Collection Created with the Homeland in Mind

In 1967, almost twenty years after the inaugural exhibition at the Drian Galleries, Halima Nałęcz decided to donate a part of her own collection to the National Museum in Warsaw. This decision was influenced by at least a few factors. The main reason was the thought which occurred to Halima Nałęcz in the first years from the beginning of the Drian Galleries that her collection should enrich one of Polish museums. As she said in 1978, “I collected paintings thinking about my country”. An equally important factor, as it seems, which seriously influenced the decision to donate this collection of works of art to the National Museum, was the economic recession which was becoming increasingly acute from the beginning of the 1970s, causing a rise in the costs of maintaining the gallery, which was expanded in 1962 with the space of the adjacent building.

The difficulties connected with the costs of maintenance of the space twice the size as before forced the owner to reduce in 1976 the space to its 1962 size. Apart from that, in July 1975, Mateusz Grabowski, the owner of the Grabowski Gallery, functioning in London from 1959 till 1975, presented the National Museum in Warsaw and the Museum of Fine Arts in Łódź with a collection consisting of 386 works of art by Polish and foreign artists100. This collection was gathered during the course of 16 years of the gallery’s activities “including next to a few well‑known names mostly work by young artists, without an established position. The choice of the works was made by Grabowski himself and it says a lot about the collector’s tastes and preferences and his courage in taking decisions without undue regard for the opinions of others […] Today they are often the only works by prominent artists to be found in Poland due to the fact that those artists were invited by Grabowski to stage an exhibition in his gallery 30‑40 years ago. In order to appreciate the value of this collection, it is enough to look at the list of exhibitions, where those works were presented to the public, or just leaf through the biograms of the artists. There are artists whose artistic output is hardly known in Poland, but which is crucial to the country where they come from originally, like Pedro Terán (Venezuela), Achmed Parvez (Pakistan) or Eino Ruutsalo (Finland). In the 1950s many of them would come to Great Britain, where the good economic situation boosted human energy and released human potential, and created a need to build on post‑war ruins and create works of art. New galleries appeared at that time (and three of them had Polish roots: the Drian Gallery of Halima Nałęcz, the Grabowski Gallery of Mateusz Grabowski and the Centaur Gallery of Dinah and Jan Wieliczko), mainly commercial. From today’s perspective many important exhibitions were organized at that time, including presentations of American art (two large expositions were held in London in 1956 and 1959, the latter at the Tate Gallery), a presentation of the London branch of Groupe Espace (Royal Festival Hall, 1955) and This is Tomorrow (Whitechapel Gallery, 1956). The last two were based on a similar principle, namely on an attempt to combine painting, sculpture and architecture in one compound space surrounding a human being. The exposition This is Tomorrow consisted of 12 installation prepared by small groups, which included architects, designers and musicians. One of the groups was directed by Kenneth and Mary Martin, the other by Victor Pasmore (all of them artists whose works Halima Nałęcz presented, among others, on two collective exhibitions in 1961: 50 Artists from 16eme Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and Constructions — England 1950–1960); all of them involved in geometric abstraction and members of the group Constructionists”.

Halima Nałecz considered Mateusz Grabowski’s decision to donate his collection to Poland as a useful and most appropriate action.

Almost at the same time as Grabowski was working on his collection, from 1962 till 1976, Halima Nałęcz also managed to build her own collection with impressive paintings, sculptures and graphics, which she intended to donate to Poland. By the end of 1976, the National Museum in Warsaw received a collection of 181 works of art including 13 modern painting by Polish artists, 99 paintings by foreign artists, 62 sculptures, 4 graphics and 1 mosaic. Among the international artists there are names of 98 creators, representing mainly Great Britain, but also Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, Japan, Sweden, Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Argentina, Canada, the USA and Australia. The National Museum in Warsaw was enriched by works of Polish artists, including sculptures of Tadeusz Ilnicki and Jerzy Stocki, and paintings by Marek Żuławski, Marian Bohusz‑Szyszko, Halima Nałęcz, Zbigniew Adamowicz, Tadeusz Ilnicki, Franciszka Themerson, Lutka Pink and Zygmunt Turkiewicz.

At the beginning of 1978, after initial preparations, the National Museum in Warsaw organized an exhibition of works from the collection of Halima Nałęcz. Due to the stylistic range of presented works and the multiplicity of names, the catalogue of the exhibition included only general annotation concerning the collection presented from London, without attempting any greater description or synthesis.

The exhibition prepared by the National Museum in Warsaw was a very good occasion for Halima Nałęcz to come back to her homeland after 37 years of living outside its borders, in order to open the exposition of the works she donated herself. And like in the case of Mateusz Grabowski’s collection, the communist authorities in Poland used this event for their own propaganda purposes. The aim of the publications in the press was to “give a little hope and comfort to Poles”. This occasion was even more significant for the government in view of the fact that there were visible signs of increasing social unrest caused especially by the economic conditions, which were deteriorating at a great pace. The press and the media were tightly controlled, and they were used as a tool for propagating the rule of the communist regime, so it came as no surprise that all the notes and articles published in Warsaw and all around Poland at that time praised the generosity of the donor and her “great sentiment and love for the homeland”.

Five years later, Halima Nałęcz granted the next part of her collection to the National Museum in Gdańsk‑Oliwa. In October 1983, the gift consisting of 384 works of art arrived in Gdańsk on board the ship “Innowrocław” belonging to the Polish Ocean Lines. This collection included mainly paintings (including 60 works by Halima Nałęcz herself), but also graphics and sculptures by Polish and foreign artists. The gift presented by Halima Nałęcz was described by curator of the Section of Modern Art at the National Museum in Gdańsk as “having not only an exquisite artistic value, but also, in a sense, a historical dimension. It is so because it reflects the burning issues prevailing in world art for the last thirty years and shows the directions of development within art itself”105. The collection of works by international artists, consisting of 141 artefacts, included works by British artists and also artists from other European and non‑European countries, among others from the USA, Argentina, Venezuela, India, Japan and South Africa. Polish painting was represented in the London gift by the works of Zbigniew Adamowicz, Marian Bohusz‑Szyszko, Kazimierz Dźwig, Stanisław Frenkiel, Tadeusz Ilnicki, Andrzej Kuhn, Zbigniew Kupczyński, Halima Nałęcz, Lutka Pink, Andrzej Putrym, Halina Sukiennicka, Franciszka Themerson, Janina Żemojtel and Marek Żuławski.

Half a year after the works were delivered to Poland, on 10 April 1984 in The Abbots’ Palace in Oliwa, Halima Nałęcz opened the inaugural night of the exhibition of her own works, which included both the paintings offered to Gdańsk and 23 canvases belonging to Halima Nałęcz, which were brought specially for this exposition. On the opening night the artist was awarded two orders of merit “in recognition of the involvement of Halima Nałęcz in promoting Polish culture”: one for propagation of Polish culture and the other for promotion of the region of Gdańsk. Both the exposition and the presence of the London artist would foreshadow a large exhibition of all the works donated to Gdańsk, which was already in preparation at that time. A few months later, on 14 September 1984, Halima Nałęcz would arrive in Gdańsk with another visit for the inaugural night of the exhibition entitled: Works of Contemporary Artists. Gift of Halima Nałęcz from London for the National Museum in Gdańsk, which was arranged in several exposition rooms of The Abbots’ Palace in Oliwa107.

Open for half a year, the exposition attracted a lot of attention and, in the words of Dorota Hill who reviewed the event, “in spite of inevitable factographic gaps, the collection of Halima Nałęcz should satisfy even the most demanding connoisseur of modern art. Beginning with chronologically oldest works, there are paintings by artists, like Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, Leon Zack, Edgar Pillet, Aleksander Kobzdej, Douglas Portway, to mention some of them […] In terms of style, they represent non‑figurative, structuralist, abstract painting — but still they display a tendency to resort to natural forms and organic processes (Terry, Frost, Roger Hilton) and a predilection for gesture painting (Frank Avray Wilson). The next room — Hill says describing the exposition — introduces the famous name of Joseph Lacasse (1894–1975) and his Composition on the black Background from 1910. If we associate this date with the production of the first abstract watercolour by Wassily Kandinsky, it is easy to discern the significance of this artist in the world history of art. He is exposed in the company of Munford and intuitive visions of Japanese artist Paul Jean Foujino. The sequence of Japanese paintings explodes in subsequent rooms, where one can find enormous canvases of Keiichi Taté. If somebody had any doubts about the illuminating qualities of those paintings, they should be dispelled by the effect produced by the works of Louis Porter (USA). The motifs of the sun, trees, beach light out the dark places of their exposition, creating a somewhat too‑bright a threshold for too‑dark a room hosting a gouache by Michael Sandle, kept in the convention of lyrical abstraction, which relies primarily on the use of colour. The second floor of The Abbots’ Palace is filled with the paintings from the 1960s and 70s. One can find here a group of oils marked with well‑known names: Marian Bohusz‑Szyszko, Marek Żuławski, Andrzej Kuhn, David Messer, Andrzej Putrym, Janina Żemojtel, Stanisław Frenkiel. The collection of Halima Nałęcz over and over again facilitates contact with artistic individualities. There is William Crozier. There is John Bellany. The latter belongs among the unquestionable successes of the initiation triggered by Halima Nałęcz. His painting is now immensely popular around the world. The oils from the 1970s have a decisively thematic character. It is still aesthetic art, but presenting Man in the centre of his problems. It shows motivations behind contemporary behaviours, together with human morality and philosophy. John Bellany is to be found among the works by most recent artists, which terminate the rhythm of the collection. And in a characteristic way, even in the context of the world art, they are marked by a high degree of thematic content, by a return to realism, for instance Ray Walker’s At a Bus Stop. Coloured with the personality of Halima Nałęcz, this collection is a great lesson in the history of art”108. The decision of Halima Nałęcz to donate the collection to Poland was a very reasonable one, especially in view of the fact that in 1985, after the death of her husband, her everyday activities increased by all the duties connected with the closing of her late husband’s real estate business, which he had been successfully managing for many years. However, as she would often emphasize, despite all sad events and new situations she would not give up, although a thought about closing the Drian Galleries would more and more often assume the form of official declarations. A few weeks after the death of her husband in 1986, at the inaugural night of a retrospective exhibition of her own works, which coincided with making of the film Halima Nałęcz w krainie czarów109, and in the presence of Polish Consul Cezary Ikonowicz, Nałęcz said the following words: “This opening is different from so many others because I am not sure whether it is not the last one, after almost 30 years of my work here. The future of the gallery will be resolved within a few weeks. On my side, if I have enough strength, I will be trying to continue my work”.

The Drian Galleries continued its work in London for the next twenty years, with substantial assistance from Maryla Żuławska, who cooperated with the gallery owner from 1986, even though it was already in 1987 that the artists said in one of the reviews that she had already reached the “height of her dreams”. The event which was so remarkable was the exhibition of 87 paintings by Halima Nałęcz from the collections she previously donated to the National Museum in Gdańsk and Warsaw110, together with selected works of contemporary European and non‑European artists, organized in June 1987. However, what was more important was the venue of the exhibition — it was arranged in the rooms of Matejko and Narutowicz in the Zachęta Art Gallery in Warsaw. “When I was ten years old I would stand with Professor Stanisław Herbst in front of the Zachęta Art Gallery, which was both fascinating and intimidating in its enormous size. I would dream then about displaying my works there. And here I am. It happened. I have got an exhibition at the Zachęta”.

Naturally, Halima Nałęcz shared her satisfaction with her ‘Polish success’ also with Poles living outside the country. It was also the year of the 30th anniversary of the activity of the Drian Galleries in London.

The three‑week exposition in the Zachęta Art Gallery was very well received by the public, probably also because of the fact that, apart from the exhibition 4 × Paris, which took place in the Zachęta in 1984, there were very limited possibilities to compare the work of Polish artists with the work of European artists. It is true to say that there was an international art fair “Interart” organized on a regular basis in Poznań since 1984, but it was limited only to communist countries at that time and it offered only fragmentary overview of contemporary tendencies in art. Apart from that, it had a more commercial rather than artistic character.

The large selection of beautifully serene works gathered and exhibited at the Zachęta, vibrating with rich colours and illuminated by light tones, was to be the last display of her creative work in Poland. Four years later, at a collective exhibition Jesteśmy [We Are] showing the works of artists living outside of their homeland, there were no paintings by Halima Nałęcz (and the reasons why are still not very clear today). The London group of artists was represented by the paintings of Janina Baranowska, Marian Bohusz‑Szyszko, Stanisław Frenkiel, Magda Konarzewska, Marysia Lewandowska, Antoni Malinowski, Jan Pieńkowski and Rosław Szaybo.

For the next two years from her stay in Poland in 1988 and 1989, Halima Nałęcz organized a few more exhibitions of British and foreign artists at the Drian Galleries and finally brought her activities as promoter and patron to a closure. The last event to take place at the Drian Galleries was the exhibition of photo-montages by Basil Alkazzi, who was her long time favourite and her biggest discovery of the 1970s.

“When I look with wonder at all that happened — Halima Nałęcz said — it seems to me that I was not the driving force behind all that, but that there must have been some other force that directed everything. And today, when I receive catalogues of exhibitions from artist from all over the world, and I see my name as the first person who exhibited them, it gives me a lot of satisfaction, and I forget about all the hardships I went through. And there were indeed plenty of them”.

Taking into account all the effects of her lifelong activities as exhibitor and collector of art, one can say that Halima’s inspired and productive energy in collecting modern art must have had more sublime and profound roots than just a need to invest capital, to which she never gave a thought, and not only because she was the end of the line of the Krzywicz‑Nowohoński family from Antonowo. The passion for art offered her an opportunity to effectively use her intuition, especially in evaluating the work of artists who were little known then, but whose talent flourished with time. Throughout her life Halima Nałęcz managed to combine her collector’s enthusiasm with inspired creativity and in this way she successfully shaped her own world and her own lifestyle.

JAN WIKTOR SIENKIEWICZ , 2007