Stanisław Frenkiel

Frenkiel's substantial body of artistic and written work was deposited at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń Émigré Archives by his daughter, Oleńka Frenkiel, the award-winning BBC investigative journalist in 2009.

He died on 17 June 2001 in London and was buried at Putney Vale cemetery.

In 1994 Krakow Academy of Fine Arts conferred on Frenkiel the distinction of Doctor honoris causa. In 1997 the President of the Republic of Poland awarded him the Polish Army Cross for Polish forces in the West.

He began his British career with further studies at the Sir John Cass College of Art. On completion he became an art master at the London Jesuit-run Wimbledon College and later Gipsy Hill College. He next gained a lectureship in art at the University of London. After a post-graduate degree in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art he rose to be head of Art at the Institute of Education and finally Reader in Art at UCL. His prolific artistic output, including printmaking, continued alongside his academic work and free-lance writing and art criticism in the Polish language émigré press. He exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, beginning at the trend-setting Grabowski Gallery in Chelsea, for whom he also wrote exhibition notes for other artists. He was a founding member in 1957 of the Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain.

He managed to join general Anders' Polish forces being mobilised at that time in Soviet Russia and crossed the Caspian Sea from Turkmenbasi into Iran. His new wife was meanwhile marching behind the troops with the civilian deportees and they met up again in Tehran. From there in 1943 he was moved to Iraq and the Palestinian Mandate where he underwent officer training. In preparation for the Italian campaign, he was sent to Egypt. Owing to Stalin's opposition the operation was called off and he remained in Egypt until the end of World War II. At war's end he was able to travel to Beirut where his wife had gained a place to study medicine at the American University of Beirut. He took up a place to study Fine Art at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in November 1945 and completed the course two years later. He developed his own style drawing on local colour and street life and began exhibiting there while participating in the intellectual life of the Polish émigré community, co-founding two reviews, Pion and Dziurka od klucza. In 1947 the British authorities announced that Poles would have to leave the Lebanon and choose either to return to Poland or to go to the United Kingdom. He decided on the latter and joined the British Army in Egypt. Arriving in Britain, he was posted to a camp in Staffordshire. In January 1948 he was joined there by his wife and Beirut-born baby son, followed by demobilisation from the army.

He made his way back to Kraków in August 1939 where his fiancé, Anna Leonora Neuman was still living. After several months of German occupation they resolved to flee over the border into Hungary, but failed. On the advice of his lecturer, Eibisch, they relocated to Lwów. There Stanisław Frenkiel was arrested by the NKVD for refusing to accept Soviet citizenship and was deported to a camp in Suhobesodnoye near Nizhny Novgorod. Meanwhile, in 1941 his mother had died in Zakliczyn, Southern Poland. He survived the privations of the camp partly due to his sketching the guards in their uniforms. At the end of that year an amnesty enabled him to leave the labour camp and he made his way to Tomsk, having heard that his fiancé Anna, had been deported to Yakuts on the Sea of Okhotsk. There he found out she had been taken south and he managed to get to Almaty. Thanks to the Union of Kazakh Artists he obtained work as portrait painter to the local political cadre. Not ceasing from his search for Anna he discovered she was now in Fergana in Uzbekistan. Having arrived there, he came across her by chance in a street as she queued for bread. Together again, they were next deported to Khirgistan where they succumbed to typhus. Having recovered they married in 1942 in the large village of Kurshab.

In 1937 he completed his schooling at Kraków's Henryk Sienkiewicz Gimnazjum and entered the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in the city. His lecturers included Władysław Jarocki, Kazimierz Sichulski, Xawery Dunikowski and Eugeniusz Eibisch. During the summer vacation of 1939 he set off on an art tour of Paris, by way of Berlin where he stopped off to see the exhibition of Degenerate art put on by the Nazi Party. Then in Paris he encountered the work of Moïse Kisling, Jan Wacław Zawadowski, Efraim Mandelbaum, Artur Nacht-Samborski, and in particular Georges Rouault, whose work impressed him greatly.

He was born in the family of Artur-Arnold Frenkiel and his wife Bronisława. His mother brought him up as a lone parent after his father fell victim to the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919.

Stanisław Frenkiel RWA (14 September 1918 in Kraków - 21 June 2001 in London) was a Polish-British expressionist painter, graphic artist, art historian, teacher, academic and writer.