Page 49 - Studio International - November 1966
P. 49
View from the Boat House, 1964, oil, 40 x 26 in., one of the
works lent to the Leeds City Art Gallery retrospective
(October 6 to November 6) of the work of Zdzislaw
Ruszkowski, the Polish-born artist now domiciled in
England. Ruszkowski has had one-man exhibitions at
Roland, Browse and Delbanco and the LEICESTER
GALLERIES, and has participated in a number of group
shows, including the London Group and the first and
second John Moores Exhibitions.
After leaving Warsaw for Paris in 1935, Ruszkowski
spent several years in France, and received a French
Government grant for 1938-40. He joined the Polish
Army when he was in Brittany, made his way across the
Pyrenees, and eventually enlisted in the Polish Army in
Scotland. Since the war he has lived in Hampstead.
One of his earliest admirers in England was the late
Eric Newton, who termed him 'a master of the painterly
and sensuous side of his art'.
about insights, which seem to me second-hand, filtered like. At worst, the pictures are laboured and sticky; at
through two sets of perceptions. best they give one a real feeling that one is touching
An instructive contrast is provided by the work of Welsh earth, and that Welsh rain is (sure enough)
Kyffin Williams, which occupies the last room. Kyffin trickling down the back of one's neck.
Williams is by no means a fashionable painter. These From the unfashionable back to the fashionable—Tony
dark, heavily-painted Welsh landscapes go defiantly Morgan's painted aluminium sculptures at the INDICA
against any trend there may be. Yet (though it's evident GALLERY could scarcely be more firmly placed in the
that they owe something to Vlaminck) they do en- mainstream of the moment. The sculptures are made, in
shrine an original vision of what the Welsh landscape is the approved St Martin's School of Art idiom, out of
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