THE ARTIST WHO MADE A VOW

Another modern Catholic artist with a fascinating life was  ADAM KOSSOWSKI, (1905 - 1986) a Polish artist, born in  Nowy Sącz, notable for his works for the Catholic Church in England. He arrived  there in 1943 as a refugee from Soviet labor camps and was invited in 1944 to join the Guild of Catholic Artists and Craftsmen.

In 1923, uncertain about a career as a painter, Adam began architecture studies at Warsaw Technical University. But after two years there, he turned to painting and was accepted into the  Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. During his time in Cracow he worked on the restoration of paintings at Wawel Castle.

In 1929 he returned to Warsaw and its  Academy of Fine Arts. Travelling on a government grant, Adam experienced Italian art in Rome, studying tempera painting techniques, and later in Florence, Naples and Sicily.

In 1938, he married Stefania Szurlej, whom he had met in Rome. He was named "senior assistant" at the Warsaw Academy of Art and won first prize in a competition to create interior sgraffito work at Warsaw's Central Railway Station. But this project was abandoned after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. His wife fled with her parents while Adam went east, where he was arrested by invading Russian troops in November 1939.

He was first imprisoned at Skole and then at Kharkov, both in present Ukraine. He told Fr. Martin Sankey, "In prison I stayed about a year. Later we received sentences. I got five years of hard labor camp and was sent to the part of the Gulag which is called Peczlag, on the river Peczora which runs into the Polar Sea and I stayed there till 1942."

At this time Adam  began to pray, " … because when I was so deep in this calamity and nearly dead I promised myself that if I came out of this subhuman land I would tender my thanks to God. I hesitate to call it a vow, it was rather a promise to myself but later I used to think that it was my obligation …"

He went on to describe his release with other Polish prisoners in order to form the Polish 2nd Corps under General Władysław Anders:

From the camp on the river Amu-Daria - where I was sent from the North - I was evacuated finally with other Poles to the banks of the Caspian Sea from where we went to Pahlevi on the Persian coast. There the Polish ex-prisoners gradually received English uniforms, our old rags infected with all sorts of disease and insects being burned, and we started the journey towards Teheran and from there to Palestine.

After several months of recuperation in Palestine, Adam, through the efforts of his wife in London, travelled to Scotland. In 1943 he joined the Polish Ministry of Information in London, where he worked throughout the war.

Working from a studio in  Hampstead, Adam composed work for his first show in London, entitled "A Polish Soldier's Journey", which opened in 1944, consisting of new drawings, some of which he had made during his difficult sojourn in the Ukraine and on through to Palestine. In a brief note on the show, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs observed:

The drawings produced in the course of the three years of the artist's life thus absorbed, are notable for showing, apart from a real power of interpreting the local character of each scene, a rare sense of the dramatic, the gift of effective silhouetting being particularly characteristic. We see here well exemplified the profit which the artist (who long taught mural painting at Warsaw Academy) derived from his protracted studies of the frescoes in Rome and Assisi. Figure-drawing, of a very incisive kind, inevitably comes much to the fore in scenes which succeed each other on the walls of the exhibition, but many of the impressions of landscape, here displayed, will also remain impressed upon the spectator's memory. Altogether, this is an art very much in the best Polish tradition, and with an individual note definitely its own.

After winning a prize for the oil painting "Jesus Bearing the Cross"  (also known as Veronica) in 1944, Adam was invited to join the Guild of Catholic Artists by its chairman, sculptor Philip Lindsey Clark

This connection, in turn, led to Adam's first major commission from Fr. Malachy Lynch, prior of the Carmelite Friars at Aylesford, Kent: the seven-panel History of the Carmelites of Aylesford in tempera.

 Adam's first large ceramic project, a  Rosary Way, also came as an Aylesford commission. When the artist suggested that he may not be "the man who should do that", Fr. Malachy replied, "Adam, I am sure Our Lady has sent you here for that purpose."

 Adam later commented on this project:

Looking at these Mysteries now, and remembering the agonies, the frenzies and delights of this spontaneous work, I think my inexperience and technical near-impudence contributed much to the freshness and simplicity of these works which, I hope, redeem some of the shortcomings.

 After an exhibition in 1952, a brief notice in The Tablet stated:

Mr. Adam Kossowski comes from Southern Poland, where East and West meet. He studied mural painting in Italy, taught in Warsaw and suffered for two and a half years in Russian prisons and labour camps. This rich experience of nationality, training and suffering is obvious in all his work. He is thoroughly mature artist of great vitality and exuberance but with the necessary discipline to harness these forces.

From 1953 to 1970, Adam completed many commissions for large murals and reliefs. He died in London on 31 March 1986, aged 80, and is buried at Aylesford, Kent.

He is considered one of the greatest and most prolific religious artists in twentieth-century. Benedict Read notes in “Adam Kossowski: Murals and Paintings”  that in Britain after the war the Church was ‘a vital artistic culture,’ and that ‘the thirty years after 1945 witnessed for the Catholic Church in particular in this country an almost unprecedented campaign of church building and decoration, with the new cathedrals in Liverpool, Cardiff and Bristol just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.’