Obituary of Andrzej Krajewski

World-famous artist Andre Krayewski (Andrzej Krajewski), of Newark, passed away Tuesday, April 10, peacefully of natural causes, after 84 years of life and hundreds of posters, paintings, and pages of comics and prose. Andre was known in his community as a larger-than-life figure -- a dashing bon-vivant, fount of idiosyncratic outsider wisdom, and passionately devoted parent, grandparent, husband, and lover. A noted innovator of the Polish School of Posters, Krayewski expressed his bold creative vision across several continents and in a vast array of media. He is remembered with a brush in his hand and a twinkle in his eye. “My first poster came about in 1956 when in the town where I lived after the war, Wroclaw, appeared a young woman, who looked sort of like Julliett Greco, who had the aim to set up a small experimental existentialist theater,” Krayewski wrote in his own biographical note. Andre later studied under the renowned poster artist Henryk Tomaszewski, earning a master's degree from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1963. He married Maria Ihnatowicz, with whom he occasionally designed posters and book covers. They had one daughter, Natalia. Andre spent the 1960s and '70s creating startlingly original poster art and book covers for clients throughout Europe. A monograph of his graphic design work was published in 2014 by Ha!Art. His posters took him throughout Europe, and a trip to Morocco in 1978 sparked in him an interest in fine art paintings. He eventually developed an art deco-like style and exhibited at shows in Europe and Japan. He and Maria eventually divorced, and in 1983, Andre met his beloved wife Yagoda (Jadwiga) in the cafe of the Hotel Europejski during martial law in Warsaw, a story he recounted in one of his comics. It was love at first sight. A longtime fan of American jazz and cinema, Krayewski emigrated to the United States with Yagoda in 1985. They had two boys, Edward and Kayetan, born in New York City, and eventually settled in the Ivy Hill neighborhood of Newark, where they would live for the rest of their lives. They arrived on tourist visas and struggled to obtain documents. (Yagoda died in 2005, less than a year after receiving her green card) When he couldn’t register the family New Yorker due to immigration status, the ever-inventive Andre, with characteristic flair, simply drew a replica license plate on a piece of cardboard and stapled it to the bumper. It worked for several years before police spotted the forgery on the street and towed the car. It was crushed along with several paintings left in the trunk. While Andre continued in the large format of paintings, two of them were used as posters. The painting “BOOGIE WOOGIE” (oil on canvas, 42×58’’) was used for the official poster of the 1997 Panasonic Jazz Festival and the painting “HOLLYWOOD HOLLYWOOD” (oil on canvas, 60×80’’) for many years was the official poster of the New York Film Academy, seen on buses and in subways across New York City. After Yagoda’s death, Andre returned to poster art while working on a memoir about his younger days, an effort lovingly mocked by his family. But in 2009 the memoir became SKYLINER, a semi-autobiographical novel expressing a young artist's yearning to escape Stalinist Poland to a mythologized America in 1954, was published in 2009 by Czysty Warsztat. Despite its anti-Polish undertones, it was relatively well-received, earning 4 stars from Newsweek Polska. Around 2011, after his son Kayetan began to buy him collections of underground comics such as MEATHAUS and the 2009 edition of BEST AMERICAN COMICS Andre discovered a profound love for comics and cartooning, and began to create an extensive series of self-published comic pamphlets, graphic novels and cartoon prints. His son Ed adapted SKYLINER into comic book form, and the two released 11 issues of SKYLINER OR 1954, which was collected in 2014 into one graphic novel. He also continued to work on posters at this time, creating several for a Polish theater production company as well as film poster collectors. Andre pursued his restless creative vision until the end, spending the last four years of his life collaborating with Ed on the monthly FKT magazine. The father and son team co-wrote the comic, which over the course of 24 issues and several book-format collections comprises more than 1000 original pages of daring, experimental, provocative sequential art. A chapter from FKT is slated for inclusion in the upcoming 2018 edition of BEST AMERICAN COMICS from Houghton Mifflin, the latest in a long string of honors Andre has received for his different art work. Despite medical struggles towards the end of his life, he was looked after with great love by his son Kayetan. Andre remained a deeply caring father, a man of wry humor and rascal's charm, and a creative force of nearly unfathomable productivity and inventiveness. He took enormous pleasure in joking with his sons and playing with his new granddaughter Jackie. He was working and plotting until the end, and would like to say he died with a pencil in his hand, because sometimes a good story is better than the plain truth. Andre's legacy is embodied by Kayetan, a graphic artist in his own right, Ed, his wife Richara and their daughter Jadwiga, and Natalia and her daughter Maria Herman, who is studying the history of art in Poland, and of course by his own countless artistic creations.