Wladyslaw Brzosko

Wladyslaw Brzosko is a classically trained American painter who was born in Siberia on October 23, about 1912, third child of a Polish prisoner of the Czar of Russia.  (His family was subsequently freed because of the Bolshevik uprising in 1917 and Wladyslaw traveled with his father to Vladivostok, Tokyo and Northern China.

It was on a visit to a museum in Vladivostok with his father where Wladyslaw viewed his first oil paintings.  Upon seeing the marine paintings by Aivazovski, he declared “I will be an artist.”  His father engaged a Chinese art teacher to begin training Wladyslaw when he was about age 7 or 8.

About 1923, Wladyslaw moved with his family to Poland where he finished his education.  Against his father’s wish for him to become an architect, Wladyslaw chose to attend the Academy of Art in Warsaw.  His father promptly disowned him but an uncle was supportive and helped him obtain a position teaching sports and athletics in a boarding school to help him pay for his own artistic education.  He trained at the Warsaw Academy of Art between 1932 and 1938 under Professors Skoczylas and Kotarbinski.

An amateur sailor, he maintained his own small yacht in Sopot, a city on the edge of the Baltic near Gdansk, where he commenced a course in interior architecture at the Polytechnic.

His early career was interrupted in 1939 by the invasion of Poland and he enrolled in the Polish Army.  During the years of war, Wladyslaw was a member of the Polish Home Army (Armii Krajowe), working under cover in the forests.  Despite the war and the risk of discovery, he managed to maintain homes in Sopot and Warsaw and was able to help several Jewish families to flee or hide, thus surviving the Holocaust.  Names of these families have been provided to Yad Vashem.

At war’s end, with the capital city, Warsaw, and much of the nation laid flat by long years of tank and air bombardment, Wladyslaw began a career as an architect/conservator in the three northern states of Szczecin, Gdansk, and Olstyn.  He served as conservator of art for major museums and churches, ordering repairs and restorations of buildings and monuments and storage of artworks that were at risk.  In addition, he supervised restoration of wrought iron gates and lamps on city streets and public facades in the city of Warsaw as well as in the northern states.

In 1956, Wladyslaw moved to France and thence to the United States in 1960.  Upon his arrival in New York, his first goal was to complete a series of paintings about the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an event he says he could not get permission from the artists’ union to paint in Poland.  The project evolved through many charcoal and watercolor sketches, resulting in four major oil paintings, called simply Blue Canvas (canvas I), Yellow Canvas (canvas III), Korczak (canvas II) and Umschlagplatz (canvas IV).  On each canvas a multitude of people huddle or fight in war tableaus against the backdrop of the burning city.  The series was nearly complete by 1967 when three of the canvases, the Blue (named by art historian, Alfred Werner, “Warsaw Ghetto Recollections”) and the Yellow (which Dr. Werner called “The Final Struggle”), as well as the tribute to Janusz Korczak, were exhibited along with about 30 drawings and watercolors from the series, at the Herzl Gallery in the Jewish Agency Building on Park Avenue in New York (April 1967).  Dr. Alfred Werner, a distinguished art historian and contributor to the journal Art News, wrote in the introductory brochure for the exhibition “…the impact of the drama is felt and the artist has captured the essence of a great moment in history.”  Interest in Wladyslaw Brzosko’s art was unfortunately overshadowed by the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

In 1975 Wladyslaw’s portrait of Copernicus (Nicolai Kopernik) was exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution symposium celebrating Copernicus’ 500^th birthday.

In 1984, he received a gold medal for his painting “Artist in the Studio,” exhibited at the Salon des Nations in Paris along with a large number of his oil paintings including both compositions and landscapes.

Wladyslaw’s most recent exhibition was at Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT in October 2008.  For the first time, all four of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising oil paintings were shown together along with about 30 drawings from the series.
Previously, he showed two dozen works at the Mohave County Museum in Kingman, AZ (1991) and had a show of 22 Arizona landscapes in oil pastel and watercolor at the Sun Cities Art Museum in 1986.  Director of the Sun Cities Art Museum, Richard Teitz, said of these works “He has a feel for the atmosphere and the color harmonies of the desert.”  Of his style Brzosko says, “My art is very simple.  I am a modern realist concerned with problems of composition, form and color.”