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Zbigniew Drecki

The South West Academy owes a great debt of gratitude to Zbigniew Drecki, the painter and philanthropist, and his wife Jo Drecki. The Drecki Memorial Lecture was established to honour his memory. The following text is a personal recollection of Zbigniew Drecki by David Bazell. If Auschwitz prisoner No. 214, in pursuing an interest and flair for painting after the war, had daubed away in blacks and greys, perhaps with an occasional dash of red, it might have been perfectly understandable. But Zbigniew Drecki did no such thing. His canvasses emerged with colours that were largely to become the way one saw him - an eternal spring season despite the wartime hell he had had to endure. His experiences in the camps had been such that almost as a medical necessity he had to live away from Britain in the wintertime, and eventually it drove him to build a home in Florida. But he never laid aside his art and with his wife Jo continued to share his time with his home in Exmouth where he lived for many years and at one time ran a painting school. He had met Jo at the Ockenden Venture, set up after the war for the care and education of refugee children from Displaced Persons Camps in German, when Jo was an English Teacher. Zbigniew Drecki almost always had a ready smile, and a deep seated sense of humour often came to the fore during our many conversations. He was always willing to speak about the Death Camp - even including small acts of kindness that showed up against the backdrop of generally overwhelming inhumanity - and more than once referred, with a hint of that impish smile that often crossed his face, to the times he cheated the ovens, assisted on one occasion - he had been the very next in line to be shot against the wall next to the infamous Block 10 - by an unexpected visited to the camp by Hitler which interrupted that particular programme and consequently saved his life.



Painting by Zbigniew Drecki

Invariably, however, he would return to the passion in life which consumed him as much as his oils: the creation of a world order for peace and stability. Almost his final words to me, as he lay dying in his Exmouth home, Zbigniew was to say: 'Life is wonderful; it is only people who spoil it.' He referred to conflicts around the globe and the consequent inhumanities that sometimes matched the worst excesses of the Third Reich about which he knew only too well as a survivor of the first transport to Auschwitz in June, 1941, and who after being transferred for a spell at Buchenwald, escaped on a night train taking him to Dachau.

He asked me to write of his ideas for future conduct worldwide to the Secretary General of the United Nations. Listening to him trying to recount what he had failed to do in his life made me feel I had at least to do this much for him; he felt strongly that his survival placed on him a duty to achieve something for all those who perished. Well, Kofi Annan has Zbigniew's views. And the vision of this remarkable man from Warsaw is set down and available in the latter part of his moving book, Freedom and Justice. He wrote letters to anyone influential, from world leaders to ordinary newspaper reporters - to anyone he thought might listen - to try to make a lasting contribution on the victims' behalf. He tried.

Formidable in stature and presence, Zbigniew Drecki, from Warsaw, was a gentle and quiet-spoken man. He very often painted away furiously; at one time, a room of his home in Albion Hill was stacked to the ceiling with his work. Scores upon scores of paintings, mostly colourful and pacific, emerged. He seemed to get a real buzz from them, showing them, holding them up. 'What do you think?'. Who knows, perhaps he received a kind of energy from them, even providing a light for his darkness.

This year, the South West Academy's annual Drecki Lecture took the form of a performance reading of Yasmina Reza's hilariously funny, award-winning comedy play, 'ART'. And what more apposite a stage setting for this performance than the premises of auctioneers Bearnes, Hampton and Littlewood of Exeter, complete with their own paintings and artefacts, who generously hosted the evening.

'ART', a play fundamentally about the merits of modern painting and the vagaries of friendship, was performed by the three renowned Cornish artists, Anthony Frost, Bob Devereux and Phil Bowen, themselves long-standing friends. The obvious rapport behind their stage characters gave an extraordinary energy and dynamism to the production completely captivating the audience for the full ninety minutes.

The play commences with Serge (Anthony Frost) showing Marc, his close friend and a rather self-opinionated art buff (Bob Devereux) his newly purchased painting - a largish canvas painted white with 'three fine, white diagonal scars'. Both friends are obviously agitated by each other's response to the painting, instigating the eternal question of 'What Is Art'?

Marc, for his part, cannot believe that his friend, whom he has mentored for fifteen years, has been foolish enough to pay £200,000 for a 'piece of worthless white s....!'. He is also filled with some 'indefinable unease', doubtless because his old chum seems to have developed a newfound independence. Both men are quick to enlist the advice of mutual friend Yvan (Phil Bowen) in the hope that he will support their respective viewpoints, but Yvan, a rather insecure character, is concerned less with the virtues of the painting and more with keeping the peace between his two best pals.

His endeavours at peace-making fail miserably, and instead he becomes their scapegoat, at one point receiving a clout from Marc, likely intended for Serge, for his efforts.

Yvan's initial ambivalent nature turns into self-induced hysteria as he rages, almost without drawing breath, about his rivalling relatives and the problems facing his forthcoming wedding preparations. Again it seems he is powerless to do anything constructive.

As the furious row continues, the question is whether their friendship will 'de-construct' beyond repair, while the eternal question of 'What is Art' remains ever-present as we, the audience, are fully aware of the white canvas which has been left on stage throughout.

The intelligent wit and humour is never lost for a second by these three gifted performers, whether in the fast, lively delivered dialogue or the moments of reflection and although ART has been translated into thirty-five languages and staged from London to New York, this recent performance, presented so vigorously and dynamically by these three professional Cornish artists, surely compares with the best. The SWAc audience certainly thought so, as the hoots of laughter and lengthy, exuberant applause testified.

Phil Bowen's latest book of poetry, 'Nowhere's Far' is out now from www.saltpublishing.com.

Our thanks to Alison Summerfield for permission to reproduce this article.



Yvan (Phil Bowen) examines the £200,000 white canvas. Photograph: Alan Jones


Phil Bowen, Anthony Frost, Bob Devereux. Photograph: Alan Jones

The 2010 Drecki Memorial Lecture featured a documentary film and presentation by the film-maker and photographer Noel Chanan.

In 1983 the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and American printmaker and sculptor Leonard Baskin, his collaborator for many years, took part in an audio recording in which they discussed their long-standing friendship and the nature of their collaborative work on illustrated books of Hughes' poems.

The outcome of the recording was a lively, entertaining, and revelatory dialogue. Previously unpublished, this unique insight was the basis of a forty-minute video by film maker Noel Chanan, friend of both Hughes and Baskin, and in it they explore in intimate detail the genesis of such key works as Crow and Cave Birds.

The video incorporates extracts from readings by Hughes of his own poems, and a mass of previously unseen photographs of the interlocutors, together with extensive ilustrations of Baskin's dramatic prints and sculptures.