under the charm of this technique. I asked him to explain to me how he did it. He replied: “It is very simple…”. That it was simple, I could see, but I wanted him to reveal to me some of his secrets of the method. Then he explained: “I choose a subject and then I start to draw it from left up to right…”. “I must try it!” – I replied because I could not expect him to give me any further instructions given such absolute simplicity of his explanations⁴³.

The Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, the environment of Polish students gathered around Bohusz-Szyszko and the experiences acquired in artistic studios located around Circolo Artistico near via Margutta, as well as personal contacts and exchange of experiences and technical skills with other students – all the above contributed to Wojnarski’s development as an artist. This array of artistic impulses was soon to determine the shaping of a full artistic manner (or, if we prefer, style) which today is so easily recognizable and characteristic of Wojnarski’s creative output. His skills were formally certified with an artistic diploma he received in Spain, where he left from Rome in 1946. The decision that the Polish II Corps was to leave Italy for Great Britain was for Wojnarski an exceptionally sad news, just as it was for the numerous other Polish students who were already putting down roots in the academic environment of Rome (not only those from the Academy of Fine Arts). By the end of October 1946, Wojnarski said good bye to his brothers in arms from the Corps. It was a difficult farewell. In the night of 2 to 3 November 1946, in deep fog, the ship with Polish soldiers from the Corps which left from Naples arrived in Glasgow. For the decisive majority of Poles, including the former students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and trainees of Bohusz-Szyszko, it was a journey to their final destination⁴⁴. On a side note, it should be mentioned that only a small group of several Polish artists and students, having neither professional nor personal contacts, remained in the Eternal City. The group included: Karol Badura, Adolf Glett, Kazimierz Halski, Adam Kobierski, Mikand Kukso, Piotr Macuk, Wiesław Łabędzki (who returned to Poland in 1947), Jan Wojciech Osęki-Nowicki, Ignacy Augustyn Paprotny, Marian Panas, Wiesław Twarowski, Zbigniew Zawadzki and Gemma Riccardi⁴⁵.

Due to the fact that in the case of a majority of students who were also soldiers in the Corps, the Italian period of their education lasted merely three semesters, which meant that many students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome arriving in Great Britain did not have the opportunity to take exams in the winter examination session in the academic year 1946/1947. Until 1946, none of the Polish students managed to receive full education at the Academy in Rome and receive a desired diploma of this prestigious artistic school. Only in the following years the list of graduates included several Poles from among those who stayed at the Tiber. Those were: Karol Badura, Jan Wojciech Osęki-Nowicki, Jan Głowacki and Mikołaj Portus Portus⁴⁶.

Neither did Wojnarski complete his education at the Academy in Rome. Discharged from military service on 14 November 1946, having a perspective of receiving an academic scholarship in Madrid, in the second half of the month he set out for Barcelona on board the ship from Genoa⁴⁷. He was one of the few soldiers of the Corps who decided to leave for Spain. Mirosław Sokołowski decided to go in the same direction. They maintained a close friendship in Spain, of which the best proof is their common exhibition, organized in May 1953 in the Spanish town Vitoria, in which apart from Wojnarski and Sokołowski also two other Poles (unknown) participated⁴⁸.

It is impossible to tell what Wojnarski’s artistic career would have looked like if the fresh student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome finished studies at his Alma Mater or – as was the case with most of his compatriots – left for Great Britain. Today, we can only speculate about that. By deciding to go to Spain, the young Wojnarski took a different path from the one followed by the majority of “Anders’s artists”. He was awarded a diploma of higher education at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. In 1949 he met his future wife Ewa Zawadyńska in Switzerland (her father was Polish and mother Swiss). They got married in 1951 in Zurich, with time becoming parents to four children (son Tadeusz was born in 1952, a year later in 1953 daughter Teresa, the second son Antoni in 1956, followed by the second daughter Elżbieta in 1964). Despite the duties related to the upbringing of the children, for the first few years of their marriage the young parents toured Spanish town and villages with their marionette theatre, earning a living in their difficult situation thanks to this ingenious idea. Finally, they settled permanently in Zurich in 1958. Apart from painting, which Wojnarski never abandoned, he applied his artistic talent to designing decorations commissioned by the Swiss largest supermarket chain MIGROS. Even though only fragments of those works have been preserved to this day, their photographic documentation is a testimony to the greatest mastery in this area of creative endeavour. Those works fall within the rich pre-war tradition of Polish paper crafts, which had been especially dynamically developed and popularized by Prof. Wojciech Jastrzębowski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw⁴⁹. It should be added that it was precisely Polish artists who arrived in England together with General Anders’s Polish II Corps that should be credited with London’s high level of decorative art in the area of applied arts and graphic design. The names include Andrzej Krzysztof Bobrowski, Andrzej Czyżowski, Antoni Dobrowolski, Wacław Jerzy Hryniewicz, Jan Kępiński, Zygmunt Kowalewski, Tadeusz Lipski, Feliks Matyjaszkiewicz, Stanisław Niczewski, Stefan Osiecki or Władysław Szomański. They are mostly Wojnarski acquaintances from his stay in Rome who also studies in Poland before WWII under the guidance of Edmund Bartłomiejczyk, Władysław Skoczylas, Bonawentura Lenart and Władysław Jastrzębowski and who achieved significant successes in decorative arts in the city by the Thames⁵⁰.

Having settled in Switzerland, Wojnarski also shared his knowledge and skills from the area of visual arts with his students – he worked as a teacher in a state school in Zurich from 1967 up to his retirement⁵¹. At present, all his artistic output, both paintings and decorative art, is awaiting proper recognition and analysis, just like the artistic achievement of numerous other artists whose background is rooted in General Anders’s army.

Translation into English: Adam Kunysz, Chmielów PL

Footnotes