File Note 102: Franciszka & Stefan Themerson

Franciszka Themerson was born in Warsaw in 1907, the daughter of painter Jakub Weinles, and pianist Łucja Kaufman. She grew up in a world filled with art. She studied painting at Warsaw Academy of Art and graduated with honours in 1931. 

Stefan Themerson was born in Płock in 1910, son of a family doctor (who was also a published writer). In 1928 he moved to Warsaw. After a year studying physics, he transferred to the School of Architecture at the Polytechnic. He abandoned architecture for writing and at the same time started to experiment with the camera — film, photo-collages, photograms, etc. 

Franciszka met Stefan in 1929 and they married in 1931. The Themersons played a major role in the history of experimental cinema and photography in 1930s Warsaw. Their significance for the development of the Polish avant-garde film is enormous.

They co-founded the Polish Film-makers’ Co-operative in 1935. They edited and published two numbers of its journal, f.a. (art film) in 1937. Visiting Paris and London 1936/37, they met Moholy-Nagy, John Grierson, Len Lye and other film-makers, and took their work back to screen in Warsaw. In 1938 the Themersons moved to Paris, wanting to be at the heart of the avant-garde art world. Two days after the start of the Second World War, they both volunteered for the Polish army. In 1940, Franciszka escaped by moving to London with the Polish government- in-exile; Stefan served as a soldier in France, ending up in a Polish Red Cross hostel in Voiron, 1940–42. It was during this time that he wrote his novel, Professor Mmaa’s Lecture. After two years of separation, they were reunited in London in 1942. They made two more films, 1942–44.

History has not been entirely kind to the Themersons. Franciszka and Stefan began their earnestly jocose work in Warsaw in the 1930s before moving to Paris and then London in the early 1940s, the flames of war licking their heels. They were among Poland’s finest, heirs to those great currents of European modernism — Futurism, Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism. Working in film, photography, illustration, typographic design, poetry, novels and theatre design, they produced a body of work that suggested new ways of thinking and feeling for a reborn society. The Themersons were conduits, importing into grey, socially conservative Britain a strain of mischievous modernism that snubbed starch-shirted bourgeois conformity. Outside a select few friends and acquaintances, London’s elite art establishment largely overlooked them; their influence would be slow, diffused, and only very belatedly recognised.  

Britain took some time catching up with the Themersons’ multiple media engagements. At first, they were known mostly for their books. In 1948, they founded the Gaberbocchus Press (a made-up Latin translation of ‘Jabberwocky’), which published texts on and by diverse artists, writers, poets and intellectuals, from the then-obscure émigré Kurt Schwitters, to the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Gaberbocchus’ volumes are delights, printed with Franciszka’s precise typographic arrangements and keen-eyed illustrations (see her extraordinary production of Russell’s The Good Citizen’s Alphabet, 1953). Stefan’s tribute to the eponymous Dadaist in Kurt Schwitters in England, 1940–1948 (1958) is similarly striking. It is an object of tactile delight, with a proto-punk cover of a defaced royal decal détourned into the book’s title. In 1951, they also produced the first English translation of Alfred Jarry’s anarchic play Ubu Roi (1896), a work whose antiauthoritarian stance presages the Themersons’ own. Franciszka later produced masks for a reading of the play at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (1952), sets and costumes for a touring production of the play (1964 onwards), as well as another book, this time a comic-strip version, in 1969–70. These subversive currents found a keen audience amongst London’s art school students, intellectuals and the emergent counterculture, providing the Themersons with a basic living and a growing audience. 

The Themersons resisted social oppressions with a childlike, wide-eyed freshness of vision. It’s important to know that Stefan wrote children’s books (and Franciszka illustrated them), while his adult novels are also guided by this innocent logic. In Bayamus and the Theatre of Semantic Poetry (1949) the eponymous narrator meets a man with three legs, with whom he begins a Socratic dialogue in which it becomes apparent that it is logically better to have more limbs than less. The novel is a defence of difference against conformity, and a vindication of reasoning against ingrained superstition. Why not re-think writing itself? This, ultimately, is the purpose of Bayamus — to introduce the reader to the viability of avant-garde poetic forms, in which the reader can enjoy scaling and descending though a text at their own will. 

Stefan’s writing is — secretly — very grown-up, full of a wisdom borne of experience. In his aforementioned writing on Schwitters, Stefan recounts how he first met the Dada artist-poet in London in 1943 at a tricentennial celebration of the publication of John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), a tract defending free speech and attacking censorship. Their shared interest in Areopagitica is rooted in the socio-political failures that lead to war, in the need for open discussion and freedom of expression. Stefan described Schwitters’s writing as having a ‘masterly freedom from artifice, and at the same time, palpably warm’ (Kurt Schwitters in England, 1958, pg. 9), and we might say the same of the Polish couple’s diverse output. In their work, the Themersons gave an object lesson in the importance of free imaginings, as well as in the vitality of friendship and love, in overcoming totalizing social norms. Their work was rooted in a desire to rid the world of pomp and prejudice, to clear the grounds for social relations that are more direct, democratic, generous and humane.