George Zarnecki

Elected a Fellow of the Society on 4 March 1954

The following obituary was published in The Times on 13 September 2008.

Professor George Zarnecki: pioneering historian of Romanesque art whose studies of English Romanesque sculpture transformed scholarly understanding of the subject.

Professor George (Jerzy) Zarnecki, CBE, historian of the Romanesque, was born on September 12, 1915. He died on September 8, 2008, aged 92.

Professor George Zarnecki was a leading authority on the Romanesque. He settled in England after the Second World War and joined the staff of the Courtauld Institute of Art, becoming one of a number of distinguished medievalists who have helped to shape the character of that institution.

The pioneering studies of English Romanesque sculpture that he began in the late 1940s made a lasting contribution to our understanding of this country’s artistic history.

Jerzy Zarnecki was born in Poland in 1915. He attended Cracow University and became a junior assistant in the Institute of the History of Art in 1936. He completed an MA at the university in 1938. This part of his life and career was ended by the German invasion the following year. Zarnecki joined the Polish Army and fought with distinction in France, receiving the Polish Cross of Valour and the Croix de Guerre. He was captured in 1940 and spent two years as a prisoner of war before managing to escape, only to be interned in Spain. He made his way to England in 1943 and rose to the rank of lance-corporal in the Polish forces in London, where he at first spoke little English. Much of his time was spent helping to compile an index of the cultural losses sustained by his homeland as a result of the German occupation. He published an English introduction to Polish art in 1945.

When the war ended Zarnecki made his home in England. He was married to Anne Frith and found employment at the Courtauld, based at 20 Portman Square, at first translating texts. He owed this job to the help of the institute’s soon-to-be director, Anthony Blunt, to whom he had been introduced in 1944.

Generous and witty as well as learned, Zarnecki was an immensely popular figure at the Courtauld. He became the librarian of the Conway Library in 1949, managing its remarkable collection of photographs of sculpture and architecture and pioneering expeditions to build up the library’s holdings, embarking on entertaining odysseys around Europe with his friend and fellow medievalist Peter Lasko.

Zarnecki was appointed Reader in 1959, and in 1961, after a year as Oxford’s Slade Professor of Fine Art, he succeeded Johannes Wilde as Blunt’s deputy-director at the Courtauld, a position he held until 1974. He became Professor of Art History in 1963.

Zarnecki’s influence in these years was hugely beneficial to the Courtauld and its reputation. Peter Kidson recorded that his importance can hardly be overestimated, not least because his responsibilities extended to almost running the institute on Blunt’s behalf. Despite an association that lasted for 30 years, Zarnecki found Blunt elusive — an assessment that many shared. When, in 1979, Blunt was exposed as having spied for the Soviet Union Zarnecki was horrified and could not bring himself to speak to him.

Zarnecki’s study of English Romanesque sculpture was prompted by a fellow émigré scholar, Fritz Saxl of the Warburg Institute. Any student of the subject must overcome the lack of documentary evidence and the destruction of many of the sculptures themselves, with others surviving in a poor state of preservation.

“Only a fraction of what existed has come down to us,” Zarnecki wrote, “and the often mutilated state of the objects is an eloquent testimony to the fanaticism of the iconoclast or to ignorant neglect.” Saxl, though, had taken an interest in the subject and encouraged Zarnecki in what became his doctoral dissertation.

This led to two books in the early 1950s: English Romanesque Sculpture 1066-1140 (1951) and Later English Romanesque Sculpture 1140-1210 (1953). These short works, extensive in their ambition and based on meticulous scholarship, were freshly and lucidly written introductions to a topic that had received little serious consideration; they transformed our understanding of the subject.

Zarnecki emphasised that the English Romanesque was a regional development of the astonishing artistic revival of the 11th century that embraced the whole of Western and Central Europe. He described the character of what he termed Anglo-Norman sculpture, carefully charting its development from the earliest influence of the Romanesque in England in the decade or two before 1066 through to its 12th-century maturity.

He questioned the commonly held view that the Norman Conquest was an unwelcome foreign intrusion that brought to an end Anglo-Saxon art, instead emphasising the survival of the complex artistic traditions the Normans inherited at the Conquest in the continuing influence of the Winchester School and Scandinavian animal styles such as the Ringerike.

Anglo-Saxon sculpture did not, Zarnecki suggested, “die an heroic death at Hastings”, but rather remained vibrant, flourishing in a great blossoming of artistic life and influencing to an unexpected extent the art of Normandy and other areas of northern France.

Zarnecki published revealing studies of the Romanesque sculptures at the cathedrals of Ely (1958) and Lincoln (1964), profusely illustrated with photographs, as had been his earlier books, in an effort to make images of these sculptures more widely available for enjoyment and study. His fascination with his subject was demonstrated in numerous essays over 40 years, subsequently collected in two volumes: Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1979) and Further Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1992).

His interests, though, ranged wider. He published a study of the 12th-century French sculptor Gislebertus in 1960, with an English edition the following year, and in the 1970s produced Romanesque Art (1971), addressing the subject as a whole, The Monastic Achievement (1972) and Art of the Medieval World (1975).

In the early 1980s he chaired the working committee organising the Arts Council’s exhibition 'English Romanesque Art 1066-1200', held at the Hayward Gallery in 1984 and giving, in Zarnecki’s words, “a glimpse of the beauty of this distant and largely forgotten period”.

He received the Polish Gold Medal of Merit in 1978 and became a member of the Polish Academies of Learning and of Sciences in the 1990s. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1968 and was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, where he was for a time vice-president. He was appointed CBE in 1970.

On his retirement in 1982 Zarnecki was made Emeritus Professor of the University of London and became an honorary Fellow of the Courtauld Institute in 1986. In 1987 he was the leading figure behind the creation of the British Academy’s Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, an archive recording Romanesque stone sculpture in these islands.

Zarnecki is survived by his wife, Anne, and their son and daughter.

The following obituary, by our Fellow Michael Kauffmann, was first published in the Independent on 16 September 2008

George Zarnecki: Former deputy director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and leading scholar of Romanesque sculpture

George Zarnecki was a leading scholar of medieval art whose authority in the field of English Romanesque sculpture has remained unchallenged over half a century. In his role as deputy director of the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London, he was revered by generations of students.

Zarnecki was born in Stara Osota, then in Russia, now in Ukraine, to a Polish-speaking family, his father a convert from Judaism, his mother Catholic. He obtained his MA degree at Krakow University in 1938 and became a junior assistant in the Art History Institute.

Zarnecki's career was interrrupted by the outbreak of war. He joined the Polish army, serving in France, where he was taken prisoner in 1940 and only just escaped being sent to a concentration camp after being denounced as a Jew. What saved him was the fact that the Germans' inspection showed that he was not circumcised, and also that his mother had given him a crucifix to wear under his shirt.

He escaped with the help of forged documents in 1942, spent time in occupied southern France, and after being interned in Spain, escaped to England. There, still in the Polish army, he met Anne Leslie Frith, who became his wife and lifelong support. They met during an air raid, while taking shelter at Regents Park tube station in 1944. Seeing him, Frith was deeply impressed not only by his looks but by his splendid uniform. With all those braids and epaulettes, she thought, he must be a general. At which point in the story, George smiled and explained: "I was never more than a lance corporal." His war service was, later recognised by the award of the Polish Cross of Valour and the Croix de Guerre.

After the war he undertook a PhD at the Courtauld Institute under the inspiring supervision of Fritz Saxl, director of the Warburg Institute. Completed in 1950, the subject of his dissertation was the Regional Schools in English Sculpture in the 12th century and it set the course of his academic career.

In 1945 he had obtained his firstemployment at the Courtauld, asassistant in the Conway library, the unrivalled photographic archive of medieval art and architecture. Scholars in the field have owed much to Zarnecki's photographic campaigns abroad, which added considerably to the library's holdings.

After 10 years as Conway librarian, he joined the teaching staff with the rank of Reader in 1959, became deputy director in 1961 and Professor in 1963. It was a period of expansion for the Institute under Anthony Blunt's directorship and it was Zarnecki who carried the main administrative burden. His diplomatic and managerial skills were much admired and it was thought that he would become director when Blunt retired in 1974. But he felt that he wanted to return to more teaching and research and declined to apply.

His achievements as scholar and deputy director received recognition from the 1960s: most notably, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1968, made CBE in 1970 and received several honorary doctorates. The Society of Antiquaries, of which he had been vice-president, was particularly close to his heart and he was touched to be the recipient of its gold medal in 1986. His generous help to Polish students and scholars was recognised by the award of several Polish distinctions.

Zarnecki published a considerable body of work which was both authoritative and accessible. His two volumes on English Romanesque Sculpture 1066-1140 (1951) and Later English Romanesque Sculpture 1140-1210 (1953) are deceptively modest in length and format. They were the first to propose a widely accepted structure of dates and sequence of the main monuments and they remain authoritative to this day. Due partly to the iconoclasm of the Reformation, relatively little remains of Romanesque sculpture in England when compared to Continental countries, but Zarnecki's two volumes served to demonstrate the emotional impact and international standing of many of the surviving monuments.

These general books were followed by detailed studies: English Romanesque Lead Sculpture (1957), Early Sculpture at Ely Cathedral (1958) and Romanesque Sculpture at Lincoln Cathedral (1963, expanded ed.1988), as well as numerous innovative articles collected in his two volumes of Studies in Romanesque Sculpture. Of his major publications, only Gislebertus: sculptor of Autun (1961) concentrates on a Continental monument.

The 11th century saw the revival of monumental architectural sculpture, of which there had been very little in the earlier Middle Ages, and most of the surviving sculpture of the period forms an integral part of ecclesiastical buildings large and small. Accordingly, a study of the history of the architectural setting was Zarnecki's first concern, followed by a close analysis of the sculpture itself. Comparisons, particularly with contemporary English illuminated manuscripts and Continental sculpture, were adduced to fix sources of inspiration, dates and sequences of development. And if stylistic analysis was the main concern, his expertise also covered questions of material, of patronage and iconography. One of his most valued early studies demonstrated that the Coronation of the Virgin, an image best known from 13th-century French sculpture and mosaics in Roman churches, in fact had its earliest development in England, as seen in a capital of c.1130 from Reading Abbey.

Shortly after retirement, Zarnecki achieved a particular triumph with the Arts Council's magnificent exhibition English Romanesque Art at the Hayward Gallery in 1984. His was the inspiration and expertise behind the exhibition which, for the first time, brought the subject to a really wide audience. Indeed, although his reputation is that of a specialist, his ability to cover large fields for a more general public was demonstrated as early as 1945 with his Polish art, a brief introduction to the subject, and more fully with his Art of the Medieval World (1975) which covered all arts from the 4th to the 15th century, remains a standard synthesis, and was recently translated into Chinese.

George Zarnecki's outstanding place as a scholar and teacher can be traced in his publications, and in the honours bestowed on him during his career. Yet to those who knew him, these achievements were matched by the warmth of his personality. Immediately striking was the old-world continental charm which remained with him to the end. But in his case the charm was matched by a deep-seated kindness, concern for others and a gift for friendship. Generations of students and colleagues from the Courtauld and further afield will attest to the importance to them of his kindness, his helpfulness, advice and support, often at key points in their lives.

Jerzy (George) Zarnecki, scholar of medieval art: born Stara Osota, Russia (now Ukraine) 12 September 1915; junior assistant, Institute of Art, Krakow University 1936-39; staff, Courtauld Institute of Art 1945-61, Deputy Director 1961-74, Honorary Fellow 1986; Reader of History of Art, University of London 1959-1963, Professor 1963-82 (Emeritus); CBE 1970; married 1945 Anne Leslie Frith (one son, one daughter); died London 8 September 2008.

The following obituary, by Terence Mullaly, was first published in the Guardian on 11 September 2008

George Zarnecki: eminent art historian who helped the Courtauld survive the Blunt scandal.

In 1979, Sir Anthony Blunt, the former surveyor of the Queen's Pictures and director of the Courtauld Institute in London, was revealed to have been a Russian spy - the fourth man in the ring that included Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean - and insatiable curiosity was concentrated upon him and his circle. For a while he was the most notorious man in the world.

That the Courtauld survived the scandal with its prestige intact had much to do with the influence of the art historian George Zarnecki, who from 1961 to 1974 had been deputy director - and, in effect, Blunt's righthand man. A charming and discreet figure, Zarnecki, who has died aged 92, was the perfect deputy director of what became a big and, given the strong personalities of many of its staff, difficult institute to run.

He also he did more than teach and stimulate others well. He was one of the finest medievalists of the second half of the 20th century and did much to enhance public awareness of medieval art. He changed attitudes to a whole period of European history, making the middle ages and their art accessible.

Born in Poland, Zarnecki received his MA from the Jagiellonian University of Cracow in 1938, and from 1936 to 1939 was a junior assistant in its Institute of the History of Art. Many years later, it was a particular source of pleasure to him that his roots were recognised, when he was awarded the gold medal of the Polish Order of Merit in 1986, made a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Learning in 1992, and elected to the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1994.

His academic career had been interrupted by the second world war, during which he served as an army lance-corporal, receiving both the Polish Cross of Valour and the Croix de Guerre for his bravery in France. Held as a prisoner-of-war from 1940 to 1942, he escaped, only to be interned in Spain. He finished the war with the Polish army in Britain. He joined the Courtauld in 1945, remaining on the staff until his retirement in 1982.

Zarnecki, who in 1950 had obtained a PhD in London, played a prominent role in several learned societies, was on many committees and was honoured outside the University of London. Thus he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford (1960-61) and made a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1966. Where learning and practical hard work had to be combined, he was always at the forefront. In 1984 he chaired the committee organising the Arts Council's exhibition of 'Romanesque Art from 1066 to 1200'. This was not just academically an exemplary exhibition; it set new standards for exhibition arrangement and did much to encourage a wider appreciation of medieval art.

Similar results - aiding scholarship and promoting particular interests - stemmed from his involvement with the British Society of Master Glass Painters, the conservation committee of the Council for Places of Worship and the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. His teaching was characterised by a mixture of enthusiasm, the ability to convey insights into the minds of men from a different age, and flashes of wit and humour. He was a reader at London University (1959-63), a professor (1963-82) and in 1986 became an honorary fellow of the Courtauld.

Learned societies also recognised his achievements. He was a fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries (which meant a great deal to him - he received its gold medal in 1986) and of the British Academy, in addition to being an honorary member of the Royal Archaeological Institute.

Zarnecki's fusion of intellect and emotion ensured that he fitted perfectly into the Antiquaries. He was adept at harnessing all the latest aids to research, yet it was typical of him that when supporting a friend who was about to become a fellow of the society, he would remind him that after his investiture, he should follow the custom of bowing to the assembled fellows.

From 1951, when his English Romanesque Sculpture 1066-1140 first appeared, the flow of Zarnecki's books and articles was continuous. His writing made many original contributions to scholarship, for he united probing curiosity with a scrupulous attention to detail and uncompromising accuracy. This was backed by an extraordinary range and depth of knowledge. It was not by chance that his Art of the Medieval World (1975) was translated into Chinese - yet he was no pedant.

When a detailed point about Romanesque art is in dispute, scholars will still turn to Zarnecki, but from an early work like Gislebertus, Sculpteur d'Autun (1960, English edition 1961), it was apparent that he had the ability to penetrate the mind of medieval man. Thus, he came to exert a wide influence, making many who had previously found the art of the middle ages difficult, begin to feel its fascination. Not surprisingly, books such as his English Romanesque Lead Sculpture (1957), Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1979) and Further Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1992) came to establish both a new precision and a much more balanced appreciation of the Romanesque.

At the same time Zarnecki had a masterly ability to synthesise the work of others and to make definitive statements about particular buildings and detailed problems. This was something that was apparent in his Early Sculpture of Ely Cathedral (1958), in Romanesque Sculpture at Lincoln Cathedral (1964), and Romanesque Lincoln (1988). He also collaborated in a fruitful way with others in a series of projects, bringing out the best in them.

Zarnecki's greatest achievement, however, was made possible thanks to the characteristics he displayed and to the circumstances of his life. His rigorous academic training at Cracow certainly prepared the ground for later research, but that was only one side of his work. The courage he manifested during the war and his long years, from 1945, happily married to Anne Frith with their son and daughter (who all survive him) revealed the human qualities that made him so loved as a teacher.

The crucial point was, though, that he combined these things with extraordinary powers of insight. He could conjure up what medieval man was about.

The following obituary was first published in the Telegraph on 18 September 2008

George Zarnecki: authority on Romanesque art who proved an influential administrator as deputy director of the Courtauld.

George Zarnecki  (lying on the bench in the picture on the left), who died on September 8 aged 92, was a charismatic figure with an enormous influence in the establishment of art history in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.

Even after his retirement as deputy director (under Anthony Blunt) of the Courtauld Institute in 1974, after 13 years in the post, his friendships and quiet determination allowed him an impact on decisions of academic and cultural importance.

He helped the English in particular to learn not to disparage their own art: it was distinctive, but it was also European and needed to be understood in a broad framework, not an insular one.

Through the extremely successful English Romanesque Art, at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1984, he perhaps inadvertently initiated a series of exhibitions of medieval painting and sculpture, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Reformation, of which Age of Chivalry at the Royal Academy was the most spectacular.

The son of a Polish Jew, Jerzy Zarnecki was born at Stara Osota, near Kiev, in what is now Ukraine, on September 12 1915.

His mother was Russian, and throughout his life George felt torn between a love of Russian culture and a rejection of its politics.

He was educated largely in Cracow, where he took a degree in Art History (his father thought he was studying Engineering) and then a teaching job at the university. He published a number of papers on 15th-century sculpture before the outbreak of war.

With the Germans approaching, George decamped with his parents and sisters to Bucharest, whence he proceeded through Italy to France to join a Polish regiment. After training, and refusing a commission, he saw fighting in Alsace, winning the Polish Cross of Valour (two Bars) and the Croix de Guerre.

Zarnecki was taken prisoner by the Germans, but twice managed to escape. On both occasions he was recaptured. In the end he succeeded in forging the documents of a French national with a medical complaint and was released, making his way to England via Spain and Portugal. It was a protracted and unpleasant journey. Crossing the Pyrenees by night, Zarnecki and his party were helped by local Spaniards. Having no money but wanting to thank them, he parted with his only possession of any value: a fountain pen.

After spending more than a year in a Spanish concentration camp, he was allowed to go to England, where he faced diversions and interrogation before he could make a new start. In 1944, in Regent's Park underground station during an air raid, he met by chance his future wife, Anne Frith; they married the following year.

Zarnecki was fortunate in that there were many other talented academic art historians from Europe who had escaped to Britain and with whom he had a rapport.

Some, such as Ernst Gombrich, became close friends; Fritz Saxl was a huge influence, but died young. Otto Pächt and Nikolaus Pevsner were of great importance, but so too were English trained academics: older colleagues such as Francis Wormald, contemporaries such as Reg Dodwell and Julian Brown, and ultimately students of the Courtauld Institute, where Zarnecki worked in the Conway Library from 1945. These included Peter Lasko and Peter Kidson, with both of whom (and Reg Dodwell) he was to mount art historical sorties into Europe and beyond for decades.

As far as art was concerned, there was one period in European history which fired Zarnecki: the Romanesque.

Recalling the end of the war and the restored freedom to travel, he remembered: "The first place I went was Lincoln." At the cathedral there he was overwhelmed by the Romanesque west front, seeing in it a meeting of the imperial and the folksy, the cerebral and the visceral. Compared with the misnamed "Gothic" which followed it, Romanesque spoke with many voices in many languages, past and present, including those of Church and State.

Zarnecki's fascination with the Romanesque was partly conditioned by the world he inhabited, torn between authoritarianism, rebellion, curiosity and personal expression. These tensions allowed him to bring a particular edge to the study of art in Britain which the likes of Pevsner, Saxl, Pächt and Gombrich were for the most part keen to play down.

He was not inclined to follow Pevsner down the line that art expressed the spirit of the people: he never quite subscribed to the Englishness of English art. Nor did he adopt Saxl's view that what is best in English art comes from overseas. And although Zarnecki was a close friend of Gombrich for decades, he never accepted the intellectual approach to culture promulgated at the Warburg Institute.

He was not given to theorising as such – indeed, he was cautious of any position that was not grounded in direct experience of the material. At a party in the mid-1960s he approached a former Courtauld student who had "defected" to the Warburg and asked: "What do they say about us over there?"

The imagined cosy world of establishment art history in Britain in the 1960s was not what it seemed. As Blunt's recalibration as a traitor was to suggest, the sense of the place of art in human culture was, and is, complex and contested.

Zarnecki had become deputy director at the Courtauld in 1961, and as an administrative and political duo he and Blunt were the perfect complementary pair. Between them they controlled art history in Britain for more than a decade, and after Blunt's authority waned Zarnecki's was potent for at least another 10 years.

As an academic politician he made a fundamental impact. One of Zarnecki's priorities was the survival of medieval art as a viable subject of historical enquiry. As art history departments sprang up from the mid to late 1960s, new professors were appointed. Many were Courtauld-trained, and for every Marxian theoretician there was at least one (and probably two) "grounded" medievalists, who understood how to make the world and operate in it.

As a scholar Zarnecki made his name with a series of brilliantly conceived and deliberately low-key confrontations with the "unformatted" presumptions of the host nation he loved so much. He told the English that the Norman Conquest was really a European engagement. He told the Irish more or less the same, though subtly and indirectly.

Zarnecki wrote more than 50 short papers on specific subjects. His books included Romanesque Art; Gislebertus: Sculptor of Autun; and The Early Sculpture of Ely Cathedral.

The final project to which he gave his energy was the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, established with Peter Lasko as a publicly available digital project – one of the first of its kind (www.crsbi.ac.uk) The idea was conceived by Zarnecki and the French scholar Jean Bony on a tour of Herefordshire around 1960. It involves a coterie of fieldworkers visiting, recording and measuring Romanesque sculpture in Britain and Ireland at more than 6,000 sites.

Zarnecki was appointed CBE in 1970. Among many other honours and awards he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

He did not enjoy the limelight – "the most important rank," he would say, "is corporal" – and preferred working in small groups, with students and colleagues. He was devoted to his family. It was not until the late 1950s that his mother and sister were able to leave Poland to visit him, by which time his father had died.

George Zarnecki is survived by his wife and by their son and daughter.