Escape to Fame

Only twelve years ago, Stefan Knapp was a refugee wandering through Soviet Russia, feeding himself on roots, berries, and--on lucky days--the meat of cats and rats. Now, at 32, Knapp is a successful painter whose one-man show last week was a high point of the London season. Twenty-six of his pictures were sold by the Hanover Gallery, and Knapp was considering two commissions as a muralist.

The pictures on view were iridescent semi-abstractions in which bonelike black lines formed skeletal figures encompassing colored geometric shapes. Angry Bull, whose heavy lines encased blocks of purple, yellow, red, green and orange, suggested a formalized matador and a ferociously rigid bull. Not Exactly a Horse was an assembly of triangles and rectangles which, for all its abstractness, managed to look remarkably like a horse. All of the canvases showed rare originality and a deliberate, controlled ferocity.

Back from Siberia. Painter Knapp's own life story is as strange and tempestuous as any of his canvases. An art student in Lwow, Poland, he was picked up by the Russians in 1939 and packed off in a cattle truck jammed with other prisoners consigned to slave labor camps. Knapp's most nightmarish memory of the journey: a baby born in the crowded truck died. When guards opened the doors to water the prisoners, the Poles pushed the body out. It was pushed right back again. Finally, the prisoners squeezed the tiny corpse through the window bars.

Knapp was imprisoned in Siberia until 1942, when the hard-pressed Russians decided to release a group of the prisoners. With no food, money or work permits, Knapp and his friends headed south, eating anything they could scavenge, finally made it to India. The British sent Knapp to England, and he ended the war as a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force.

From the Bone. Knapp took up his interrupted studies, this time at London's Slade School of Fine Art. He was too poor to buy canvas, but rather than restrict himself to watercolors, he set out to find a medium that would stick to paper and still have the versatile quality of oil.

With the help of some chemistry lessons and an egg beater, he developed a secret mixture that did the trick. The new medium, which has a luminous quality, can also be applied to glass and metal.

Experimenting with paint mixtures convinced Knapp that he had a flair for invention. His next was a papier-mache spherical lamp shade; he sold the process for -L-1,000. This was enough money to permit Knapp to settle down to serious painting. The result, as viewed by Londoners last week, was a kind of abstraction that suggests reality in much the same way that a child's oversimplifications stress meaningful fundamentals. Says Knapp: "I wanted to say it in the simplest possible way. I'm not interested in the shell of the human being, but in the symbol of the human being ... I decided to work from the inside, from the bone."

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