Andrzej Krauze

Andrzej Krauze (born 7 March 1947) is a Polish-born British cartoonist, illustrator, caricaturist, painter, poster designer and satirist noted for his allegorical, fabulous, symbolic and sometimes scary imagery, as well as his reliance on black ink, bold lines and cross-hatching. His illustrations have been a regular fixture

Life and career

Early life and career in Poland Andrzej Krauze was born in Dawidy Bankowe, a village on the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland, on 7 March 1947. but his growing success marked the end of his original ambition to become a film director, forcing him to move to Amsterdam in 1980, where he worked as an illustrator for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. From Amsterdam he moved back to Paris once again, where he contributed to the French magazines L'Express, L'Expansion and Lire When martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981, he was once again in London organising an exhibition of his drawings. As he later recalled, "I said to myself, if I am a political cartoonist, this is my time. I only had a one-week tourist visa to begin with, but after martial law I published a lot of drawings in English, American and French newspapers, and immediately it was impossible to return [to Poland]. The borders were closed, it was very difficult to send journalists to Poland, there were no photographs coming out, and I was one of the few artists who could draw without fear." He has since been widely published in Polish newspapers and weeklies, such as Rzeczpospolita and wSieci, as well as regularly having notable exhibitions in Warsaw.

In 2017, he was honoured with the President Lech Kaczynski Award for outstanding contributions to Polish art and culture, along with his brother, film director Antoni Krauze, at the VII Congress of the Polish Great Project in Warsaw. Andrzej Krauze was further named a laureate of Polish art and awarded the Gold Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis, which is the highest distinction that the Minister of Culture can give to an artist on behalf of the Polish Republic.

Krauze lives in London. He continues to have his work published widely in both England and Poland and has recently exhibited in Warsaw and Tuscany.

Critical responses to work Cultural historian Patrick Wright, whose book On Living in an Old Country (1985) Krauze illustrated, recalls of Krauze's early work that it was "like nothing else in Britain at that time... Many of [his drawings] were defiantly crude onslaughts, which used strong ink lines and ferocious cross-hatching to emphasise the violence of the Communist state and then hurl it back in the face of the regime... is eye seemed harsher, and sometimes frankly disrespectful of the foibles and eccentricities of British life. His drawings lacked the cool 'designer' cynicism of an age increasingly defined by advertising imagery... [He was] an illustrator with a more distanced eye than was customary in English illustration."

Journalist Francis Wheen has written of Krauze that "whatever [his] subject ... his ironic, cosmopolitan intelligence never fails to enlighten... Krauze can do caricatures and jokes, of course, but his real genius lies in the creation of vivid metaphor... absurd, sometimes scary imagery that owes more to writers such as Bulgakov or Alfred Jarry than to Jak or Mac... this is a man who both works hard and thinks hard, as proved by his dozens of brilliantly apt drawings in the book Introducing The Enlightenment ... Krauze is both an artist and an intellectual; but he wears his learning lightly. Like all good intellectuals, he keeps Occam's razor within easy reach, ready to slash through obfuscation and reveal a plain truth in all its simplicity – or perhaps one should say 'in black and white', since he employs black ink more tellingly than any other illustrator I know... this remarkable artist has always accepted the duty that is more traditionally assigned to journalists, though many of them prefer to duck the challenge: he speaks truth to power." Mit 20 Tieren um die Welt. Gedichte (With 20 animals around the world. Poems). Illustrated by Andrzej Krauze. Edition Melos, Vienna 2022, ISBN 978-3-9505056-2-7.