‘Gaberbocchus Press (1948–1979) and the Themersons on paper, on screen, on stage’

Between 1931 and 1937 the Themersons made experimental films, started a film-makers’ cooperative in Warsaw and edited and produced its journal, f.a. (art film). Stefan continued his involvement with experimental photography for which he invented new techniques. With a single exception, their films were lost during the war.

They moved to Paris in 1937 to continue their work at the center of avant-garde activity. Their life was disrupted in 1939 by the outbreak of the Second World War. Stefan Themerson joined the Polish Army; Franciszka escaped to London. During the years of their separation, Franciszka completed a long series of drawings which she called ‘Unposted Letters’ and Stefan wrote his masterpiece Professor Mmaa’s Lecture. In 1942 they were reunited in London, where they were to spend the rest of their lives.

In London, their artistic collaboration continued first in the making of two more films (1943-45) and then, in 1948, with the foundation of the Gaberbocchus Press, a publishing house which over the next 30 years, produced a string of remarkable books. These include first English editions of Alfred Jarry, Pol-Dives, Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Hausmann, Heinrich Heine, Christian-Dietrich Grabbe, Raymond Queneau, the work of their friends Jankel Adler, Kurt Schwitters, Bertrand Russell, Stevie Smith, C.H. Sisson, and some brilliant books of their own. Franciszka designed the books and created illustrations for many of them. Gaberbocchus aimed to endow the appearance of each book with qualities inspired by the content.

Franciszka’s mature career as a painter developed from the late 1940s. From 1957 there were major exhibitions of her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in London, New York, Belfast, Poland and Denmark. Among public collections holding her work are Museum Narodowe, Gdansk; Museum Sztuki, Lodz; British Museum, London; London Film-makers’ Cooperative; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; 
Marionettemuseen, Stockholm; Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw.

During the 1960s, she did outstanding work in theater design, including sets for Ubu Roi (1963-64) and The Threepenny Opera (1966) at the Marionetteatern, Stockholm. In 1970-71 she designed Ubu Enchainé and Thesmopharia Zusai for the Dukke Theatre, Copenhagen. She was awarded the gold medal at the 1966 Triennale of Theatre Design, Novi Sad, and, in 1976, elected honorary member of Union Internationale de la Marionette for her services to the theater.

Over the years, her paintings became paler and more aggressive. The line which carries the image is incised, scratched or gouged out of the surface. Pigment is allowed to seep into the gaps. Drawing, in whatever medium, remained a constant and primary activity throughout her career, and in retrospect appears to have been her abiding passion. She contributed drawings to journals throughout her career, in Europe and elsewhere, and several collections of her line drawings were published as books: The Way It Walks (1954 and 1958), Traces of Living (1969), Franciszka Themerson 1941-42 (1987). Her originality as a designer was also expressed in her exhibition design, and in her teaching at Bath Academy of Art and Wimbledon School of Art.

Whereas Franciszka’s medium of paint, line and color is free of rules, Stefan’s is confined by formal demands of grammar and of the three languages in which he worked – Polish, French and English. The last was his principal language but he often made his own translations from one language into another. He wrote 9 philosophical novels, but was not a conventional novelist. He wrote 12 books for children, but these too are unlike other books for children, introducing the young reader, as they do, to the magic of the real world. He wrote poetry, essays, some texts on art, one play, the libretto and music for an opera – St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio – and a book about photograms and experimental cinema. All of his writings share a concern with ethics and language. His concern with ethics is encapsulated in the Chair of Decency, the Huizinga lecture delivered in Leyden in 1981 which argues that there is no aim greater than the decency of means. His concern with language is encapsulated in Semantic Poetry which he invented in 1944. Semantic  Poetry is the sort of poetry that returns at every step to pure dictionary definitions of words and banishes the euphemisms, local color and contextual overtones with which usage shrouds them. Themerson disliked classifications and he himself remains unclassifiable.

His books have been translated into eight languages. A comprehensive bibliography of Stefan Themerson is published in Comparative Criticism, Cambridge University Press, 1999. ‘Bibliography is my biography,’ he said, ‘the rest is irrelevant.’

Franciszka died in London on June 29th 1988, Stefan Themerson on September 6th 1988. The Themerson Archive, which was at 12 Belsize Park Gardens in London from 1988, moved to the National Library in Warsaw in December 2014.

Although the work of  Franciszka and Stefan Themerson clearly has roots in the international avant-garde of the interbellum, they maintained a high level of independence in all of their activities. The first Gaberbocchus books were printed by the Themersons on a handpress in the corridor of their London flat. Their publications are characterized by all manner of improvised techniques and materials, and by experiments with word and image. They often used cheap printing techniques (such as Rotaprint, an offset process) and job lots of colored papers at sale prices. The required negatives were made by Themerson with a second-hand camera. It has been said that Gaberbocchus did not have a ‘house style’: what connects the sixty or so titles published by the Press between 1948 and 1979 is their unique combinations of text, image, design and materials. The books exude a gentle non-conformism and eccentricity, expressing the identity of its  contents. Their family unity springs from the degree and quality of each book’s originality, and Stefan playfully drew a ‘family tree’ of Gaberbocchus books and their authors. As well as their own work, and translations of important experimental European writers unknown in England, they published work by British writers and artists, who worked mainly on the periphery (many of whom became friends – like Stevie Smith, George Buchanan, Patrick Fetherston, C.H.Sisson). Financial gain was never the driving motivation of the Press. As Barbara Wright wrote, ‘No one ever thought of money in those days except insofar as some was needed to be able to publish.’ Wright, who started her career as a translator with Gaberbocchus, was one of the four directors of the Press, as was the artist Gwen Barnard. Lack of funds meant that many projected books remained unpublished, including works by Henri Michaux, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Douanier Rousseau, Bertrand Russell, and an illustrated dictionary of semantically interpreted terms.

One plan that was realized was the Gaberbocchus Common Room, a ‘club’ founded by the Themersons in 1957, to bridge the gap between art and science by offering those from each culture a place to meet. Categories and boundaries were considered anathema. There were film-shows and recitals; lectures, plays and poems were delivered, art works and scientific objects exhibited, meals shared. In all 82 evenings were organized, and the membership reached 149. Stefan gave a lecture on Kurt Schwitters in England, Franciszka a talk on her pictorial language, Barbara Wright introduced the work of Raymond Queneau. The adventure ended prematurely, through lack of funds. In 1959 doors closed for the summer and never reopened.