Andrzej Krauze

Andrzej Krauze (born 7 March 1947)[1] is a Polish-born British cartoonist, illustrator, caricaturist, painter, poster designer[2] and satirist noted for his allegorical, fabulous, symbolic and sometimes scary imagery, as well as his reliance on black ink, bold lines and cross-hatching.

Zuzanna Lipinska, daughter of the Museum of Caricature's founder, agrees: "Cartoons were important because there were a lot of things that couldn't be said directly, so people had to find metaphorical ways of saying them.

After a year there, however, the Home Office refused to extend his visa,[8] forcing him to move to Amsterdam in 1980, where he worked as an illustrator for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

I only had a one-week tourist visa to begin with, but after martial law I published a lot of drawings in English, American and French newspapers, and immediately it was impossible to return [to Poland].

[2] Between 1986 and 1990 he designed posters for London's Old Vic theatre, then under the directorship of Jonathan Miller, and began contributing cartoons and illustrations to the New Statesman in 1988,[1] The Guardian in 1989, and The Independent on Sunday in 1990.

[5] In 2001, Krauze returned to Poland as an artist for the first time in 20 years, with a critically acclaimed exhibition in the Museum of Caricature, Warsaw, attended by the British ambassador and the celebrated Polish film director Andrzej Wajda among others.

Many of [his drawings] were defiantly crude onslaughts, which used strong ink lines and ferocious cross-hatching to emphasise the violence of the Communist state and then hurl it back in the face of the regime... [H]is eye seemed harsher, and sometimes frankly disrespectful of the foibles and eccentricities of British life.