Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1902 Warsaw, Kingdom of Prussia (now Poland)

Died: 1978 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1940

Other name/s: Halina Julia Korngold, Halina Korn-Zulawski

Biography

Painter and sculptor Halina Korn was born one of five children into a Jewish family in Warsaw, Kingdom of Prussia (now Poland) on 22 January 1902. Her father, Julian Korngold, was a representative of foreign leather goods companies, and her mother was brought up in a small provincial town near Lyon, France. During the 1920s, Korn studied journalism at the School of Political Sciences in Warsaw, while also taking singing lessons with Professor Adela Comte-Wilgocka and Stanisława Korwin-Szymanowska at the Warsaw Conservatory. Initially meeting Polish painter Marek Żuławski in 1938, a year later Korn encountered him again during a holiday in Brittany, France. They would later marry but, in the uncertainty of the early part of the war, Żuławski returned to London, where he had lived since 1937, while Korn left for Paris. After working as a typist for the Ministry of Social Welfare of the Republic of Poland in Paris, and then Angers, Korn escaped on a boat destined for the USA after the Nazi occupation of France in 1940. The boat arrived at Falmouth in Cornwall, England instead, and from a nearby refugee camp she wrote to Żuławski who managed to secure her a job at the Polish embassy in London.

Soon after arriving in London, Korn began painting and sculpting around 1941, and she exhibited two paintings, Fruit and Maida Vale, at the 41st Annual Exhibition of The Women’s International Art Club (WIAC) at Suffolk Street Galleries in 1942. Working for the Polish Embassy until 1946, Korn did not have much time to practice and develop her art. This was further impeded when in the same year she learned that her entire family had perished during the Holocaust, including her sister who died in Auschwitz, triggering a nervous breakdown resulting in Korn's first hospitalisation. Subsequently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Korn was regularly in and out of psychiatric clinics for the rest of her life.

Gradually, after the war, Korn returned to creating sculptures and paintings, her works standing as ‘a powerful testimony to her troubled state of mind and the release she found in art’ (Dickson, 2020). Without any formal artistic training, she relied on professional and emotional support from Żuławski, whom she married in 1948. The same year, she held her first solo London show, Paintings of London Life at the Mayor Gallery; the following year her work was included in Artists of Fame and of Promise at the renowned Leicester Galleries and The Royal Society of British Artists show at Suffolk Street Galleries. Often described as ‘naïve’, Korn’s artworks were nevertheless sophisticated in their use of composition and colour, and through them she demanded a sense of independent artistic identity by signing them ‘Halina Korn’; even after marriage (Bihalij-Merin and Tomašević, 2001). In the early 1950s, Korn worked for the BBC, writing about art and reviewing exhibitions for their ‘Round the Galleries’ broadcast. She also exhibited more frequently, showing with The London Group at the New Burlington Galleries and acknowledging her Jewish heritage in Ben Uri's Autumn Exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings by Contemporary Jewish Artists (both 1951); holding a solo show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1953, and participating in the Polish Painters in Britain exhibition at the Crane Gallery, Manchester in 1955 and with the Women's International Art Club through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. She also showed with the AIA on more than one occasion (1951 and 1956) and participated in Pictures for Schools at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1958, the same year she read from the English version of her childhood autobiography, Holidays end in September (which she would later unsuccessfully attempt to publish this in English with Dobson Publishers in 1965) at Stefan and Franciszka Themerson’s club for writers, artists and scientists at their Gaberbocchus Common Room in Maida Vale. With her reputation increasing, Korn was mentioned in G S Whittet’s article, ‘New British Artists’, in The Studio magazine in 1960, and in 1965 she participated in the international exhibition Artists Against Racialism at London's Savage Gallery, whose committee included Julian Huxley and Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the same year, after another period of depression, Korn underwent brain surgery. As a result, she stopped sculpting and painting for a time, and resigned from the WIAC in 1967, the year in which she completed her last painting, Paramedic (National Museum, Warsaw). In September 1974, after a serious heart attack, she was treated in Mabledon Hospital in Kent. Halina Korn died on 2 October 1978 in London, England and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. Posthumously, her work was shown at the Camden Arts Centre in 1981 and in New Frontiers of naive art in Europe at the Royal Festival Hall, London(1984), under the auspices of the Register of Naive Artists, (RONA), while her childhood memoir was eventually published in Polish in Warsaw in 1983. In 2017 one of her sculptures featured in Ben Uri's 2017 survey exhibition, Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain. In the UK public domain, her work can be found in the Ben Uri Collection.

Related books

Rachel Dickson ed., From Adler to Żuławski: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain (London: Ben Uri Research Unit, 2020)
Katarzyna Moskała, 'Between Fear and Art. A Woman in the Works of Halina Korn-Zuławska', Emigration Archive, Vol. 20-21, Iss. 1-2, 2014, pp. 364-387
Douglas Hall, Art in Exile: Polish Painters in Post-War Britain (Michigan: Sansom, 2008)
Philip Vann, Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century (London: Sansom, 2004), p. 69
Anthony Petullo and Margaret Andera, Self-Taught & Outsider Art: The Anthony Petullo Collection (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 83, 86, 210
Oto Bihalij-Merin and Nebojša-Bato Tomašević eds., World Encyclopedia of Naive Art: A Hundred Years of Naive Art (London: Frederick Muller, 1984), p. 365
Camden Arts Centre, Jewish Chronicle, 5 June 1981, p. 27
New Artists Forum, Jewish Chronicle, 14 May 1965, p. 22
Peter Stone, 'A Flush of Women', Jewish Quarterly, Vol. 7, Iss. 2, 1960, pp. 26-27
G. S. Whittet, 'New British Artists', Studio, Vol. 160, 1960, pp. 176-181
Pictures for Schools, Jewish Chronicle, 21 February 1958, p. 21
Martyn Goff, 'Marek Zulawski and Halina Korn', Studio, Vol. 152, 1956, pp. 108-111
AIA Sculpture exhibition, Jewish Chronicle, 27 April 1956, p. 27

Public collections

Ben Uri Gallery and Museum

Related organisations

BBC (employee)
The London Group (exhibitor)
Women's International Art Club (exhibitor)

Selected exhibitions

Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2017)
The Best of British Naive Painters, Barbican Centre, London (1984)
Halina Korn, Camden Arts Centre, London (1981)
The World as We See It. Graphics, Paintings, Sculpture, exhibition organised by International Women's Decade 1875-1985, Swiss Cottage City Library, London (1977)
Artists Against Racialism, Savage Gallery, London (1965)
Korn: Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings, New Artists' Forum, 7 Park Walk, London (1965)
Women's International Art Club, (1963-66, 1960-61, 1954-56, 1948, 1942)
Women's International Art Club, 1963-66, 1960-61, 1954-56, 1948, 1942
Halina Korn, Gallery One, London (1960)
Pictures for Schools, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1958)
AIA Sculpture exhibition, London (1956)
Polish Painters in Great Britain, Crane Gallery, Manchester (1955)
Halina Korn, Beaux Arts Gallery, London (1953)
London Group: Contemporary Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, New Burlington Galleries, London (1951)
Autumn Exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings by Contemporary Jewish Artists, Ben Uri Gallery (1951)
Second Paddington Art Exhibition, Paddington Hall, London (1950)
Artists of Fame and of Promise, Leicester Galleries, London (1949)
Royal Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street Galleries, London (1949)
Pictures for Schools, Tate Gallery, London (1948)
Paintings of London Life by Halina Korn, Mayor Gallery, London (1948)
Women's International Art Club, RBA Galleries, London (1948)
41st Annual Exhibition of The Women's International Art Club, Suffolk Street Galleries, London (1942)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Halina Korn]