Art in Exile: introducing our latest project ‘Making Spaces’

Welcome to our new series of blogs discussing Chippenham Museum’s Making Spaces project. Launched in October the project explores Chippenham and the surrounding area as a place of refuge. The project was kickstarted by the museum’s autumn exhibition of work by Peter Potworowski, which coincided with the recent conservation of a painting by Charles Wellens. Through the artwork of these refugees, from the First and Second World Wars, the museum worked with local Ukrainian families fleeing conflict in their home country to create a new artwork exploring their current experiences of the area as a place of refuge.

In this first blog we look at the Polish artist and West Country exile Peter Potworowski.

Peter (Piotr Tadeusz) Potworowski was born in Poland in 1898. He was an abstract and figurative painter who had lived and exhibited in Poland, Sweden, France and England. During the 1920s he spent seven transformative years in Paris in the company of avant-garde artists including Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, and Fernand Léger.

Self-Portrait, watercolour on paper, 1953

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Potworowski fled first to Stockholm where he organised an exhibition of works by refugee artists. After settling in London, in 1944 he moved for the first time to the West Country, to Lynmouth, Devon to escape the bombing in the capital. He returned to the area soon after the war, this time to Wookey Hole, Somerset.

Potworowski was invited to teach at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, Wiltshire. Founded in 1946 by Clifford Ellis, the Bath Academy of Art was hugely influential art school that included some of the most important British artists among its teachers and students. Potworowski moved to the area, setting up a studio in Corsham and a house in Pickwick.

Cornish Harbour, ink on paper, c.1950, Golder-Thompson Gift

Like many of the tutors at Corsham, Potworowski, spent his free time in Cornwall, holidaying in the small village of Sancreed in the far west of the county. Potworowski’s work changed and matured as a direct result of his experience of the English landscape while a refugee in this country. The majority of paintings and drawings shown in the museum’s recent exhibition of his work, were from Potworowski’s English or ‘green’ period.

In 1958 he returned to Poland taking up the post of Professor of Painting at Poznan and in 1960 he was a prize winner at the 30th Venice Biennale. He died in Warsaw in 1962.

Installation View, Peter Potworowski: West Country Exile at Chippenham Museum, 2023