Art in trust for Poland: Tim Knox describes the remarkable career of Count Andrew Ciechanowiecki, who saw his family homes in Poland destroyed in World War II and was imprisoned for six years by the Communists

Now retired from a highly successful career as a dealer in London, most famously at the Helm Gallery, he is devoting himself to the Ciechanowiecki Foundation. This private trust acquires works of art, mostly with a Polish provenance, for display in Warsaw's Royal Castle, which lost its collections during the war. In the following pages, we present a selection of its treasures.

It is not every dealer who has an artist named in his honour, but Count Andrew Ciechanowiecki, long the presiding genius of the Heim Gallery in London, has given his name to a mysterious master responsible for a clutch of rare seventeenth-century bronzes, now generally known to scholarship as the work of the 'Ciechanowiecki Master'. It is a fitting tribute to one who has done so much for the revival of the appreciation of sculpture, and of baroque art in general.

Very often the world of art fails to appreciate the contribution of influential art dealers in the formation of taste and collections, both private and public, but Andrew Ciechanowiecki's name deserves to be firmly inscribed on the roll-call of arbiters of taste during the second half of the twentieth century. He is well-known as an art dealer, but rather less familiar is his ambitious cultural initiative, the Ciechanowiecki Foundation.

Andrew Ciechanowiecki was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1924 and is the last of his line. His father, a diplomat, died young and much of his upbringing was entrusted to his English paternal grandmother, who lived in the imposing neo-renaissance family palazzo in ul. Piusa XI in Warsaw. The counts Ciechanowiecki are a noble Polish family who can trace their descent back to about 1380 and were established in Byelorussia from the sixteenth century. The family was expelled from Russia by the Bolsheviks in 1918, and nothing now survives of their great neoclassical house, Boczejkow, near Minsk, which had frescoed interiors and elaborate gardens on three terraces. Moreover, in 1939, when Ciechanowiecki was only fifteen, the last remnants of his family's former prosperity were swept away when the Nazis marched into Poland. The family lost everything.

His education disrupted, Ciechanowiecki struggled to get a grounding in economics and history of art in one of the underground schools set up by the Polish Resistance, served in the Home Army and took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Later, after a brief spell as chef de protocole to the Foreign Ministry of the short-lived interim government, he took a degree in economics at Cracow, followed by an in history of art at the Jagiellonian University, where he became assistant to the chair of art history. Indeed, Ciechanowiecki seemed destined for an academic career until his arrest in 1950 by the new Stalinist regime for 'Anglo-American-Vatican contacts' and, after seventeen months of interrogation, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. Exonerated and released in 1956, he returned to his studies, winning scholarships from the British Council and the Ford Foundation that enabled him to study in Britain and the United States. In 1959 he spent a year in Germany, at Tubingen University, where he gained his doctorate.

This experience of the west and the increasingly difficult situation in Poland made Ciechanowiecki decide to leave his beloved homeland. He arrived in London in 1961 with just two pounds in his pocket and the determination to become a dealer in the works of art he loved and studied. Ciechanowiecki's intelligence, energy, and his eye for the unusual soon paid off and English friends helped him become established as one of the co-founders of Mallett at Bourdon House. His first exhibition there, in November 1962, of works by the French animaliers--a term that Ciechanowiecki invented as a noun--demonstrates his talent for spotting a hitherto largely unappreciated artistic genre. Indeed, sculpture became his speciality, and in subsequent years Bourdon House was the venue for important exhibitions on terracotta sculpture (1963), Jules Dalou (1964) and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1965). These last two shows, made up of works purchased from the sculptors' descendants whom Andrew had tracked down in France, helped re-establish the reputations of these by then neglected nineteenth-century artists.

Ciechanowiecki left Mallett in 1965 and went into partnership with Francois Heim, opening the Helm Gallery, at 59 Jermyn Street, with an exhibition of Italian baroque paintings and sculpture in June 1966. Once again, his taste and business acumen prevailed, as did his sense of showmanship, in his presentation of thematic collections of unusual and striking works of art in a variety of media in his elegant crimson-damask-hung premises. Two exhibitions were mounted each year for the next twenty years--a large mixed show of major works in summer and a smaller one in autumn with one or two star pieces. Exhibitions were invariably commemorated by scholarly catalogues, each piece being illustrated and objectively described, which in itself was a new departure. Indeed, the thirty-eight Helm Gallery catalogues produced between 1966 and 1986 can be said to have set the standard to which auctioneers' and dealers' catalogues now aspire. Scholars, collectors, museum directors, the fashionable world--even members of the royal family--flocked to the Helm Gallery exhibition openings celebrating what were then such novel themes as seventeenth-century French bronzes, Italian baroque oil sketches and neoclassical portrait busts. Ciechanowiecki also regularly collaborated with museums and other institutions on touring exhibitions: 'The Twilight of the Medici' shown in Detroit and Florence in 1974; 'Giambologna' at Edinburgh, London and Vienna in 1978; and 'The Golden Age of Naples' in Naples and Detroit in 1981.