Draft:Tadeusz Jaroszynski

• Comment: Please add inline citations. – LuniZunie_(talk) 14:13, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

---

Tadeusz Jaroszynski
Born	(1933-07-13)13 July 1933 Makarska, Kingdom of Yugoslavia (now Croatia)
Died	2020(2020-00-00) (aged 86–87) Villeloin-Coulangé, France
Education	Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki (1953–1957)
Known for	Painting, printmaking
Spouse	Karin Jaroszynska

Tadeusz Jaroszynski (13 July 1933 – 17 February 2020) was a Polish-born painter and printmaker who built his career mainly in South Africa between the late 1950s and the late 1990s, with an intervening period in France from 1978, before settling permanently in France's Loire Valley. His paintings and prints were reviewed regularly in the South African press through the 1970s and 1980s, and his work is held in several South African public collections.

Early life

Jaroszynski was born to a Polish father, Karol, and a Finnish mother, Maïre (née Inkinen), in the fishing town of Makarska on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, where the family owned a small seafront hotel. He had a brother, Pajo. In the summer of 1939 Tadeusz and his brother were with their mother's family in Finland when war broke out; their father returned to Poland to join the Polish army, while their mother made her way back across a Europe at war to recover her sons. Their mother's account of this journey — from the Dalmatian coast, through a Poland under bombardment in September 1939, and on through Lithuania and Latvia to Finland, where her children were waiting — was published in Paris in 1940 by Robert Denoël as Une Finlandaise dans la tourmente, a French-language text credited to Herbert Régis. A contemporary review in the Annales de l'Institut Français de Zagreb described the book as combining real literary quality with vivid, near-hallucinatory pages recounting the crossing of wartime Poland, alongside more idyllic descriptions of the Dalmatian coast the family had left behind.

According to the Jaroszynski Art Museum's account of the family's history, mother and sons then travelled through the Middle East, spending some months in Palestine and Egypt, before sailing from there in 1941, without Karol, aboard the SS Nieuw Amsterdam to Durban, South Africa; from Durban they travelled more than 2,000 kilometres by train to Mazabuka, in Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia), where they settled. Karol Jaroszynski meanwhile served with Polish forces in the North African and Italian campaigns, including at Tobruk and Monte Cassino, before rejoining his family in Africa after the war and taking up the management of an asbestos mine. Their third son, Karol, was born in 1946. Tadeusz was sent to boarding school in Salisbury (present-day Harare), in Southern Rhodesia. In 1953 he began his artistic training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, where he remained until 1957 and met a fellow student, the Finnish painter Karin Heikkinen, whom he married in 1954.

Career

South Africa: early years

In 1957 Jaroszynski and his wife settled in South Africa. His early years there were financially difficult, and he painted only part-time while working in commerce; his entries in national competitions gradually drew favourable attention. In 1967 he was awarded first prize at the Transvaal Academy exhibition and received a special mention at the exhibition Art South Africa Today in Durban. In 1972, after several years of combining part-time painting with employment, he gave up his job in commerce to paint full-time.

Jaroszynski's first solo exhibition was held at Gallery 101 in Johannesburg; reference works on South African art and the artist's own exhibition record date this show to 1969 or 1970. A review of an exhibition of his paintings at the same gallery, published in The Star in October 1971 and captioned as his "first one-man exhibition," described the work as combining vivid, almost dazzling colour with darker background tones, and praised his handling of dramatic colour contrast and his technical discipline. Later that month, a review in the Sunday Express of a group show at the Lidchi Gallery, where Jaroszynski showed alongside Geoffrey Armstrong and Douglas Portway, described his drawings as combining careful, deliberate technique with an undercurrent of fierce tonal contrast, giving his central figures a ghostly, cartoon-like quality. A Daily Mail review of the same period noted that Jaroszynski's newer portrait work, including two paintings titled Monsieur Michelin and Madame Michelin, was moving away from the more obscure abstraction of his earlier paintings toward work with a new sense of humour and echoes of his Polish ancestry.

Graphic work and international exhibitions, 1974–1977

In 1974 Jaroszynski printed his first lithographs, working in Johannesburg and later in Finland, where he also produced etchings and returned with an etching press of his own. With his wife he produced a joint print portfolio known as the "Helsinki Series", published by Gallery 21, Johannesburg. Between 1975 and 1977 the couple's prints gave them a foothold on the European exhibition circuit, and they showed annually at the Art Basel international fair in Switzerland. Graphic works by the couple, issued under Gallery 21's Editions 21 imprint, were shown at the Basel fair from 1974 and were well received there; a 1974 Star feature on the fair described the demand for the seven South African artists' prints, including Jaroszynski's, as considerable. Gallery 21 also showed graphic compositions by Jaroszynski at the International Art Dealers' Fair in Basel in June 1974. His graphic work was also included in a group exhibition at West Ridge High School, Johannesburg, in August 1974, alongside prints by artists such as David Goldblatt and Cecil Skotnes. Further international showings followed at graphic-art biennales in Frechen, Germany, and Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, at international art fairs in Cologne, Vienna and Stockholm, and at group exhibitions in Helsinki and Bologna, through 1976. In 1977 he was included in the Biennale of Monte Carlo, Monaco.

In March and April 1974, Jaroszynski exhibited alongside the Italian painter Gianni Dova and the Chilean-born Surrealist Roberto Matta in a three-artist show at the Lidchi Gallery. A Daily Mail review found an affinity between Jaroszynski's work and that of the two visiting artists, singling out a painting titled Organic Still-life, inspired by sea-floor forms, and a Fantastic Landscape in ink and wash. In the Sunday Express, the critic Oliver Kerr wrote that Jaroszynski's eerie, carefully constructed paintings dominated the exhibition and described it as the artist's most important show to date. An Afrikaans-language review in Die Transvaler likewise judged Jaroszynski's contribution the strongest of the three, describing his driftwood- and shell-like organic forms as taking on the character of sinister miniature monsters set within blue and green landscapes. In September 1975, a joint exhibition of oils by Tadeusz and Karin Jaroszynska at Gallery 21 was reviewed in The Star under the headline "How Bizarre"; the reviewer compared the couple's invented world to Alice in Wonderland and noted that their technique had become more direct and refined without losing its unsettling, fantastical quality. The couple also exhibited jointly at the Gertrude Posel Gallery, University of the Witwatersrand, in 1976.

France, 1978–1983

In 1977 Jaroszynski and his wife left South Africa, intending to settle in Scandinavia; the 1979 monograph on his work states that they moved to southern Norway, while other sources give Sweden. Working in relative isolation, Jaroszynski's painting took what has been described as a new direction during this period. In 1978, while visiting their daughter in France, several of his paintings were seen by the director of the Galerie Romanet in Paris, who purchased them and entered into a representation agreement with the artist; Jaroszynski subsequently settled in Touraine, in the Loire Valley, becoming a member of the Maison des Artistes. His first solo exhibition in France was held at the Galerie Romanet in October and November 1979, to coincide with the publication of a monograph on his work, written by the French art critic Pierre Mazars. He continued to show at the Galerie Romanet and at the Art Basel fair through the early 1980s, and exhibited at the New York Art Fair in 1982. In 1981 he returned to South Africa to exhibit at the Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, showing colourful abstract compositions in oil and gouache, and in 1983 he exhibited at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, as well as again at the Galerie Romanet.

Return to South Africa, 1983–1997

Jaroszynski and his wife returned to live in South Africa in 1983, remaining there until 1997. He exhibited again at the Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, in May 1990. The Financial Mail reported that this followed an eight-year absence from the Johannesburg exhibition circuit and identified a major shift in his work, from landscape and nature toward the human figure; the review described the show as dominated by single, enigmatic portraits, mostly of women, rendered with simple composition and accomplished technique. A catalogue essay for the same exhibition, written by the French novelist Yves Berger, similarly described a shift in Jaroszynski's subject matter, from the late 1980s, away from landscape and seascape and toward stylised, elongated figures with a fixed, sometimes hallucinatory gaze, set off by comparatively large and heavily worked clothing; Berger placed this later work, loosely, between the traditions of Amedeo Modigliani and Fernando Botero. He held further solo exhibitions at the Everard Read Gallery in 1994 and 1996, and in 1996 also showed at the Galerie Hughes de Payns, Troyes, and the Galerie 32, Strasbourg. In 1997 his work was shown at the ST'ART art fair in Strasbourg, and in 1998 at an exhibition space run by Crédit Agricole in Tours.

Later life

From 1997 Jaroszynski and his wife lived permanently in Touraine, France. Karin died in 2014 and Tadeusz died in 2020 in Villeloin-Coulangé, in the Loire Valley.

Style

Writing in 1970, the critic Esmé Berman described Jaroszynski's painting as unlike that of any other South African artist of the period, characterised by aggressive, boldly blocked compositions in which shapes are outlined and overscored with dark, emphatic strokes, producing a geometrical, stained-glass-like effect of luminous colour set against dark surrounding tones. She linked the emotional character of his paintings to his Finnish training and to childhood memories of Yugoslav masked carnivals. In her expanded 1983 entry, Berman traced three broad phases in Jaroszynski's career to that point: an early period of organic, structured compositions running from the 1960s into the early 1970s; a graphic-focused phase beginning around 1974; and a new, more abstract European phase that opened with his move to Scandinavia in 1977. She described his tempera paintings of the later 1970s as largely abstract but evocative, often suggestive of an imagined landscape populated by unworldly, floating forms, executed on a small, intimate scale with a distinctive skill for manipulating opaque and transparent layers of colour. Pierre Mazars, in his 1979 monograph, described Jaroszynski's paintings and gouaches as built up from densely worked, textured surfaces on which forms and colour planes are layered without a predetermined composition, giving the finished works a sense of movement and rhythm rather than fixed representation. In later life the artist himself described having returned to a form of realism drawing on nature, the sea and everyday objects, applied with a colourful, humorous touch he associated with expressionism.

Collections

Jaroszynski's work is held in the public collections of the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; the Pretoria Art Museum; the Durban Art Gallery; the University of the Witwatersrand; the Sandton municipal art collection; the Pietersburg Art Gallery (now Polokwane); the Potchefstroom Art Gallery; Rand Afrikaans University; and the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, as well as in private collections including that of the Schlesinger family in London and of the Oppenheimer family.

Publications

• Mazars, Pierre. Jaroszynski. Paris: Éditions Romanet, 1979.

Jaroszynski's work and career are also documented in general reference works on South African art, including Esmé Berman's Art and Artists of South Africa and Grania Ogilvie and Carol Graff's The Dictionary of South African Painters and Sculptors including Namibia. His mother, writing as Maïre Inkinen (Mme Jaroszynska), published an account of the family's flight across wartime Europe in 1939, Une Finlandaise dans la tourmente (Paris: Robert Denoël, 1940), with a French text credited to Herbert Régis.

Legacy

A museum dedicated to the work of Tadeusz and Karin Jaroszynski, the Jaroszynski Art Museum, operates in the Loches area of Touraine, France. In 2025 Polish public broadcaster Telewizja Polska produced a documentary on the couple, Tworzyć to żyć dwa razy. Karin i Tadeusz Jaroszyńscy ("To Create Is to Live Twice: Karin and Tadeusz Jaroszynski"), broadcast on its regional TVP3 channels.

External links

• Tadeusz Jaroszynski archives, Art Archives of South Africa
• Jaroszynski Art Museum

Category:1933 births Category:2020 deaths Category:South African painters Category:Polish painters Category:South African printmakers Category:People from Makarska Category:South African emigrants to France