Polish husband and wife creative team Franciszka and Stefan Themerson wore so many different artistic hats, across such a range of disciplines, it’s quite astonishing. In a career stretching over 50 years (both died in 1988), their visual output included (deep breath): book illustration, publishing, stage design, costume design, puppetry, comic books, poster design, photography, animation, and film directing. A few projects don’t belong within any area: Stefan’s brightly coloured drawings of abstract, twisted, mathematical forms, for example, which you can’t really classify as anything except out-and-out art. But even here, it turns out, there’s a practical, applied-arts aspect, because the works are experiments with felt-tip pens which, in the early 1970s, had just been invented.
Indeed, if you had to characterise the unifying theme of their work, it would be this commitment to experimentation. The aim of their publishing company, founded in 1948 when they settled in London, was to produce ‘best lookers and not best sellers’, allying works by avant-garde writers and poets with Franciszka’s cubist, sketchy, vaguely winsome illustrations. And their most longstanding association was with a similarly revolutionary piece of literature, ‘Ubu Roi’, Alfred Jarry’s scatological, absurdist 1896 play about the nature of power. The Themersons designed grotesque masks, surreal cardboard costumes and sets for various productions, as well as creating a comic-book version.
The high point of the exhibition is the section covering their films, particularly the two made for the exiled Polish Government in London during WWII. ‘The Eye and the Ear’ translates music (by a Polish composer) into visual form, resulting in all sorts of madly pulsing, abstract patterns and beautiful, allegorical imagery. ‘Calling Mr Smith’, meanwhile, is a warning against the cultural destruction of Nazism – yet also, in its celebration of Europe’s artistic legacy and diversity, becomes a kind of summary of the Themersons’ own ethos.