In search of  "Wonderland" 

by  JAN WIKTOR SIENKIEWICZ

Halima Maria Krzywicz‑Nowohońska1 was born on 2 February 1914 in Antonowo in the Vilnius region in the district of Grodzieńsk on a family estate belonging to landowner Antoni Krzywicz‑Nowohoński2 and his wife Larysa Domańska. At the beginning of the Polish‑Bolshevik war the Nowohoński family were forced to abandon their estate and leave the area of Vilnius. Together with her family Halina found herself in Jarosław on the Volga. Just after her arrival in Ukraine, Halina’s father died unexpectedly. In 1920 Halina returned with her mother to Antonowo, which was seriously damaged during the war; however, they would not stay in their family house for long. Shortly after, they moved to Warsaw3, then they moved back to Antonowo, only to settle in Vilnius were Halina started regular school at the age of ten. After finishing a 3‑year education at the Czartoryski Gymnasium, she continued her secondary education for 6 years at the Liceum Filomatów in Vilnius. Upon graduation she moved on to study painting at the Stefan Batory University under the supervision of Professor Michał Rouba. Previously, she had attended evening courses on painting run by the Professor already during her secondary education — mainly because of the encouragement she received from her arts teacher at school, Kazimiera Adamska, who happened to be the wife of Michał Rouba. So even though, as she said herself, there was no tradition of painting in her family, her choice of studies was seriously influenced by the atmosphere of her family home, in which they cultivated musical traditions4. In 1936, at the age of 22, Halina Nowohońska married an engineer called Stanisław Jastrzębiec‑Więckowski, Capral of the Third Regiment of Podhale Rifles (Strzelcy Podhalańscy — the name for the mountain infantry units). During the campaign in September 1939, he served as an aide‑de‑camp to General Józef Ustroń from the 21st Mountain Division. The marriage did not last long. Halina Więckowska’s husband died in 1941 in one of the German POW camps. Her mother died in the same year, on the way of their escape to Lithuania, from where Więckowska planned to leave for Canada through Vladivostok. Finally, due to the beginning of the German‑Soviet war Halina found herself in Moscow. With the assistance of her uncle General Strzemiński, who was staying at that time in England, she received a British visa and through Odessa and Turkey she reached Haifa6. That was where she joined a women’s assistance service at YMCA which was forming by the II Corpus of the Polish Army, where she became a decorator, helping with decoration of military interiors, like community centres, casinos, officers’ quarters, soldiers’ tents etc., and creating scenography for school performances. As she later recalled, “for many years I would decorate day‑rooms for soldiers in military clubs; I would organize and prepare performances to commemorate anniversaries, festivals and visits of important officials, for instance that of General Władysław Sikorski. We even staged Halka with stage‑props made with whatever bits and pieces that were at hand. We turned Australian hats into highlander hats and out of various pieces of fabric we would sew stage costumes”7. For the scenography for Halka Halina received special thanks from General Sikorski, and he “promised to lead her in the first pair in a traditional Polish dance, the Mazurek, which they would dance in Warsaw in a free Poland”.

The new geopolitical situation in Poland after 1945 practically obliterated the prospect of her return to Poland9. Halina Więckowska, like thousands of Polish women forced in 1939 to leave their homeland behind them, had to find her place in a new situation. In 1946, after the demobilization of the army, she worked for a year in a convalescence home for recuperating soldiers and then in a fashion shop Aida‑Rowell in Jerusalem. “I remember her — Stanisław Frenkiel said in 1992 — from the time of war, from Jerusalem. She worked at that time in a section dealing with education and propaganda run by the Polish authorities in Jerusalem. She was an exceptionally beautiful and elegant woman with exquisite personal charm and an attractive figure”.

Jerusalem turned out to be a short stopover on her way to her home in Europe. It was there that she attended a 3‑month course in general medicine, medical care and first aid. She also did hospital practice under the terms of the British Red Cross in order to qualify as an assistant nurse. She passed the exam with the Medical Commission approved by the Delegate of the Polish Government and the Polish Red Cross in Palestine.

However, she did not become a nurse. As a result of English‑Palestinian riots in Jerusalem, she was forced to leave again. In 1848 she arrived in Lebanon, where she signed a contract to leave for England as a member of the staff of the European Volunteer Worker. “I never thought — as she recalled in 1986 — of going to England, even though in the Middle East I was engaged to an English colonel. We planned to leave for South Africa at the end of the war. Unfortunately, he was demobilized and left for England, and I was left alone under bombardment in Palestine. I was waiting for the British visa, which would never come. Finally, in order to obtain it, I had to sign a 5‑year contract for a job in Britain. However, I imagined that I would work in my profession as a decorator or painter, or at least that I would be working on some artistic projects. As it turned out, I was commissioned to work in a spinning factory. And it was an incredible experience. I was among a group of women from all around the world, who were often very simple or even primitive. It was very unlike the lifestyle I was used to in the Middle East”.

In Great Britain Halima Nałęcz was assigned to work in a cotton spinning factory, from where she was moved to one of London’s stockings factories13. In 1952, “after five years of hard work — as she remembered — I decided to end it. I went to a ball in the White Eagle Club and there, during one evening, I received several proposals of marriage. I chose Mr Zygmunt Nałęcz, [a pre‑war graduate of the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius]. Our marriage lasted 33 years”.

As of that time, assuming the artistic pseudonym ‘Halima’, which eventually substituted her first names Halina Maria, a previously unknown Polish woman made her entrance into the artistic circles of London. After marrying Zygmunt Nałęcz, Halima decided to return to her painting studies, which had been interrupted by war activities. An opportunity like this for Polish expatriates was created by the School of Easel Painting under the aegis of the Academic Society of the Stefan Batory University organized and run by Marian Bohusz‑Szyszko, which later, in the 1970s, became part of the Polish University Abroad (PUNO) as the Institute of Fine Arts. The Polish University Abroad came into being in 1949 in London at a meeting of professors and academics, in majority the staff from the previous Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, who had been living as expatriates in Great Britain since the end of WW II. The stimulus behind the organization of this academic centre for the Polish emigrant community came from a profound concern of the émigré society about the future of scholarship and national culture and also from the need to preserve unity among the large diaspora of Poles, who had adopted Great Britain as their new homeland15. An important feature of the School of Easel Painting was its tradition, which dated back to the war. The school was a continuation of the Rome School of Painting, which was created on Italian soil and included soldier‑artists within the structures of the II Corpus of the Polish Army. When the II Corps was moved to England in 1946, the school changed its profile and name into the so‑called Company of Artists, and then it developed into the School of Easel Painting. The founding father and the Head of the school until his death in 1995 was Marian Bohusz‑Szyszko.

Halima Nałęcz was one of the first graduates of the School. She received the diploma from Bohusz’s studio in 1953, and then she continued her painting studies outside Great Britain. In France she studied under Belgian abstractionist Jean Henri Closon in his Paris studio. It was also in Paris that she met the owner of a prestigious gallery of modern art Denise René and thanks to her she was able to broaden her creative horizons with a range of inspirations from French modern art, which at that time was hardly known in the British Isles.

This is where Halima had the first thought about starting her own art gallery. On her arrival back in London from Paris in 1956, Halima organized an exhibition of her own paintings, the result of her French inspirations, at the Walker’s Gallery in New Bond Street. Opened by the wife of then President August Zaleski, the exhibition brought two‑fold benefits for Halima: first, the exhibition earned her a favourable reception from the critics, who appreciated Halima’s abstract oil compositions and second, the occasion led her to meet two English painters Denis Bowen and Frank Avray Wilson. It is these two painters who convinced Halima to the idea of opening a new art gallery together with them, which came to be called the New Vision Gallery.

From the New Vision to the Vision of one’s own Gallery

It is commonly accepted that the presence of modern art in London galleries was initiated with the opening of the New Vision Gallery in 1956 and the Drian Gallery in 1957. However, English painter, art critic and co‑founder of the New Vision Gallery at the same time Denis Bowen believes that some trends connected with the appearance of avant‑garde art on English soil were to be observed much earlier: in an interview in 1986 Bowen recalled that already in 1950, he and Halima Nałęcz were organizing exhibitions of the works of students from the Central School of Art and Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts in London. At that time the arts centre of the capital of Britain was situated in Bond Street, with its most prestigious and legendary Walker’s Gallery. However, in its exhibition and promotional activities this gallery tended to avoid artists who would not be generally known or those who would create so‑called ‘difficult art’. “When I had my first exhibition in Bond Street — as Halima recalled — it attracted many artists, as it was the first exhibition of abstract painting in that gallery. At that time we would complain that there was no place to exhibit our works, as there were only three galleries in London which showed any real interest in modern art”.

In the middle of the 1950s, the main aspiration of Denis Bowen, his friend Frank Avray Wilson and Halima Nałęcz was to establish an art gallery which would focus on artists whose work was disregarded on Bond Street and who, therefore, did not stand a chance of appearing in prominent exhibitions.

In 1956, the aspirations of the three artists became a reality. Bowen, Avray and Nałęcz opened together a new gallery of modern art, and the place they chose was situated at 4 Seymour Place, Marble Arch. The idea of starting a gallery was, as a matter of fact, a continuation of an earlier initiative of Bowen, who had started a New Vision Group five years earlier with the aim of integrating young artists from artistic schools in London. As Denis Bowen recalled, “Through her connections in Paris, Halima made it possible for us to meet artists from France, which contributed considerably to the professional image of the New Vision Gallery. Thus from the very beginning our activities had an international profile and I think that both of us (after the opening of the Drian Gallery) exhibited artists from all around the Commonwealth, Australia, Pakistan, India and even the USA, Japan and the majority of European countries. I would concentrate on abstract painting, but Halima was the first to discover the huge potential in the painting of new figuration”.

Hence it was not only the narrow field of abstract painting, Halima’s main passion in the 1950s and 60s, that she would consider as her chance for artistic fulfilment. More so, she would recognize her chance in applying her creativity to vast areas of art with thematic content and representational motifs. As well as that, she decided to seek her professional fulfilment in running her own gallery. The fact of Halima’s somewhat abrupt departure from the project of the New Vision Gallery was not considered as an act of ‘secession’ caused by the rules of competition on the art market. On the contrary, through the subsequent years these two galleries, the New Vision Gallery and Halima’s Drian Gallery, cooperated with each other very closely, as it was obvious to the owners that the expositional space in London at that time was of immense value and the few commercial galleries which were on the market were unwilling to support young artists24. Denis Bowen believed that only a few artists had a sufficient knowledge at that time about modern art and the limited number of magazines dealing with art would not devote too much space even to already renowned artists, hidden along the Cornish coast.

In 1957, Halima Nałęcz, as she says, “became mature enough to start her own gallery”. At 7 Porchester Place, in a building situated near the New Vision, she opened such a gallery, which she called “Drian.”

From 1957 the Drian Gallery of Halima Nałęcz and the New Vision Gallery26, together with the already important Gallery One, managed by Victor Musgrave and the Obelisk Gallery run by Jimmy McMalem, were the only exhibitional institutions which would facilitate the presentation of works by young and promising avant‑garde artists28. “But in fact — as Denis Bowen says — it was only our two galleries which facilitated the exhibition of works by artists from outside the mainstream tendencies in exhibition and promotion of art”, which were limited to the small area of London Mayfair.

In the year of the opening of the Drian Gallery Halima Nałęcz was forty three years old. She was about to embark on a new and totally independent stage of her professional life, which lasted until the end of the 20th century. The road she had to travel in order to find her own place in the London art market was often difficult and sometimes even painful.

Drian Gallery — Mondrian and the Butcher’s Shop

It took Halima Nałęcz less than a year to move from the concept of starting her own gallery to the decision to leave the New Vision. “I grew up to a moment — as she remembers — at which I decided that I could have my own gallery. Near the New Vision I found a building at 7 Porchester Place, which was a closed butcher’s shop Clark & Son. The place was perfect and I rented that spot. But in order to hang pictures instead of meat on the butcher‑hooks in this location we had to work unbearably hard on repairs and adaptation of all rooms”.

“In […] 1957 — as we read in one of the manuscripts by Halima Nałęcz — I decided to give it a try and open my own ‘Drian Gallery’. Various travels through France, Italy, Spain and Germany would interrupt my hard work. Visiting galleries and exhibitions all over Western Europe, meeting painters and sculptors of divergent nationalities opened the world to me. I started buying paintings according to the rule that for every one of my paintings that was sold I would buy a sculpture or a painting done by friends. Soon, the list of candidates for an exhibition in my gallery started to grow. As payment (especially from young artists) I would take a painting or a sculpture. Each penny earned through selling was invested in further collections and due to intensive advertising campaigns the prices would increase. In order to build a capital for managing the gallery and helping my friends, I would sell to make profit. In the end the gallery became famous. I was interested in difficult and unknown works and artists. I organized exhibitions which were historically important [on British soil]. I was the one to show for the first time the works of Vasarely and Stephenson”.

The main expositional room of the gallery, with its main, safe and representational entrance from the street, was prepared on the ground floor of the building. Soon after, with the help of friends and artists, the first‑ and second‑floor of the building were adapted for the exhibition activities of the gallery, and they were also designed to hold the archive and the store of the gallery. “At the time of repair and building work on the upper floors — as the artist remembered in 1989 — we held ‘coffee parties’ in the spacious basement, during which artists like Crozier, Irvine and Tamir would decorate the walls with mural paintings, which are to be found there to this day”.

During these intense preparations some other interesting incidents occurred. Among the more interesting, the painter would often recall the day that the floor‑boards were being prepared to be put in the main room of the gallery. She remembers she noticed that one of the boards was missing. To her surprise she discovered that in a surge of creative energy Peter Clough was using it as a board for painting. The result was so good that instead of a fragment of the floor she had a new painting for the inaugural exhibition, and the item was sold immediately to an important collector34. The adaptation of the rooms was just half of the work that needed to be done before the opening exhibition. The second half, that is the name of the gallery, as Nałęcz would often emphasize, was as important in creating the first impression as the elegant interior and the works gathered inside. Consequently, the choice of the name was crucial to the success of the new exhibition centre as a whole.

The idea for the name of the gallery Halima explained in 1963 for the London “The Studio” in the following way: “It was a need to create an original name, which would summarize and emphasize the character of the gallery rather than the name of its owner and which would carry within itself something more than just a message that there appeared just another gallery outside Mayfair”.

Thirty years later Halima Nałęcz would describe the very moment of inventing the name in much simpler terms: “I wanted a short name. So I opened a book about art, and I saw the name Mondrian. It was some kind of a solution — an abstract painter and I valued this mode of painting very much. Thus the abbreviation “Drian” seemed to fit the character of the planned gallery and my own tastes”.

And the very function of the butcher’s shop changed from exhibiting meat products into exhibiting human talent in the form of paintings and sculptures — in order to become the spiritual food for aesthetic minds.

Finally, on 23 October 1957, the first gallery of modern art in Great Britain organized and managed by a Polish artist initiated its activities38. “It was — as Halima remembered — a new quality on the London art market. Even the very place, which was a bright, well‑lighted and open space was something unusual and even avant‑garde, especially in view of the fact that London galleries at that time were arranged in a traditional way: with dark light and plush tapestries on the walls”.

For the three subsequent years the gallery was spelled in the singular: Drian Gallery. The name changed into plural Drian Galleries in November 1960, when the gallery hosted a large individual exposition of the works of Belgian abstractionist Joseph Lacasse40 and Halima Nałęcz extended the exhibition area of her gallery with new rooms, renting an additional flat in the adjacent tenement house41. After connecting both buildings through the ground floor and the first floor a new exhibition space was created, which would allow for the organization of exhibitions twice the size of those organized so far. For the next 16 years the gallery of Halima Nałęcz functioned in the rooms of both buildings, and it was only in 1976 that the owner of the gallery returned to the situation from before 1960 using one building only. This was caused by the high costs of maintenance, including rent and heating, of a large expositional space like that. Still, the name of the gallery remained unchanged. With the opening of her own gallery this educated painter became at the same time a recognized and respected patron of the arts.

“She managed to combine painting — Stanisław Frenkiel would remember — with running the gallery. So as the owner and manager of the gallery she would wear a different hat than at the time when she was a painter. However, these two areas are intertwined, as she would also show her own paintings in the gallery. But her opinion as art patron and manager of the gallery was totally independent […] Her gallery was always perfectly administered in terms of business management. Halima Nałęcz would have complete trust of the artists, and the gallery hosted various colourful people from the area of Polish and foreign art”. Apart from that, the gallery was visited by a plethora of personalities from the artistic world of London, both English and Polish. Participation in the opening nights at exhibitions in the Drian Galleries functioned at times as a specific form of manifestation of the attitude of the Polish emigrant community, which consisted in rejecting cooperation with communist Poland. However, Halima Nałęcz never supported the attitude of the so‑called ‘unbreakable’ London, which boycotted as a rule all initiatives in the area of broadly understood cultural activities43. An attitude like that would often create a situation in which artists living in London who decided to show their works in Poland “were often exposed to the criticism from the Polish emigrant circles”. As Rafał Habielski wrote, “the way of thinking of the Polish London, that is its ‘unbreakability’ had also an apolitical dimension. It manifested itself in expressing nostalgia for the past, in cherishing memories about history and in evaluating the outside world through a traditional perspective. The concern for preserving Polish culture against ideological deformations to which it was exposed within the native borders directed the attention of some emigration groups to focus on matters exclusively Polish. Thus the emigrant community would isolate itself, partly on purpose and partly inadvertently, in a world created by themselves for themselves. The inevitable consequence of an attitude like that was a lack of trust and antipathy towards the outside world”.

Halima Nałęcz was far from assuming radical attitudes, which would close her off from the possibility of choosing artists also from behind the “iron curtain” and showing their artistic output, even though her interest in Polish artists working in Poland and in their work was significantly smaller than that of Mateusz Grabowski, who ran another Polish gallery. Apart from that, some exhibitions, like for example the jubilee exhibition of the works of Marian Bohusz‑Szyszko in October 1963, with General Anders and Edward Count Raczyński present on the opening night, were undoubtedly a manifestation of a power centre competitive towards then President of Poland‑in‑Exile August Zaleski. This power centre was the so‑called the Council of Three, from 1954 till 1972, the organ of the executive authority of the Polish emigrant community, including Władysław Anders, Tomasz Arciszewski and Edward Raczyński.

In a relatively short time from appearing on the cultural landscape of the capital of Great Britain, the Drian Galleries established a very distinct profile among London galleries dealing in the promotion and sale of modern art. Already the very first decade of the functioning of the gallery on the London art market established its position among avant‑garde institutions of a similar profile, turning Halima Nałęcz into one of the leading experts in the field of modern art and co‑organizer of London artistic life. At that time the media compared the Polish painter and gallery owner to a New York ‘monopolist’ of Pablo Picasso’s works — Eleonore Sidenburg, or the Parisian gallery owners Denise René, Collette Allendy and Madame Prévot, with whom Nałęcz maintained close professional relationships.

The main feature of the activities in the Drian Galleries was not the commercial side, but it was most of all “the focus on important, contemporary trends in the world of art and promotion of young, creative artists”. Compiled over the course of more than 40 years by the gallery owner herself as a result of regular exhibitions, the collection of works of art by Polish and international artists was a reflection of Halima Nałęcz’s own tastes. As Stanisław Frenkiel would also emphasize, “Halima Nałęcz always had broad horizons and both as an artists and as a person she had an exquisite feel for art. And she had a strong temper. Her decisions were irrevocable, and her behaviour was often apodictic. She would not take into account the opinions of others, but she knew what she was doing. Both as an artist and as a person she was conscious of her goals, and she was determined to achieve them”.

Yet those who would expect a complete coverage of all tendencies, styles and trends in international or Polish art in the exhibition activities of the gallery from 1957 till the end of the 20th century on the basis of the gallery’s extensive presence on the market is bound to be disappointed to some degree. The collection of Halima Nałęcz, in spite of a considerable stylistic divergence of collected works did not register all artistic events which occurred over the second half of the 20th century. It would be a futile task to search for all major issues from contemporary art, especially if one were interested in the record of key events starting from the second half of the 1970s till the end of the previous century. Neither was there a place in the promotional and exhibition activities of the Drian Galleries for recording, in a sense, representative phenomena of the 1960s, which Jerzy Ludwiński categorizes as two intertwining tendencies: the ‘destructive’ one consisting of a whole range of events like the happening, event and ephemeral art, and the ‘constructive’ one with various visual experiments like the multiple, minimal art and environment.

Today, in the new century, after the gallery has been closed, we can claim with certainty that despite the open attitude of Halima Nałęcz towards new and little‑known art and while struggling to become a part of the European artistic elite, the Drian Galleries was to a large degree, which was also noticed by Dorota Hill, a gallery of a ‘traditional’ character. It understood ‘tradition’ as a form of artistic expression, which in the case of the Drian Galleries meant in the majority of cases a classical painting, sculpture or graphic.

On the decision of 84‑year old Halima Nałęcz the Drian Galleries ceased its activities in 1998. Eleven years earlier, in 1989, art lovers could participate in the opening night for the last exhibition at Porchester Place.

Thus the 1990s marked the stage of a slow decrease in the activities of the gallery, which was only partly involved in organizing exhibition events. In the period between 1957 and 1989 Halima Nałęcz organized in her gallery over 320 documented exhibitions, both collective and individual, which allowed more than 400 artists from all around the world to present their work to the public.

“I never suspected — Halima Nałęcz said in 1986, twelve years before the closing of her gallery — that the gallery would survive for so many years, even more so because of the fact that I did not have any capital at the very beginning, and year by year there would appear new competitive galleries in London. It was becoming more difficult. But I would not give up. And at the time when I was very tired after carrying and hanging pictures for the next inaugural night and knowing that the exhibition was good — I would regenerate”.

In spite of difficulties connected with preparing and organizing exhibitions, which would change, especially in the 1960s and 70s, every fortnight, Nałęcz had always aspired to maintain the high standards she had set herself. As she would say herself, “in London there are many galleries, which are primarily commercial, which would accept only those artists who were easy to sell. But I was against that. I would present those artists who were difficult. And if I am satisfied, it is mainly because I survived this hard time, and now those difficult painters are recognized in the world and those easy ones are long forgotten”.

Denis Bowen perceives the situation on the London art market at the beginning of the 1960s in a similar way when he says the following words: “Since about 1960 many artists from all over Europe started to arrive in Britain in order to have their first exhibition in the Drian Galleries or in the New Vision Gallery. Today those artists who achieved success and fame, in their biographies always refer to the fact that they had exhibitions in London in our galleries”. Also Julie Lawson, the director of the London Institute of Modern Art in the 1980s, would have a similar opinion on the promotional activities organized by the Polish artist and gallery owner, saying that Halima Nałęcz is a splendid example of a person who devoted herself to her artists with immense enthusiasm. For many years she would promote artists who now have become very famous, like for example John Bellany, whose works she would present at the very beginning of his artistic career. Other artists, like for instance, Douglas Portway or Denis Bowen also achieved considerable fame due to Halima’s support. She never complained but was very enthusiastic about this hard work, instilling in her artists an understanding and love for art.