Waldemar Januszczak

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Waldemar Januszczak (born 12 January 1954) is a British art critic. Once The Guardian 's arts editor, he writes for The Sunday Times, and is a film maker of television arts documentaries. He has also worked at Channel 4 television – as Commissioning Editor for Arts Programmes.

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

[edit] Life

Waldemar Januszczak was born in Basingstoke, Hampshire to Polish refugees who had arrived in Britain after World War II. His father, a policeman in Poland, whose job had included exposing Communists, found work as a railway carriage cleaner and died, aged 57,when a train ran over him at Basingstoke station, within a year of Januszczak's birth His widow,then aged 33, found work as a dairymaid.^[1]

The young Januszczak attended Divine Mercy College, a school for the children of Polish refugees which the Congregation of Marian Fathers had set up at Fawley Court, Henley-on-Thames.

[edit] Career

After studying History of Art at Manchester University, Januszczak became art critic – and then arts editor – of The Guardian. In 1990 he was appointed Head of Arts at the UK's Channel 4 television and in 1992 he became art critic for The Sunday Times. He has been voted Critic of the Year twice by the Press Association.[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 took part 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 an apparently drunk Tracey Emin swore at the other participants and left after ten minutes.^[3]

In 2002, when insurance broker and art collector Ivan Massow lashed out at conceptual art in general and said that Tracey Emin could not "think her way out of a paper bag", Januszczak observed in a letter to The Independent 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] Later that year he was a Christmas special critics edition of the television quiz show University Challenge.

Reviewing 2006's London National Gallery Americans in Paris exhibition, he described James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White No 1 as 'a clumsy bit of cake-making with thick smudges of white rubbed into the canvas in coarse, dry skid marks'. 'Even Whistler’s renowned mother manages here to underwhelm,' he complained. Hoaxed by artist Jamie Shovlin, Januszczak later that year 'revealed' in his paper how the 1970s glam rock band Lustfaust had 'cocked a notorious snook at the music industry in the late 1970s by giving away their music on blank cassettes and getting their fans to design their own covers'. ^[6] The band had never existed outside Shovlin's fiction. ^[7]

[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 1999) 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,^[8]
The Michelangelo Code: Secrets of the Sistine Chapel
Gauguin: The Full Story (Channel 4, 2005)
Toulouse-Lautrec: The Full Story (Channel 4, 2006)

[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.^[9]

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.^[10]