Adam Kossowski (5 December 1905 – 31 March 1986) was a Polish artist, born in Nowy Sącz, notable for his works for the Catholic Church in England, where he arrived in 1943 as a refugee from Soviet labour camps and was invited in 1944 to join the Guild of Catholic Artists and Craftsmen.
Life in Poland
In 1923, uncertain about a career as a painter, Kossowski began architecture studies at Warsaw Technical University. But after two years there, he turned to painting and was accepted into the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. During his time in Cracow he worked on the restoration of paintings at Wawel Castle. In 1929 he returned to Warsaw and its Academy of Fine Arts. Travelling on a government grant, Kossowski experienced Italian art in Rome (where he studied tempera painting techniques), Florence, Naples and Sicily.
On 29 October 1938, Kossowski married Stefania Szurlej, whom he had met in Rome. He was named "senior assistant" at the Warsaw Academy of Art and won first prize in a competition to create interior sgraffito work at Warsaw's Central Railway Station. But this project was abandoned after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Kossowski's wife fled with her parents; and Kossowski himself went east, where he was arrested by invading Russian troops in November 1939.
In the Gulag and beyond
Kossowski was first imprisoned at Skole and then at Kharkov, both in present Ukraine. He told Fr. Martin Sankey, "In prison I stayed about a year. Later we received sentences. I got five years of hard labour camp and was sent to the part of the Gulag which is called Peczlag, on the river Peczora which runs into the Polar Sea and I stayed there till 1942."
At this time Kossowski began to pray, " … because when I was so deep in this calamity and nearly dead I promised myself that if I came out of this subhuman land I would tender my thanks to God. I hesitate to call it a vow, it was rather a promise to myself but later I used to think that it was my obligation …"
He went on to describe his release with other Polish prisoners in order to form the Polish 2nd Corps under General Władysław Anders:
From the camp on the river Amu-Daria - where I was sent from the North - I was evacuated finally with other Poles to the banks of the Caspian Sea from where we went to Pahlevi on the Persian coast. There the Polish ex-prisoners gradually received English uniforms, our old rags infected with all sorts of disease and insects being burned, and we started the journey towards Teheran and from there to Palestine.
After several months of recuperation in Palestine, Kossowski, through the efforts of his wife in London, travelled on the liner RMS Scythia to Scotland. In 1943 he joined the Polish Ministry of Information in London, where he worked throughout the war.
Life and work in England
Working from a studio in Hampstead (6 Frognal Gardens), Kossowski composed work for his first show in London, entitled "A Polish Soldier's Journey", which opened on 7 June 1944 and consisted of new drawings and some he had made during his difficult sojourn in the Ukraine and on through to Palestine. In a brief note on the show, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs observed,
The drawings produced in the course of the three years of the artist's life thus absorbed, are notable for showing, apart from a real power of interpreting the local character of each scene, a rare sense of the dramatic, the gift of effective silhouetting being particularly characteristic. We see here well exemplified the profit which the artist (who long taught mural painting at Warsaw Academy) derived from his protracted studies of the frescoes in Rome and Assisi. Figure-drawing, of a very incisive kind, inevitably comes much to the fore in scenes which succeed each other on the walls of the exhibition, but many of the impressions of landscape, here displayed, will also remain impressed upon the spectator's memory. Altogether, this is an art very much in the best Polish tradition, and with an individual note definitely its own.
After winning a prize for the oil painting Jesus Bearing the Cross (also known as Veronica) in 1944, Kossowski was invited to join the Guild of Catholic Artists by its chairman, sculptor Philip Lindsey Clark.
Aylesford commissions
This connection, in turn, led to Kossowski's first major commission from Fr. Malachy Lynch, prior of The Friars at Aylesford, Kent: the seven-panel History of the Carmelites of Aylesford in tempera.