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| Andrzej Kuhn |
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by Glyn Hughes
(07 Apr 2004) |
Biography is not always deeply revealing about an artist’s work. However, those bemused and overawed wanderers so typical of Andrzej Kuhn’s paintings – fishermen under the moon, peddlers or merchants with bags full of stars, travellers struggling across a plain to a fantastic city – the travellers who are threatened and also protected by the spaces through which they travel, so reflect the artist’s life, or pilgrimage, that to consider that life becomes a valuable key to the work.
In the spring of 1940, when Andrzej was ten years of age, the Hitler-Stalin Pact resulted in Russia invading Kuhn’s Polish homeland. His father became one of the millions arrested as an ‘enemy of the state’ and was incarcerated in a camp without an address. His mother, with Andrzej and his sister, was also deported. It was at the end of winter and they were taken by cattle-truck, followed by six days in an ox-cart, 1500 miles across the plains of the Soviet Union to Kazakhstan. Dreading the next winter, the following November Andrzej’s mother tried to escape. She spent ten days on the road with her children before being recaptured and sentenced to ten years in a labour camp, where she died. Her children were dumped in an orphanage (‘it was awful’ – Andrzej Kuhn) without knowledge of the whereabouts of their parents. None of these innocents had committed a crime, of course. But, in the arbitrary fashion of events in our century, Andrzej’s father was released, and rejoined his children in exile. They were in refugee camps in some of those countries which seem most typical of the imagery of Andrzej Kuhn’s paintings: Iran, Palestine and Egypt. Kuhn arrived in England at the age of seventeen in 1947. There followed six years of the appalling labouring jobs that were available to post-war Polish immigrants, followed by a spell in the merchant navy. An advertisement in a Polish newspaper took him on a scholarship to Chelsea School of Art.
It is no wonder that the basic, wanderer images of this, by now, 24-year-old man were already fixed in his imagination. What is remarkable is the speed with which, after starting at Chelsea, he arrived at his unique and imaginative way of expressing them; also the tenacity with which he has held onto his images against the fashion, even from the earliest days, and the purity and gentleness of their development through his life.
Anyone who went to an English art school in the 1950s, as I did, knows how one was taught to chase after naturalistic effects, usually in cosy urban and domestic settings, dabbling and scratching and spotting with mingled areas of colour, or with fussy styles of drawing. It was French Impressionism filtered through Sickert and the Euston Road School. I was never at Chelsea, but I can’t believe that it was strikingly different to Manchester where I did my ‘training’. It is hard to imagine any method and genre more uncongenial to Andrzej Kuhn’s spirit.
What intellectual or artistic background did he bring with him to help him keep hold of his non-naturalistic bent towards poetic fantasies? Almost none. Other than his integrity, he had about as little equipment with which to confront the art schools, as the vulnerable figures of his paintings have with which to brave the elements.
Andrzej told me that the only art he had to nourish him in Russia, the only art he knew, was that on postage stamps. In his studio in Boston, Lincolnshire, he tipped out a cigar-box filled with tem. They had been cherished through his exile (as the characters of his paintings bear a fiddle, or a sack full of stars). In the towns of Kazakhstan he purchased, especially, used stamps sent from Tannu-Tuva, a region between Mongolia and the Soviet Union. Because of another unexpected quirk of history, they depicted an alternative to usual propaganda and to the despicable statues of Lenin and Stalin erected in the parks. The Tannu-Tuva stamps were propaganda, too, for the claim was made that its ethnic identity was being preserved by the USSR. This was not true, but the stamps showed incidents from the life there: a man spearing a bear, a woman at a loom, a man noosing reindeer. This was what Andrzej Kuhn had with which to nourish his pictorial imagination.
At the time that Andrzej went to Chelsea, he discovered the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Attracted by Beardsley’s stark outlines, his flattened, two-dimensional and stylised compositions, his fantastic and often oriental subject matter, Kuhn executed linocuts and wood engravings.
Ever since his beginnings, Andrzej Kuhn has refused to work from any source other than his inner world. Most artists of his kind produce such work after a beginning in representation, training their eyes through academic drawing and painting. From the start, he put up a resistance to ‘life studies’ and to sketching from nature, and I would suggest that this has much to do with his purity and originality now. He shows no signs of having had to be weaned from the tyranny of natural appearances – neither in the sense of showing traces of it, nor negatively with evidence of too powerful a revolt. I gather there were few to encourage him in this. One was the artist, Leon Villaincour, who taught at Chelsea in Kuhn’s time. For the rest, his influences have been his own discoveries. After Beardsley, there are traces of Chagall in his early work. Perhaps some will be put in mind of Miró. More candidly, Kuhn talks of Sumerian sculpture, ‘with the big eyes’. There is Polish folk-art in the brew, derived, I fancy, more from later returns to Poland than from childhood experience. ‘The only art in Poland to make use of the unconscious,’ he says, when contrasting it with the traditional gallery art, derived from 19th century, pan-European, academic models. Translations of Arabian poetry interest him, too.
When I asked Andrzej Kuhn what had inspired his interest in going to art school, he gave two reasons. They may be surprising, but they are direct, honest and obvious if one considers his background of forced or at best exploited, arduous labour, of exile, and of refugee camps. His first reason was that art is not hard work. His second was that art, in his view, is something to look at in times of trouble.
That first reason is easily understood by anyone who has done sustained, hard and perhaps pointless physical work, though few artists, I fancy, would have the innocence, honesty and lack of pretentiousness to admit to it. (Possibly because it also offers philistines an excuse to degrade art.)
The notion of art as offering a form of consolation, rather than a ‘grappling with the problems of society’, or an ‘expression of social concern’, is likewise a view unusual enough to be worth considering. After all, there is nothing saccharine in Kuhn’s work. There is a power in its images, which could never have come about from an avoidance of the personal experience lying behind them. It could only spring from transcending them; from their transfiguration.
On the day before his mother, his sister and he were transported, 10-year-old Andrzej, possessed by foreboding, sought ease by sifting through the illustrations in his children’s books. No doubt memories of them continued to console the child during the transports, during his three years in Russia, and in his further exile; a lesson in the power of art that he never forgot.
Thus it is that a Kuhn painting brings to the viewer an inward smile of pleasure. The fisherman who has caught a mermaid or the merchant, weighing out pieces of moon, and with bundles of stars before him for distribution to children, for example. They are meant to be images that warm when one is depressed; that uplift with their humour, their wit and humanity.
Andrzej Kuhn is a contemporary icon painter. Like the icon painters, his imagery and style remain constant without being repetitive. The force that keeps them alive is a spiritual one. That is what distinguishes Kuhn from the genre of ‘naïve’ painters among whom he is sometimes crudely, and ignorantly, placed. Although the pictures are decoratively conceived and make very good decorations indeed, they are so much more than that, and you might best hang a Kuhn painting in a bedroom, in a study, in a church; in any place where the eye would wish to rest upon an image of contemplation.
As an iconographer he does not paint Christ and the saint upon gold backgrounds, for he is not a Christian of the ossified sort. His hagiography is an appealing, warm-hearted one of bearded old philosophers (often caught in conversation), mermaids, musicians, oriental traders and fishermen. Above all, it is of the muse, depicted as the moon, or as a woman with the moon on her head, and of her subject, the poetic wanderer. At any rate, so I choose to think, though without the artist’s authority for it. (Kuhn is cautious with explanations, and when he gives them, tends to flatter the enquirer with what he would like to hear, so as to get him off his back.)
The first Kuhn painting I purchased typically shows a huge, radiant full moon with a female face. She gazes upon the tiny figure of a fisherman casting his net from a fragile boat that is tossed on ferocious waves far from an island of pointed mountains. I knew nothing about the artist, and no one was present at the exhibition to inform me. The pictures were hung around a deserted Norman church, that of Stowe near Lincoln. The austere, dignified building supported the luminous character of the paintings, and they seemed very right there. The way that I came upon them helped my sympathy with the wanderers who formed so much of their subject matter. At the time I was a ‘writer in residence’ in Lincoln, and used to take solitary cycle rides exploring the flat, strange countryside (I was used to hills), which was almost like a vacuum to me. It struck me that the image of a lone, vulnerable figure fishing under this enormous, feminine presence in the sky, was an apt emblem of the relationship between the artist and the muse, and I purchased the picture to hang it in my writing room. The painting has been for me exactly what, as I have learned since, Andrzej Kuhn would like his images to be: one to contemplate in times of confusion.
The moon appears more frequently than any other image in Kuhn’s work. From the sky she commands the spectacle, smiling serenely and enigmatically upon our tender or our puzzled affairs. Sometimes she sits in the sea and watches. Occasionally a fisherman throws his net and catches her. Scenes fill with more than one moon. Lovers sit in the moon. (Why does one assume they will be lovers in a Kuhn picture? They are merely gazing at one another. The assumption is an indication of the warmth of the artist!)
Andrzej says of his images that they are ‘ways to fill a space.’ (Quite rightly – the disentangling of symbolism is for commentators, not for painters.) ‘Filling a space’ is a prime, an archetypal concern of his, born, one is tempted to say, from that punishing, forced journey in childhood across the Steppes to the northern shore of the Caspian Sea. Something felt, too, by all those tiny figures wrestling with the enormousness of his painted spaces.
In England, he has made his home on the east coast of Lincolnshire north of Boston – a place of drained salt-marsh, utterly flat, laid out with fields of potatoes and cabbages, the horizon unbroken except for ugly buildings. I feel that I would go insane if confined upon it, but for Andrzej Kuhn an empty landscape is an inspiration. He describes it as being like an empty canvas. It encourages him to fill his head with images. A walk here might produce five paintings ‘in his head’, he says. In his fondness for a flat, monotonous place, he puts me in mind of Samuel Beckett, who would agree about its power to act as a catalyst to the imagination.
With his home and studio, named Atlantis, he has succeeded in ‘filling’ the desert-like emptiness of east Lincolnshire as he might place a consoling image in a canvas. In the emptiness there is what appears to be a small wood. On penetrating it, one finds watchful, painted sculptures; female figures, hieratic muse figures, made of scrap wood, strung with beads, moons on their head perhaps. Embedded in the trees is a long, low, small house and studio, much of it coloured blue or faded pink, and filled with art. It brings one up short because it is as if one has suddenly been projected five hundred miles east, to Poland.
In a similar spirit he has filled empty boards and canvases with the contents of his imagination. In an empty sky, he places a moon. In the next picture, it grows larger. It acquires a face. And so on.
A visitor once asked Kuhn that notorious, simplistic question: “Do you really see people as looking like this?” At first Andrzej tried to rebut the stupid enquiry, and then he gave in, telling the questioner what he would like to hear: “Yes, that is how I see people looking.”
Well, there is truth here, too. Andrzej Kuhn might parry suggestions of deliberate symbolism, but on one matter he is unambiguous; these are real people, with whom you can communicate – you the viewer, and Andrzej Kuhn their creator.
I would like to end by quoting Andrzej himself on this matter of actuality. It is from an article he produced for The British Journal of Aesthetics in 1961
‘To me, painting is like a journey into an unknown world. With my
paint brushes ready at hand I travel in my mind to forgotten lands,
lost deep in the obscure corners of memory, and penetrate to
undiscovered islands of emotion.
In those far lands I meet strange people, creatures of the imagination.
They are poets, fiddlers, sailors, tramps. Their heads are large and
their bodies out of proportion. I invite them to come with me and I
set them on canvas, where they can live again, smoking their pipes,
talking and wondering at this new existence. In their funny hats and
coats, playing primitive fiddles and flutes, they feel equally at home in
flat, two-dimensional houses or among steep mountains reaching
towards the sky and a blue sun. Animals as strange as themselves
accompany them in their daily, unending tasks. Time does not exist
as long as the canvas holds together their universe, the world created
out of paint in which they exist. And this world is a real world, as real
as ours. We have only to understand its different laws.
For me the Old Man from the Mountains, resting on a stone on the
way to town, with his tiny dog at the end of a lead, is a real person.
I expect him sometimes to get up and move. He never does, but he
speaks to me from his place on the wall and amuses me when I am
depressed. He is a poet and he has many stories for those who can
accept his strange existence fashioned out of shapes and colours.
I am sure there are many such individual worlds hidden in our inner
selves, waiting to be discovered by artists and poets. Perhaps they may
help us to understand more of our world of which we know so little...’
Glyn Hughes, trained as a painter, has published five novels, three collections of poetry and two volumes of autobiography. His first novel, Where I Used to Play on the Green (Gollancz 1982; Penguin 1984) won the Guardian Fiction Prize. His novel, Roth (Simon & Schuster, 1992, Sceptre paperback, 1993), was about a painter. The Observer wrote of it: ‘It confirms Hughes as one of the country’s most vibrant and versatile writers,’ and The Sunday Telegraph, ‘in this haunting account of womanly love he is quite possibly without peer.’ In between came The Antique Collector (Simon and Schuster, 1990; Sceptre paperback, 1991) which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year. His has also written a novel about the Brontes. |
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