Stanislaw Brunstein was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland) in 1914, training at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, he was imprisoned by the Soviets and exiled to Kazakhstan before being released to join the Polish 'Anders' army. He arrived in Britain in 1946 to work as a stage designer in the Yiddish theatre and, from 1962 onwards, he specialised in painting images of the lost world of Polish Jewry.
Artist Stanislaw Brunstein was born into a middle class Jewish family in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland) on 27 October 1914. He trained at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris but was subject to anti-Semitism. Lorna Brunstein, his daughter who is also an artist, commented on her father's experience of being a Jewish student, stating that 'when he went to art lectures before the war he had to stand – he was not allowed to sit like other students because he was a Jew' (Dorset Echo). In Warsaw, he worked for the Jewish theatre as a set designer. He also produced satirical cartoons for newspapers, in which he criticised fascism, and was therefore forced to flee during the German occupation of Poland in autumn 1939. Attempting to escape to Russia, on 15 November 1939, he was captured and imprisoned by Stalin's police. He then endured 14 months in solitary confinement before he was sent to Vorkuta Corrective Labour Camp in May 1941. He was also exiled to northern Kazakhstan to work on a collective farm. He was eventually released in 1942 to join the Polish army in the East under General Anders, on its arduous return journey to western Europe. He was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. After the war ended, he spent a year studying scene design at the Rome Art Academy, as part of his migration with the Anders army.
In 1946 he immigrated to England to work as a stage designer in the Yiddish theatre in the East End of London. Here, he met and married actress and activist, fellow refugee Esther Brunstein, née Zylberberg, in 1949 who had survived the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz, and with whom he had two daughters; In 1952 he became a naturalised British subject. As well as creating stage designs, Brunstein was also a prolific painter, From 1948 onwards he exhibited with Ben Uri Gallery. From 1962 onwards, he specialised in images of the lost world of Polish Jewry, his naive style particularly suited to his preferred subject, the shtetl (small Jewish villages which existed across eastern Europe before the Holocaust). After his death, a book of his paintings was published entitled The Vanished Shtetl: The Paintings of Stanislaw Brunstein. These images captured the daily lives of orthodox Jews in eastern Europe, depicting prayer houses, religious schools and homes, rabbis, farmers, street traders, and workers, to convey the tragic loss of culture and lives during the Holocaust. He also worked as a tailor and designer of children's clothes while Esther took on various roles, including as a dental nurse, Yiddish interpreter, translator and teacher. She also gained wider recognition for her Anti-Nazi activism throughout the 1990s, addressing the UN in New York in 1998 on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and opening the Holocaust exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2000. Brunstein's daughter Lorna, also an artist, often explores the themes of intergenerational trauma resulting from the Holocaust endured by both parents, and has incorporated both written and painted works by her father into her own practice. In spring 2021, as part of an online symposium on Migration, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists, organised by the University of Leicester, she discussed her father's work with Katie O’Brien (Director of 44AD Artspace, Bath), under the title 'Inherited Trauma, Place, Embodied Memory and Artistic Practice'.
Stanislaw Brunstein died in London, England on 19 October 1994. His work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection and the Imperial War Museum.
Stanislaw Brunstein in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Stanislaw Brunstein]
Publications related to [Stanislaw Brunstein] in the Ben Uri Library