Waldemar Januszczak
English art critic and journalist
Waldemar Januszczak (born 12 January 1954) is a Polish-British art critic and television documentary producer and presenter. Formerly the art critic of The Guardian, he took the same role at The Sunday Times in 1992, and has twice won the "Critic of the Year" award.
Early life and education
Januszczak was born in Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, to Polish refugees who had arrived in England after the Second World War.
In Poland his father had been a policeman in Sanok, a job that included exposing Communists. In the UK, he worked as a railway carriage cleaner, but died, aged 57, when a train ran over him at Basingstoke railway station. His widow, then aged 33, found work as a dairymaid. Waldemar was one year old at the time.
According to Januszczak in Holbein: Eye of the Tudors, he attended St Anne's (Roman Catholic) Primary School in Caversham, Berkshire, between the ages of five and 11.
The young Januszczak attended Divine Mercy College, a school for the children of Polish refugees which the Congregation of Marian Fathers had set up at Fawley Court, Henley-on-Thames. He notes that he was subject to severe corporal punishment, because the priests "spread God’s goodness among us by whipping us and caning us on a nightly basis...
“Waldemar Januszczak” enters the record as english art critic and journalist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Waldemar, Januszczak and English can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7961415. VIAF identifies the subject as 8770561. The Library of Congress control number is n83211322. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Waldemar Januszczak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.