Janina Baranowska was born in Grodno, Poland in 1925; as a teenager, following the division of Poland between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia during the Second World War and the forced exile of many Poles to Kazakhstan, she eventually migrated to the UK with the Polish 'Anders' Army. Arriving In London in 1946, she studied painting and, later, ceramics and graphics. Alongside her painting, Baranowska designed stained glass windows for Polish churches in the UK and worked closely with the Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain (APA), serving as its founding secretary and president.
Painter, stained glass, ceramics and graphic artist Janina Baranowska (née Janina Zbaraszewski) was born into a Catholic family in Grodno, Poland on 28 October 1925. In 1939, her father Józef, who served in the military, was transferred from Grodno to Warsaw and when Janina and her mother tried to follow him, during the occupation and division of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in 1940, they were arrested and deported to Kazakhstan. In 1942, having lied about her age, she joined the Polish so-called ‘Anders’ Army under General Anders (comprising the Polish Armed Forces in the Soviet Union and many refugee civilians) and was evacuated in spring 1942, to begin the arduous trek back to Europe via the Middle East; her mother died during the journey. Baranowska's experiences in the Middle East would serve as a source of inspiration for some of her later artworks and her Catholicism often informed her religious subject-matter.
Baranowska eventually arrived in the UK in 1945, first settling in Edinburgh, Scotland before moving to London, England in 1946. She married architect Maksymilian Baranowski (1913–2008) with whom she had a son, Krzysztof. In the capital she studied under second-generation Polish-Jewish immigrant painter, David Bomberg, at Borough Polytechnic, between 1947 and 1950. As Bomberg’s youngest and, she alleged, his favourite pupil, she learned from him that form and composition should underpin all drawing and painting, also recalling that he encouraged his students to turn their works upside down to free them from the constraints of visual reality (interview with Rachel Dickson, 2020). Stylistically, from the 1970s, her earlier expressionism often gave way to lighter tones in a tighter format, with a strict geometrical grid often providing an underlying compositional framework. Baranowska followed her training as a painter with studies in ceramics and graphics at Putney School of Art (1955–56), enabling her to diversify her practice. In 1979, she won a competition held by the Union of Polish Airmen to design a stained-glass window for St Andrews Bobola in Shepherd's Bush, a centre for the London Polish Catholic Community. The window, located in the north transept, commemorates Polish airmen who fought in the pivotal Battle of Britain. (The window is located in the same church in which General Anders' funeral mass was celebrated in May 1970.) Baranowska also designed stained-glass windows for Holy Trinity Church in Wolverhampton in 1981.
As a painter, Baranowska held a solo exhibition at the Bloomsbury Gallery in London, as well as in spaces run by Polish émigrés, including the Drian (where she also exhibited mural tiles in 1962 in a show curated by fellow Pole, Jasia Reichardt). She was also an active member of the Women's International Art Club (WIAC), participating annually in group exhibitions in 1955–58, 1960–62, 1964–65, 1967–69, 1971–73, and 1975–76, and serving on the committee in 1968 and 1969. She also exhibited with the APA (Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain), POSK (Polish Social and Cultural Centre) – including a retrospective in 2015 – and Grabowski galleries, as well as in her native Poland, France and the USA. In 2014 her work featured in Pole Position: Polish Art in Britain 1939-1989Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain, with its accompanying catalogue (2020, BURU).
Beyond her own practice, Baranowska was also involved with various initiatives related to Polish artists in exile, including the School of Painting founded by Polish painter and former Anders army soldier, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko; the establishment of the APA, and the opening of several galleries run by Polish émigrés: Grabowski, Centaur, and Drian, all of which actively supported Polish artists in England. In 1980, she became chairman of APA and was its president from 1981–91. From 1965 to 2007, she was Director of the POSK Gallery in Hammersmith, London, W6, organising exhibitions and helping artists from Poland and other countries in accordance with its mission ‘to promote and encourage access to Polish culture in all its form to Poles and non-Poles’. Baranowska was also a board member of the National Society of Painters Sculptors and Printmakers. She received the Polish Golden Cross of Merit and the Badge of the National Treasury of the Republic of Poland.
Janina Baranowska died in London, England on 1 October 2022. Her work can be found in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection and POSK Collection, as well as in her homeland in the National Museum, Warsaw, the Museum of Art, Łódź, and the Archives of Emigration Artists at the University of Torun. In 2023 she featured posthumously in the exhibition Sheer Verve: The Women's International Art Club at Ben Uri Gallery in London.
Janina Baranowska in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Janina Baranowska]
Publications related to [Janina Baranowska] in the Ben Uri Library