From a mine common room to museums

The Janów Group, formally the Circle of Non-Professional Painters (Koło Malarzy Nieprofesjonalnych), is a circle of amateur painters from Janów, a former mining municipality that has been part of Katowice since 1959. It was formed in 1946, and the Museum of Katowice History states that in the same year a common room was opened at the Wieczorek mine (before the war "Giesche"), which in time was turned into a club. This was arranged by Otton Klimczok, a mining cultural activist from Janów. Some studies also give the year 1947: that was when the art group was turned into a circle at the mine's works cultural centre.

The painters were people who in daily life worked in the mine, the ironworks or at machines. They met once a week and showed each other their work. The judgement of colleagues could be harsh, and criticised authors sometimes destroyed their paintings on the spot. The first members of the group are said to include Teofil Ociepka, Paweł and Leopold Wróbel, Eugeniusz Bąk, Paweł Stolorz, Ewald Gawlik, Antoni Jaromin, Bolesław Skulik, Erwin Sówka and Gerard Urbanek.

Teofil Ociepka and the occult roots

The origins of the group go back to the 1930s and an occult community operating in Janów, led by Teofil Ociepka (1891-1978). By trade he was a miner and worked on the surface of the "Giesche" mine. He began painting around 1927 at the urging of a correspondence master, the Swiss Philipp Hohmann, and after criticism of his works in 1930 he stopped for a time. He probably returned to painting before the war or during it.

Ociepka treated painting as a mission. His paintings feature imagined plants and animals, Saturn symbolism and the motif of the struggle of good against evil. Such themes did not fit the Socialist Realism in force after the war, so until 1956 the group's work met with criticism. Alongside Nikifor, he is regarded as one of the best-known Polish representatives of primitivism. In 1948 the writer Izabela Czajka-Stachowicz organised a solo exhibition for him in Warsaw, at which she presented him as the Polish Douanier Rousseau. Ociepka belonged to the group until 1959, when he moved to Bydgoszcz.

In 1956 Zygmunt Lis, a graduate of the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, took over the care of the painters for over a dozen years. The period of the group's greatest splendour ended in 1971, when Lis left his post and Klimczok died. The studio continued its work, and since 2000 its seat has been the Szopienice-Giszowiec Municipal Culture Centre.

Ewald Gawlik and Erwin Sówka

Ewald Gawlik (1919-1993) was born in Nikiszowiec. He studied with Katowice painters, during the war he was sent to forced labour and into the Wehrmacht, and after returning to Poland he took a job at the Wieczorek mine. He painted the everyday life of Silesians and the districts he knew best: Nikiszowiec, Giszowiec and Szopienice. He was sometimes called the "Van Gogh of Nikisz", because van Gogh's painting had fascinated him already during the war. In the 1970s he was offered membership of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers, which he did not accept, not wanting to submit to the judgement of professionals. He had his first exhibition in Katowice only in 1974, and in 2003 the Silesian Museum showed the exhibition "Ewald Gawlik Van Gogh z Nikisza". His paintings can be seen in the Silesian Room (Izba Śląska) in Giszowiec, in the gallery known as Gawlikówka.

Erwin Sówka (1936-2021) was born in Giszowiec and, like Gawlik, worked in the mine. He is counted among the primitivists and was described as the last living creator of the Janów Group. Among other things he painted female nudes against the background of Nikiszowiec, prefabricated blocks and allotment gardens, and miners in their homes. His works are in the collections of the Silesian Museum, the National Museum in Wrocław and many private collections, and in 2017 he received the silver Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture. He was buried at the cemetery by the Church of St Anne in Nikiszowiec.

Where to see traces of the group today

The City Ethnology Department of the Museum of Katowice History, housed in the Magiel Gallery in Nikiszowiec, runs the permanent exhibition "Around the Masters of the Janów Group". It shows works by non-professional artists connected with Janów and places them in the history of the estate built for the workers of the "Giesche" mine. Non-professional art is also part of the permanent exhibitions of the Silesian Museum. In Janów one of the squares was named in 2012 the Square of the Artists of the Janów Group, and on it stands the Monument to the Heroes of the Silesian Uprisings.

A separate story, of a private art collection, is connected with the former back premises of the Wilson shaft of the Wieczorek mine, today the Szyb Wilson Gallery; the gallery organises, among other things, a festival of naive art, but it is not a centre of the Janów Group itself.

The history of the group also reached the screen. The film "Angelus" by Lech Majewski from 2001 loosely refers to the story of the Janów painters, and its dialogue is almost entirely in Silesian. It was filmed, among other places, in Nikiszowiec. The plot is fiction, so it should not be treated as a record of facts.