Jan Wieliczko was born in Wilno, in newly independent Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) on 6 September 1919, and arrived in England during the Second World War as part of the Polish Air Force. In 1946, while still in uniform, he enrolled at the Slade School of Art, London, studying stage design under renowned tutor, Vladimir Polunin (1880-1957, set designer for Serge Diaghilev's legendary company, the Ballets Russes), eventually becoming his assistant. A prominent member of Polish cultural life in exile, he established the Centaur Gallery in London in 1960, with his wife, which supported many of his fellow countrymen, as well as other artists on the periphery of the English art establishment.
Jan Wieliczko was born in Wilno, in newly independent Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) on 6 September 1919. Both he and his brother Kazik served in the Polish Air Force in the Second World War, their wartime experiences and journeys into exile in the UK via the Middle East, Balkans and the Mediterranean, commemorated in their remarkable collaborative album of sketches, collages, photographs, maps and ephemera. The brothers began the album shortly before the outbreak of war, documenting their life in north east Poland, including membership of the Polish Scouts, followed by their wartime experiences. The album records that Kazik enlisted as an Officer of the Polish Air Force, becoming a bomber commander, and that Jan, following his example, was in basic glider training at the Air College at Świdnik when war broke out. Świdnik aerodrome, with its planes lined up on the airfield, shortly before invasion, is one of many memorable images, dramatically recording a tipping point in European history. Jan's son, Max, describes his father's album sketches and paintings as 'often witty, sometimes solemn, but always fresh and stylish, and their positioning alongside Kazik's documentary photographs makes for a powerful, and authentic contemporary manuscript'. The brothers subsequently arrived in Liverpool, England sometime in 1943 as part of the Polish Air Force. It can be deduced from the album that they flew in 'Operation Neptune' in 1944 as part of the D Day invasion of France's Normandy beaches. The album, with its dramatically embossed cover, patriotically displaying the Polish eagle, records their war as pilots, but also as artists - tragically including Kazik’s own death, flying a subsequent bombing raid over Essen in Germany.
Postwar, Jan remained in London, enrolling at the Slade School of Art in 1946, while still in uniform, studying under renowned émigré stage designer, Vladimir Polunin (set designer for Diaghilev's legendary Ballets Russes). Eventually becoming his assistant, the influence of the Russian is clearly evident in the theatricallity and use of flattened compositions in Wieliczko's later semi-abstract paintings. The final album images record this more settled period, with photographs capturing a new lighter mood of postwar leisure. Max Wieliczko further suggests that the 'album is representative of a common need for artists to continue to express themselves creatively, notwithstanding the circumstances, and the contribution that such personal and contemporaneous works make to our collective history'. In 1960 Jan and his English wife, Dinah, in partnership with an Austrian Jewish refugee from Berlin, Rita Masseron (previously Rita Maschler, mother of Tom Maschler, publisher and husband of acclaimed food writer and critic, Fay Maschler) opened a small shop at 82 Portobello Road in west London 'at the top end next to the bureau de change. It was a crazy mixture of quirky old objects and modern paintings, sculpture and flimsy cut paper hangings from Poland that swayed as you passed by [...] an advertisement for their Centaur Gallery, Highgate Village, North [sic] London in a listed building having been the old abattoir decades before' (Jilliana Ranicar-Breese memoir). Life-writer, Ranicar-Breese further recalls wonderful parties held by the Wieliczkos in their Highgate premises, which attracted a bohemian and Polish crowd, including fellow émigré, feminist, film-maker, writer and painter, Mira Hamermesh.
The Centaur Gallery remained central to Polish visual culture in exile and hosted group exhibitions for the Association of Polish Artists (APA, founded in 1955) in 1975, 1989, 1993 and 1996. Centaur also held exhibitions for individual APA members, including Stanisław Frenkiel, Marian Kościałkowski, Ryszard Demel, and Andrzej Kuhn, the latter designing a roundel celebrating the gallery's 40th anniversary in 1997. Wieliczko also showed his own paintings and often, quirky, totemic-like, assembled sculpture, frequently inspired by music and by historical figures. However, the gallery's focus was not exclusively Polish, and in 1962 Centaur hosted a solo show for progressive Indian émigré painter, Sadanand Bakre. The gallery finally closed in 1999.
Beyond Centaur, Wieliczko showed regularly in London, primarily within a Polish context, and was featured in the important August 1995 exhibition at POSK (Polish Social and Cultural Institute) Gallery, King Street, Hammersmith, west London, entitled Forma i Kolor / Form and Colour, under the auspices of the Congress of Polish Culture and which aimed to highlight the 'Polish presence in contemporary art in Great Britain for the past fifty years' (Foreword, Forma i Kolor catalogue, 1995). The text also acknowledged Wieliczko's important role with 'the commercial activity of the Polish galleries'. He also exhibited with the Hampstead Arts Council. Jan Wieliczko died in London, England on 5 November 2003. Posthumously, his painting 'Blue Lancer', depicting a mounted soldier from the famous Polish Uhlan cavalry, in his distinctive flattened and angular, modernist style, from the POSK Collection, was featured in Ben Uri's exhibition Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain (2017), with an associated publication (BURU 2020) and in 2024, he featured in Ben Uri's exhibition, Cosmopolis: Refugee Art Dealers in Twentieth-Century London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jan Wieliczko]
Publications related to [Jan Wieliczko] in the Ben Uri Library