Exhibitions 2
Lines from Life: The Art of Franciszka Themerson (Royal Festival Hall, till 7 November)
The way she walked
John Henshall
Readers with long memories may recall that five years ago I wrote a piece about the avant-garde novelist and publish- er Stefan Themerson, who arrived here from Poland during the last war and who for 30 years ran the extraordinary Gaber- bocchus Press from his London home. I was one of the few British journalists ever to be granted an interview with a man who was self-effacing to the point of paranoia
A typically exuberant line drawing from the Sixties by Franciszka Themerson and who told me quite simply that he was not interested in publicity.
I shall not forget that icy winter's night in Maida Vale or the tall, shuttered windows which not entirely successfully tried to keep that winter out. Nor shall I forget the sight which greeted my eyes momentarily after Themerson answered the door. As he showed me in, I happened to glance to my left and saw, in what (mistakenly, as it turned out) I took to be the kitchen, a woman of about five feet in height appar- ently in the process of climbing into the sink.
I politely looked the other way, and we spent the whole evening talking about Gaberbocchus and its output, until it was nearly time for the tubes to stop running and I had to go. Themerson offered me Polish whisky and oddly shaped buns. Every time a Gaberbocchus title was men- tioned he would produce a copy from his towering bookshelves and sign it before presenting me with it.
Just before I left he showed me into what I had thought was the kitchen, but which turned out to be his wife Franka's studio. I was relieved to find that she had not spent the evening trying to squeeze herself down the plughole but had been washing paint off her hands. All around the walls hung her strikingly surreal paintings, brightly coloured versions of the drawings she had produced for every Gaberbocchus title which required them since just after the war. I was bewitched by them.
Now you can see an exhibition of Fran- ka's work at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. Her lines swoop and cavort with easy joy and her cartoon-like imagery ranges from the immediately identifiable to the deliberately arcane. When Franka applies a splodge of paint here or there to highlight her confident hand, she does so expertly. Where splatters of pigment are needed, Jackson Pollock cannot compete.
Franciszka Weines was born in Warsaw in 1907 and married Stefan Themerson, who was four years her senior, in 1931. When war came they made their way to Britain and in 1948 founded Gaberboc- chus. The imprint was the first to publish Jarry and Queneau in English, and also issued books by Apollinaire, Hausmann, Bertrand Russell, Schwitters and Stevie Smith. The publisher John Calder once told me he thought Stefan Themerson was a brilliantly talented man 'who simply didn't live in the real world'. The same is true of Franka as an artist. It is probably just as well that they didn't.
Franka spent her life studying people. She published a collection titled The Way It Walks in which 'it' is mankind itself. She and Stefan died within two months of each other shortly after I met them in 1988. They left behind a breathtaking legacy of literature and art for the rest of us to mar- vel at. I should like to think that art lovers with an hour or so to spare this autumn will spend it inspecting these fine memorials to a lifetime's creativity.
Readers who would like to see Franka's work but can't make this show may like to visit the Imperial War Museum, also in SE1, to look at another exhibition of hers which runs from October to January called Franciszka Themerson: Unposted Letters — a selection of her wartime drawings, 1940-1942. If you wish to read about the Themersons and Gaberbocchus, a book is just appearing in the USA called The Themersons and the Gaberbocchus Press: an Experiment in Publishing 1948-1979 (La Boetie Inc., 9 East 82nd Street, New York, NY 10028, USA, $25).
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