Felix Fabian was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Russian Empire (now Poland) though his exact birth year remains uncertain and variously recorded as 1906, 1909, and 1913. He was educated in Vienna and Rome and worked as an art director, before joining the Polish Army during the Second World War. Fabian moved to London in 1958 and is primarily remembered for his high society portraits.
Artist Felix Fabian was born into a Jewish family to Helena and Samuel Goldberg in Warsaw, Russian Empire (now Poland) though his exact birth year remains uncertain and is variously recorded as 1906, 1909, and 1913. He pursued his early art studies in Warsaw before continuing his education in Vienna and Rome. Fabian’s pre-war career included working as an art director for 20th Century Fox Films in 1934, a position that reflected both his aesthetic skill and the early integration of art into popular culture. By 1939, with war looming, he joined the revue troupe of Feliks Konarski, performing at the ‘Stylowy’ cinema theatre in Lviv, where he began as a set designer and later as a comic performer. He became known for his impersonations of Charlie Chaplin, among others. He remained active with the group even after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, performing across cities in the USSR until June 1941.
Following the outbreak of Operation Barbarossa, Fabian joined the Polish Army formed in Buzuluk, working with Konarski’s Theatre Company. He travelled across the military front with the 2nd Polish Corps, contributing to the theatrical and artistic life of displaced Polish soldiers during the war. He also painted extensively during this time, creating watercolours such as Advancing Soldiers (1942) and Boat on Water (1943), as well as portraits of various military and cultural figures. These works offer a visual record of wartime experience through a theatrical lens, balancing stylisation with psychological realism. After the war, Fabian was hired as a set designer on the 1946 Polish-Italian co-production The Great Way, and also worked for Cinecittà, the famed Italian film studio. By 1947, he had been assigned to a transport unit in the Polish Resettlement Corps. He spent a short time in London before moving to Buenos Aires in 1948, where he became an Argentine citizen. In Argentina, he worked as artistic director of Studio Parana, collaborated with the Polish émigré theatre Nasz Teatr, and set up his own studio. He continued to paint, producing genre scenes, still lifes and portraits.
Fabian returned to London in 1958, where he established the Fabian Art Studio and continued painting, while also travelling and exhibiting in the USA and Australia. He became a sought-after portraitist, producing images of major public figures, such as Pope Pius XII, Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Lord Alexander, General Anders, the Duke of Bedford, and HRH Princess Margaret. His portraits of Polish and international film and stage stars, including Renata Bogdańska and Geraldine Chaplin, also won acclaim. Many of his portraits of Lili Stern-Pohlmann, his close friend, were retained in her private collection and exhibited after her death. A figure of both society and spectacle, he received media attention in the 1960s for painting portraits in unconventional settings, such as a Soho strip club, where he sketched dancers in situ while completing commissions for prominent patrons. While evidence of exhibitions is sparse, a leaflet from the Polish Library at POSK in west London lists shows between 1952 and 1975 in cities such as Rome, Venice, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and London. UK venues included The Society (1958), Cassel Art Gallery (1968), and Hilton Art Gallery (1970–73). In 2025, the Polish Library in London mounted a solo exhibition of his work from the collection of Lili Stern-Pohlmann.
Fabian's style was eclectic and skilled, moving fluidly between classical oil portraiture, comic theatre designs, and wartime watercolours. His work remains difficult to categorise, as it blends commercial, theatrical, and fine art elements with a cosmopolitan fluency, shaped by migration and exile. However, it is often marked by expressive figuration and a blending of thick impasto with gestural brushwork to create portraits and genre scenes, rich in texture and vitality. His palette is often vivid and emotionally charged, ranging from earthy tones when he is depicting Jewish musicians, for example, to cooler, refined hues in formal society portraits. Across different media from oil to ink, his linework remains energetic and theatrical, revealing an artist attuned to the psychological presence of his subjects, as well as their performative surface.
Felix Fabian died in London, England on 4 January 1994 and is buried in Hoop Lane Jewish Cemetery in Golders Green. In the UK public domain his work is held in several collections, including the V&A and HRH Princess Margaret’s collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Felix Fabian ]
Publications related to [Felix Fabian ] in the Ben Uri Library