Andrzej Kuhn

There are four letters from Andrzej Kuhn to Ruth Borchard, sent from his home on the Lincolnshire coast. The first, undated, says simply: 'Thank you for your letter. I will paint my self portrait and send it to you as soon as the paint dries.' In his second letter, dated '15. Oct. 63', Kuhn notes that he is 'sending the self-portrait [...] I would accept £15 for it.' In the third letter, he writes: 'Here is the painting. I do hope it arrives safely, I enclose a catalogue, a Journal and self-portrait of my son' (a raw, childish drawing by a young boy, which Ruth kept).

Andrzej Kuhn was always an idiosyncratic original in the British art world. His self-portrait is immediately recognisable for its Eastern European folkloric character. Using robust, simplified forms, it portrays the bearded artist as a serenely contented woodcarver. The elegant yet rough-hewn figure on the table has a simple black dot for an eye, which seems to gaze knowingly at the artist, whose own innocent-seeming eyes appear to look away into the far distance. It is worth noting here that Kuhn admitted to a fascination with Sumerian sculpture with what he called ‘big eyes'. The bold details of the chisel (with its blade of lucid blue) at the very centre of the picture and the small knife on the table, indicate how a sense of creative transformation (along with an unconscious awareness of the tools’ violent potential) lies at the heart of the artist's self-image.

The painting's palette, its abbreviated brushstrokes and deliberately naïve style have something in common with the pictures of the renowned Polish artist Tadeusz Makowski (1882-1932). In his final years, Makowski portrayed eery, childlike, often clownish-attired figures, who looked like living puppets carved out of wood. Polish folk art inspired this avant-garde painter. Makowksi's Le Saboteur (1930), showing a beady-eyed old man carving a block of wood at his bench, can be intimately related in spirit to Kuhn's self-portrait.

Andrzej Kuhn was born in 1929 in Lvov, then the third largest city in Poland. His early childhood was happy and unspectacular but, following the Russian invasion of eastern Poland in 1940, tragedy struck. Kuhn's father was incarcerated, and he and his mother and sister were deported and transported by cattle-truck, then by ox-cart, in winter, through Russia to Kazakhstan. His mother died in a labour camp, and the children were placed in an orphanage in dreadful conditions. As the novelist and poet Glyn Hughes noted in an introduction to a Kuhn exhibition catalogue (Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham, 1994), 'in the arbitrary fashion of events in our century, Andrzej's father was released and joined his children in exile [...] in refugee camps in some of those countries which seem most typical of the imagery of Andrzej Kuhn's paintings [owing to the pictures' qualities of fairy-tale-like exoticism], Iran, Palestine and Egypt.'

Kuhn came to England in 1947, and, after six arduous years of labouring jobs and a spell in the merchant navy, went on to win a scholarship to the Chelsea School of Art. Hughes points out that 'it is hard to imagine any method or genre more uncongenial to Andrzej's spirit than the training in an English art school in the nineteen fifties [its] French Impressionism filtered through Sickert and the Euston Road School.' Jay Goldmark has written, 'At Chelsea, Kuhn discovered [...] the elegance and rhythm of [Aubrey] Beardsley's drawings and their allusions to Eastern design.'

Hughes calls Kuhn 'a contemporary icon painter' and relates the following intriguing discussion: '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.'

Hughes also indicates one especially moving source of Kuhn's adult-yet-childlike artistic imagination. 'On the day before [the family was] 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.'

In Kuhn's c.2010 self-portrait (in the Ruth Borchard Next Generation Collection), the forms of the artist (in his expansive beret and oceanic blue-black shirt or jacket), the expanse of luminous landscape and the pink, red-roofed houses on the hillside horizon, are simplified – sometimes attenuated like the tiny figure of the cartoon-like dog, sometimes enlarged like the painter's head here with its emphatic, inward-seeing eyes (rather in the manner of Polish-Ukrainian folk artists and icon makers).

The sun, a pale simple disc, shines in the light blue sky, and the artist points with an ochre-tipped paintbrush towards his easel painting of a crescent moon in an inky-blue sky above a white castle or grand house with brown turrets. As Hughes point outs, 'the moon appears more frequently than any other image in Kuhn's work. From the sky [...] smiling serenely and enigmatically upon our tender or [...] 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 on the moon.'

In a 1961 article, Kuhn wrote: 'To me, painting is like a journey into an unknown world [...] 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 set them on canvas, where they can live again, smoking their pipes, talking and wondering at this new existence.' The  poetry of his native Polish folk art, as well as painters such as Chagall and Klee, inspired him.

Glyn Hughes described how Kuhn and his wife Diana, whom he had met as a fellow student at Chelsea, then went on to make their 'home on the east coast of Lincolnshire [...] a place of drained salt marsh [...] laid out with fields of potatoes and cabbages [...] 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 [...] there is [...] a small wood. On penetrating it, one finds watchful, painted sculptures, female [...] hieratic muse figures, made of scrap wood, strung with beads. Moons on their heads 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.' The transporting air of this remote, secluded spot was captured in a series of quietly eloquent photographs by Jay Goldmark, taken to mark the artist's eightieth birthday. Andrzej Kuhn died in 2014.

For many years, Kuhn exhibited his paintings at the Centaur Gallery, which was run by the Polish emigré painter Jan Wieliczko and his British-born wife Dinah. Ruth kept a catalogue for Kuhn's one-man show at the Centaur Gallery in 1961 – when the gallery was based in the Portobello Road, in London's Notting Hill. When the gallery moved to Highgate in north London, Kuhn continued to exhibit there. His works found an apt and quite magical setting in the gallery's series of rooms, which were vibrantly packed with antiques, icons, jewellery, abstract and figurative modern paintings, and delightful examples of Polish folk art – 'The only art in Poland to make use of the unconscious', Kuhn said – such as painted Easter eggs, decorative paper cut-outs and painted wooden sculptures.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004