Did you know that Britain and Poland are celebrating an intense cultural exchange? That between now and November more than 100 events are taking place across both nations as we touch fingers above the great European divide, like God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling? There’s even a logo for the initiative: a sweet rectangle of greenish-turquoise with the words “UK/Poland Season 25” sitting smartly in the middle.
No, of course you didn’t know all this was going on. Hardly anyone does. I was at the launch of the “exchange” at the British Film Institute in early March and despite the best efforts of Chris Bryant, Labour’s minister for creative industries, arts and tourism, to inject some vim into the event with a rousing speech from the stage, it’s fair to say that the UK/Poland Season 25 has so far managed to arouse nothing and no one. Why?
It certainly isn’t from a lack of effort. Not from the Polish end. Pretty much every sizeable Polish city, from Warsaw to Krakow, from Gdansk to Lodz, has something notable happening in its theatres, music venues and galleries. At the Museum of Art in Lodz, the artists of St Ives — Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon — are being paired with their Polish counterparts. In May, in Wroclaw, a media art biennale will present 21 premieres. In June there is a giant festival of sound in Warsaw. In Britain, no one seems to be taking it seriously.
Yes, in June, Polish photographers are being featured at the Belfast Photo Festival. Yes, between May and October a season of Polish jazz is arriving at Ronnie Scott’s in London. But you need to search hard in the lists to find these outliers. Tate Modern has nothing planned. The National Theatre has nothing on in London. When it comes to involving themselves in the UK/Poland Season 25, Britain’s chief cultural institutions are making zero effort. Why?
As you will have gathered, I have skin in this game. With its pack of crunchy consonants, my name alone signals my bellicose origins among the “sledded Polacks” of whom Shakespeare complains in Hamlet — the ones Hamlet’s father smote on the ice in his pre-ghost salad days.
Once, after I had given the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay a bad review, he published a postcard with the caption: “Waldemar Januszczak: Within this thicket there lurks a name”. A few weeks later he brought out another, saying: “Repatriate Waldemar”. I had to write to him to point out that I was born in Basingstoke.
At school, and in every subsequent situation involving a discussion of European history, I was frequently amazed by how little knowledge there was in Britain of the unrolling of Polish history. Even something as crucial as the Russian invasion of Poland in 1939 — when the Nazis came in from the west, the Russians came in from the east — seemed somehow to have slipped out of the textbooks.
More recently, the brain fuzz that descends on the British mind when Polish history is involved was brought home to me by events surrounding the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948. Quite rightly, the shocking treatment of the Caribbean migrants on board became the subject of widespread condemnation. Books were written. Statues were put up. Films were made. But nowhere did I hear a single squeak about the 66 Polish women and children who were also on board the Windrush when it docked.
History had chewed up their lives and dumped them in Mexico. Husbandless, fatherless, stateless, they too arrived here as a Windrush generation. My mother, who got here by a different route, having been taken to Siberia on a cattle truck by the invading Russians in 1939, had no papers either. It wasn’t till I went to university and learnt how not to be cowed by the Home Office that I was finally able to get her a passport.
A brilliant Polish polymath
Poland’s fate in Britain is to constitute a forgotten populace. There may be nearly a million Poles here, and Polish may be the second most-spoken language in the country after English, but when did you last see a documentary about them on the BBC? Yes, everybody knows a Polish plumber or builder or bus driver, but in the diversity wars, Poles are not diverse enough. Culturally, the Iron Curtain has never really been lifted. It’s why the UK/Poland Season 2025 has so far had almost zero impact.
I say “almost zero” because, thankfully, one small but splendid event has managed to break the shackles. At the National Portrait Gallery, the brilliant Polish polymath and stiletto-wielding draughtsman Stanislaw Wyspianski (1869-1907), has been given a chance to impress with a selection of his extraordinary portraits.
They’re extraordinary because they’re so active. Good portraitists capture your looks. Brilliant portraitists capture your mind, your temperament, your mood. Wyspianski was one of those.
His portraits of friends, family and lovers are done in pastel, a fugitive medium that falls easily off the paper and really shouldn’t travel. But the National Museum in Krakow has taken the risk and 16 of these precious records of the Polish fin de siècle face have made the journey.
In most hands, pastel is a soft and gentle medium. In Wyspianski’s grasp, it becomes nervy, intricate, interrogative. He’s particularly good with children, spotting wilfulness and terror in their eyes. His women, meanwhile, stare out at you with the high-cheeked disdain that is a speciality of the distaff side of the forgotten populace.
It’s impressive art. I wish there was more of it.
What did the Poles ever do for us?
The Heart of Darkness author Joseph Conrad grew up in Poland, later settling in London. He only learnt to write in English when he was in his twenties.
King Canute of England (1016-35) was the son of the Polish princess Swietoslawa, daughter of Mieszko I of Poland.
John Gielgud was descended from a Polish-Lithuanian noble family.
Rosena Allin-Khan, Labour MP for Tooting and former shadow minister for mental health, is the daughter of a singer in the 1960s Polish girl band Filipinki.
Charles Edward Stuart, “Bonnie Prince Charlie”, was the son of the Polish noblewoman Maria Clementina Sobieska, granddaughter of the Polish king John III Sobieski.
What exhibitions have you enjoyed recently? Let us know in the comments below
Stanislaw Wyspianski: Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, to Jul 13