Jasia Reichardt interview | Themerson Archive | London, February 2022

Jasia Reichardt discusses the newly published archive catalogue she has collated and curated over 20 years, celebrating Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, a remarkable couple at the centre of one of London’s most interesting intellectual and creative communities

The artist Franciszka Themerson (1907-88) and the writer and film-maker Stefan Themerson (1910-88) were Polish emigrés, born in Warsaw and Plock respectively. They were already celebrated in their home country for their writing, illustrations, books and experimental film-making before they sought safety from Europe’s war-torn continent and landed, via Paris, in London in the early 1940s.

Here they established a vibrant creative community, centred around the publishing imprint they founded, Gaberbocchus Press. One of the most important small presses in the UK after the second world war, it ran from 1948-79. The cultural scene that evolved around it included a regular “salon” known as The Common Room (1957-59), the nexus of an international and intellectually generous community of writers, artists, philosophers and scientists, among them Alfred Jarry, Kurt Schwitters and Bertrand Russell. Gaberbocchus published 60 books, remarkable for their originality in design and content – including the first English language version of Jarry’s Ubu Roi.

After their death in 1988, the archive was inherited by Franciszka’s niece, Jasia Reichardt (b1933, Warsaw), who, as a youngster, had also fled Nazi-occupied Warsaw to join them in London, going on to become a leading light in the UK contemporary art scene. An art critic and curator, she curated the ICA’s groundbreaking 1968 show Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, a show that was given its own dedicated edition of Studio International in the same year, and then republished for its 50th anniversary in 2018.

After 20 years of painstaking collation, research and organisation by Reichardt and her artist husband, Nick Wadley (1935-2017), the Themerson Archive Catalogue has been published by the Themerson Estate in three beautiful volumes (available from MIT Press), designed by Pedro Cid Proença with Teresa Lima. These three volumes (Volume 1, Letters and Documents; Volume 2, The Themersons; Volume 3, Gaberbocchus) celebrate in words, images, poetry, doodles, letters and photographs, 50 years of remarkable creative and intellectual enterprise.

Reichardt, a critic, lecturer, curator and a former director of the Whitechapel Gallery (1974-76), speaks here to Studio International from her room in Belsize Park, north-west London, where the archive was stored and transformed before being transferred to the National Library in Warsaw.

Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY