Waldemar Januszczak

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Waldemar Januszczak (born January 12, 1954) is a British art critic, who writes for The Sunday Times, and a film maker of television arts documentaries. He was previously Commissioning Editor for the arts for Channel 4 television.

1 Life
2 Films
3 Judgements
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Life

Waldemar Januszczak was born in Basingstoke, Hampshire. His parents were Polish refugees who arrived in Britain after World War II. In the year Januszczak was born, his father died (age 57), run over by a train at Basingstoke Station. His mother (then age 33) was a local dairymaid. His father was employed by the railway as a cleaner of carriage stock (in Poland he had been a policeman, hunting communists).^[1]

Januszczak has been described as, "a passionate art lover, art critic and writer. His presentation style is casual but informed, enthusiastic, evocative and humorous. He bimbles about on our TV screens, doing for art what David Attenborough has done for the natural world," and someone who acts out of "a refusal to present art as elitist in any way. He makes it utterly accessible and understandable."^[2]

In 1997, he was one of the participants in a Channel 4 discussion called The Death of Painting, occasioned by the absence of painters from that year's Turner Prize. The programme was made famous, when Tracey Emin swore at the other participants and left after ten minutes, apparently drunk.^[3]

In 2002, when Ivan Massow declared that Tracey Emin could not "think her way out of a paper bag" in a general attack on conceptual art, Januszczak wrote a letter to The Independent pointing out that "thinking" would not be very helpful in those circumstances.^[4]

In 2004 he differed from most critics in his defence of the art of Stella Vine, singling her out for praise in his otherwise hostile review of the Saatchi Gallery's New Blood show ("although I didn’t much want to like Vine’s contribution, I found I did. It had something"), and continuing to champion her, seeing "a combination of empathy and cynicism that can be startling." ^[5]

In a review of the Americans in Paris exhibition, The Sunday Times, 5 March 2006, he described Symphony in White No 1 by James McNeill Whistler as “a clumsy bit of cake-making with thick smudges of white rubbed into the canvas in coarse, dry skid marks” and complained that “Even Whistler’s renowned mother manages here to underwhelm...”.

In 2004 he was on a special Christmas critics edition of the television quiz show University Challenge.

[edit] Films

Januszczak has been making television art films for many years, and since 1997 with his production company "ZCZ Films."

Mad Tracey from Margate (BBC 1997) about Tracey Emin
Vincent: The Full Story about Vincent van Gogh, in which he was the narrator
Picasso: Magic, Sex And Death, by the artist's friend and biographer, John Richardson,^[6]
The Michelangelo Code: Secrets of the Sistine Chapel
Gauguin: The Full Story (BBC, 2005)

[edit] Judgements

On the Turner Prize (1984):

The British art establishment, having already shown unforgivable ignorance and wickedness in its dealings with Turner's own Bequest to the nation, is now bandying his name about in the hope of giving some spurious historical credibility to a new prize cynically concocted to promote the interest of a small group of dealers, gallery directors and critics.^[7]

On the Turner Prize (1985):

The Turner Prize, like the rot of the Arts Council, the rise of business sponsorship with strings attached, the growing importance of the PR man in art, the mess at the V&A, and the emergence of the ignorant "art consultant" is the direct result of inadequate government support for the arts. Forced out into the business circus, art has had to start clowning around.^[8]