LONDON.- Camden Arts Centre is presenting a major exhibition of works from the oeuvres of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. Partners and life-long collaborators from 1929 until their deaths in 1988, their work encompassed painting, photography, film, theatre, literature, poetry, book design and satirical drawing. They are acclaimed as the most important experimental filmmakers in pre-war Poland. Examples of their work can be seen in the public collections of the British Film Institute, British Museum, Imperial War Museum, Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Arts Council.
Their exhibition at Camden Arts Centre focuses on three main areas: their influential experimental film work; their books and independent publishing house, Gaberbocchus Press; and Franciszka’s stage design, puppets and a comic strip, all based on Alfred Jarry’s anarchic play, Ubu Roi.
Improvising with photograms, photography and photomontage, Franciszka and Stefan Themerson were pioneers of the Polish cinematic avant-garde. Their seven films are recognised as significant contributions to the development of European experimental cinema. Gallery 2 presents the three films that have survived – The Adventure of a Good Citizen (1937), Calling Mr Smith (1943) and The Eye and the Ear (1944/45), alongside other work-in-progress and photograms from the 1930s.
Their practice was driven by a dedication to defy conventions and boundaries, avoiding any house style through constant experimentation. Gallery 1 presents the breadth of their publishing output, wherein this continual reinvention is visible, in the widely various design and production of more than sixty books.
Settling in London after World War II, the Themersons founded the Gaberbocchus Press in 1948, which published English editions of the European avant-garde (Adler, Apollinaire, Schwitters) as well as first editions of important British writers such as Bertrand Russell and Oswell Blakeston. The Gaberbocchus Press also provided a platform through which they were free to publish their own work in whatever form they wished; they collaborated on children’s books, semantic poetry and an opera, and Stefan published his own philosophical essays on art, film, semantics and ethics, as well as novels. An edition of his poems was published by Gaberbocchus after his death.
Gallery 1 also includes Franciszka’s prolonged engagement with Alfred Jarry’s revolutionary satirical play, Ubu Roi. Having illustrated the Gaberbocchus book of the play (1951), Franciszka designed sets and costumes for Michael Meschke’s celebrated marionette production of Ubu Roi (Stockholm, 1964). The exhibition presents the puppets and stage design, drawings and storyboards from this body of work, along with the subsequent comic strip publication that she produced (later published in six languages). Throughout their lives and across all their media, they focused their attention variously on issues of ethics, language, freedom, conformism, dignity and the human condition.
