SOOT CUTS (SADZORYTY) In the desert during World War Two Tadeusz held an orange peel over the flame of an oil lamp. The sooted peel created a perfect dead black impression when pressed against a piece of damp newspaper. After the war he worked on the technique by sooting a metal sheet and drawing on it with sticks and bushes. It gave him the black and white mono print he was after, but with an image that was easily smudged. It took a lot of trial and error before he perfected the mixture in which to soak the paper prior to printing and which left a permanent image.
OIL PAINTINGS While his Soot Cuts were primarily figurative, his oil paintings in the 1950s and early 1960s became increasingly abstract and the human form rarely appeared. That began to change as he developed his highly original figurative abstract expressionist style. The pictures are highly textured and use a technique known as Impasto. Thick layers of white paint are sculpted using painting knives and brushes. He laid bold colours on top but leaving the marks he’d made underneath visible. The result has the look of baked enamel, is rich, vibrant, textured and exciting and it’s his mastery of technique coupled with his passion that makes Tadeusz's work animated, fascinating and alive. Often his figures are outlined in black to give the effect of stained glass. These images take him full circle, mimicking the art form that he had studied in Krakow.
EARLY LIFE Tadeusz was born in Zerków in southeast Poland and he was one of five children. His father was a teacher in the village school and the family also worked the land.
At the age of twenty-two he went to Kraków to study at the Polish Institute of Fine Art. He majored in stained glass and mural painting and graduated in the summer of 1939.
WAR YEARS With World War Two looming he joined The Polish Army. When the Germans invaded, part of the Polish Army withdrew into Hungary. Tadeusz went with it, leaving his country, his family and his home forever.
Retreating soldiers and civilian refugees were regularly strafed by German aircraft. This is when he saw a distraught mother pleading for someone to help her already dead child. It was an image that haunted him and he would return to it again and again in his work.
He didn’t speak much about his war years, but he did talk about that mother and dead child, and a dog.
Serving in the 3rd Division of the Carpathian Rifles, Tadeusz was part of a Forward Patrol Unit that approached German lines to make detailed drawings of terrain and enemy positions. A stray dog attached itself to his unit and was a welcome relief for the soldiers who ignored orders to shoot the animal. During one reconnaissance mission, when the dog should have been tied up in the camp, Tadeusz saw it, tail wagging and approaching him from behind. He said it was one of the most terrifying moments of his war. One bark would have brought a hail of machine gun fire from German troops. Astonishingly the dog adopted Tadeusz’s crawling position, stayed totally silent throughout and both lived for another day.
He fought in North Africa and then in Italy, including the battle that was a turning point of the war, the taking of the strategic supply line at Monte Cassino. Even here, in what was one of the fiercest battles of the war, Tadeusz continued to sketch.
POST WAR YEARS Tadeusz was in Rome when the war ended. He transferred to Oddziału Kultury i Prasy 2.Korpusu (the Polish Public Relations 2.Corps) where he used his wartime drawings to illustrate Malchior Wankowicz’s highly regarded first volume, Bitwa o Monte Cassino (Battle for Monte Cassino). He designed the Dust Jacket for Jan Bielatowicz's book about the Italian Campaign, Laur Kapitolu i Wianek Ruty (The Capitol Laurel and the Rue Wreath). He also won The Silver Medal at The 1946 International Festival of Art.
Like so many of his compatriots, he didn’t want to return to a Poland ruled by Russia. He’d spent five years dodging bullets, he used to say, five years risking his life for freedom. Stalin wasn’t what he’d planned for.
In 1947 Tadeusz arrived in Britain and was demobbed two years later. He was now one of an estimated 250,000 Polish soldiers and their spouses who were housed in displaced persons camps which were dotted across the UK. Tadeusz was eventually sent to Doddington in South Cheshire. This was an old army site, so again a barracks became his home. Here he made use of his art training by decorating the communal areas in the camp with murals depicting scenes from Polish village life. Tadeusz then became the camp painter and decorator. In 1951 he married another refugee, Aniela and they had two children, Tadeusz and Stanislaw.
With its own shop, church, cinema and school the camp was a little Poland. But conditions were harsh, the Nissan huts were dark, had poor ventilation and lacked basic facilities. Rehousing took Tadeusz and his family to Crewe in 1959. They lived in a council house and Tadeusz continued to work as a painter and decorator for the local authority. Once home however he would begin what he regarded as his real work and would often be in his studio late into the night.
He exhibited spasmodically in London and more regularly in the north west of England. He was a gallery artist at the Jellicoe Gallery in Manchester from the 1960s into the 1980s. He was also a founding member of “Group of Five”, an alliance of painters who exhibited together, primarily in Cheshire.
His drawings featured regularly from the 1960s through to the 1990s in the British published Dziennik Polski (The Polish Daily) and Tydzien Polski (The Polish Weekly).
His English remained broken, but his passion transcended language and in the 1960s and 1970s he taught painting at night school in Crewe.
Tadeusz worked intuitively, often painting and repainting a single piece, sometimes when it was already hung in exhibition. His philosophy was simple. "Never force what you are doing, but stay hungry”.
Major success eluded him until late in life. In 1991, at the age of 79, he had his first one man exhibition in a leading gallery. “Lost in Crewe” was staged at the Warrington Museum & Art Gallery. 20 paintings sold during the private view and most of the remaining works went during the course of the exhibition.
Further highly successful exhibitions were staged in Manchester and the surrounding areas, but by this time Tadeusz’s health was deteriorating. In 2005 he was invited to stage another one man show at The Portico Library & Gallery in Manchester as part of a season showcasing their most successful artists. Tadeusz died aged 92 in April 2005, four months before the exhibition opened.
Tadeusz Was BBC Radio 5 Live feature.
