Jan (Janusz) Marian Kościałkowski was born to a Polish father and French mother in Vilnius, Russian Empire (now Lithuania) on 1 July 1914. He was educated in Poland and France and immigrated to London in 1946 with the Polish army after receiving a grant to study at Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design. Kościałkowski was a versatile modernist artist who rarely exhibited after the Second World War.
Painter, sculptor, draughtsman and poet Jan (Janusz) Marian Kościałkowski was born in Vilnius, Russian Empire (now Lithuania) on 1 July 1914 to a Polish father and French mother. After completing his studies at the Adam Mickiewicz Gymnasium in 1932 and passing his secondary school leaving exam the following year, he travelled to Paris to study for a year at the renowned École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts. He then returned to Poland to undertake military service. In 1936, he continued his formal art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he was taught by Tadeusz Pruszkowski and Mieczysław Kotarbiński. The outbreak of the Second World War dramatically changed his life. While trying to return to Vilnius, he was arrested by Soviet secret police in the spring of 1940 and exiled to Velsk in northern Russia. After a year, following the Soviet amnesty, he joined the newly formed Polish Army in the East, under General Anders. His return to western Europe took him through Iraq, Palestine, Libya, and Egypt, as part of the 2nd Polish Corps’ propaganda unit within the 5th Kresowa Infantry Division, arriving in Italy in 1944, where he fought in the bloody Battle of Monte Cassino.
During his time in the Middle East and Italy, Kościałkowski was a prolific painter and took part in nearly all the exhibitions organised by the 2nd Corps’ Department of Information and Propaganda. In 1943, he contributed a drawing to an exhibition of work by Polish soldier-artists held at the British Institute in Baghdad, arranged by the Department’s Art Section. Early in 1944, he participated in another exhibition of Polish soldier-artists, this time at the St. George's Hotel in Beirut. That year, eight of his sketches were included in a major exhibition of Polish soldier-artists in Rome organised by the 2nd Corps’ Department of Culture and Press. Melchior Wańkowicz's second volume of Battle of Monte Cassino features eight sketches by Kościałkowski During his time in Rome, he attended classes at the Academy of Art, where he was taught by the Italian Futurist Gino Severini. He also encountered the work of Piero della Francesca, which made a deep impression and remained a lifelong influence. Postwar, in 1946, he settled in England and, alongside several dozen other Polish artists, secured a scholarship to study at Sir John Cass College of Art and Craft in east London.
Kościałkowski's work is typically divided into four distinct periods: an early, youthful phase before his arrival in the UK; a Cubist period from 1947-60; an abstract period from 1960-69; and a final Classical period from 1969 until his death, marked by sculpture and etching. His style shows an emphasis on the immediacy of the creative act. He prioritised the present moment in his process, believing that only the artwork being created held genuine value, while past creations, regardless of the passion invested in them, inevitably lost their significance. His work reveals a deep connection to the natural world and its inherent structures, taking inspiration from organic forms and textures then transformed through a process of ‘drawing-writing’ with colour. He signed his pieces under a number of pseudonyms including J. Marian, Jan Marian, Marian, Marian Kruszyński (wife’s surname) or Marian Pouillet (his mother’s surname).
In England, Kościałkowski rarely exhibited his work, though he was a member of APA, the Association of Polish Artists in the UK, while his meeting with fellow Polish artist, Tadeusz Piotr Potworowski, on his arrival in the UK enabled him to secure his first solo exhibition at the respected Gimpel & Fils Gallery in London in 1948. In 1966 he held a solo show at the Drian Galleries, London, established by Polish émigré, Halina Nalecz. Back in Poland, small displays of Kościałkowski’s drawings took place at the CBWA (Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions) in Poznań and Szczecin in 1958 and 1959, and he received an important award from the Parisian journal Kultura in 1964.
Kościałkowski travelled widely in the Iberian Peninsula during the 1950s and became a British citizen in 1958. Following the end of his first marriage, Kościałkowski married Lidia Kruszyńska, who remained his devoted partner for the next thirty years. A serious health crisis occurred in 1965. Nevertheless, three years later, the couple purchased a house in Carrara, Italy, where he began sculpting in marble. Marian Kościałkowski died in Carrara, Italy on 14 July 1977 after a long illness. The following year, an exhibition of his work at London's Centaur Gallery (founded by fellow Pole, Jan Wieliczko) enabled Polish émigré artist/art historian, Stanisław Frenkiel to re-evaluate his artistic contributions. Jan Marian Kościałkowsk's work is not represented in the UK public domain; however, his archive, as well as several hundred of his works in all techniques, is located in the Emigration Archive of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland.