Painter, graphic artist and playwright, he was the author of polychrome decorations and stained-glass windows in Poland and abroad. He participated in more than forty solo exhibitions and in dozens of group shows. Born in Kraków on 20 December 1896, he died on 15 May 1969.

He owed his introduction to the world of art to his father, Alojzy Bunsch (1859–1916), who was a professor of sculpture at the Cracow Industrial School from 1892 to 1916. Following his example, he enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1914, but his studies were interrupted by military service in the Austrian army. In 1916, he was transferred from Sopron to Kraków, where he served as a painter’s assistant at the garrison hospital until 1918. In 1917, he embarked on two courses of study: at the Jagiellonian University he read philosophy, while at the Academy of Fine Arts he studied painting in Józef Mehoffer’s studio. His career and artistic development were again curtailed when, in November 1918, he volunteered for the Polish Army. As a member of the 3rd Battery of the 1st Field Artillery Regiment of the Polish Legions, he took part in the eastern campaigns. After the war, he returned to his native Kraków, where he resumed his studies in art and philosophy, graduating in 1921. That same year, having obtained the necessary qualifications, he moved to Bielsko, where he taught drawing and geometry at the State Industrial School until 1939.

Not wishing to sever his ties with the flourishing artistic life of Kraków, he regularly visited the city, where he associated with writers connected with the editors of the “Literary Newspaper”. In this milieu, he met Witkacy, who painted him in 1933. Maturing in the company of such forceful personalities, he took up writing himself, a passion he shared with his brother, Karol Bunsch. “Steam Horse”, staged in 1933 at the City Theatre in Kraków, was Adam Bunsch’s dramatic debut. Janusz Degler, a distinguished historian of literature, has argued that it was an important inspiration for witkacy himself. Bunsch’s catastrophic vision of the future, in which the development of technology is linked to moral decay, was, however, received coolly by the Kraków audience. His reflections on the progress of civilisation were continued in his later dramas, “The Last Poem” (1958) and “The Tower of Babel” (1961).

He was actively involved in the work of the “Theatre Confraternity”. Bunsch’s artistic training and wide-ranging interests also led him to try his hand at theatre stage design. Together with Tadeusz Kudliński and Wiesław Gorecki, he was one of the co-authors of the “New Realisation of Hamlet” (1936), a production based on Wyspiański’s study of the play. The initiative to create a theatrical repertoire to accompany the 1939 Kraków Days became a catalyst for Bunsch to write two plays about figures closely associated with Wawel Castle: Wit Stwosz and Adam Chmielowski, “Wit Stwosz's Altar” (1942) and “The Pigeons of Brother Albert” (1943).

Adam Bunsch’s dramatic oeuvre comprises thirty plays, most of them unpublished; six were included in the volume “Dramaty” (1974).

The interwar period was the most intensive phase of his artistic activity, including his work in the fine arts. At that time, he engaged in a sustained search for appropriate means of expression and readily adopted a range of stylistic conventions. He was formed above all by the symbolism characteristic of Young Poland, a tendency exemplified by his oil painting "Lecture on Man" (1923). Here, Bunsch constructed form primarily through colour, synthesising and eschewing detail, for instance in the facial features of the figures. Viewed in the light of the artist’s later works on the subject of war, this scene can be read as a bitter reckoning with the past. At the same time, the symbolism present in the painting lends it a more universal, eschatological dimension.

The need to come to terms with history culminated in a series of works dedicated to war. His painterly reminiscences of the First World War are not underpinned by a historiosophical vision, typical of Polish painting, that sums up national captivity and insurrectionary uprisings; instead, they offer a reflection on the fate of the individual caught up in the machinery of global conflict, as in “The Seized Trench” (1930) and “Fatum” (1931). In this series, Bunsch moved between a relatively faithful imitation of nature, despite certain distortions in the proportions of the figures, as in “Wake-up Call” (1932), and a freer approach to the subject. An example of the latter convention can be seen in “Review of the Retreat” (1927), a bold composition based on perspectival foreshortening, synthesis and the geometrisation of forms, together with a striking contrast of yellow and green. Nor did he abandon the symbolism of Young Poland, with its characteristic fascination with the personified figure of death, as in “Carbine Ball” (1929).

New qualities were introduced into his painting by a journey undertaken in 1928–1929 along the route Paris – Rome – Florence – Venice – Vienna, and by his encounter with post-impressionist tendencies. He began to intensify his colours, lighten the palette and introduce a pronounced surface texture, visible in spontaneous, sweeping brushstrokes, as in “Paris – Seine” (1928). Between 1933 and 1939, he was associated with a colour-oriented formation, the “Group of Ten”, founded by Teodor Grott in 1932.

Adam Bunsch’s artistic inclinations were inherited by his sons, the stage designer Ali (1925–1985) and the graphic artist Franciszek (born 1926). The subtle pastel images of his four children, including “Sleeping Child” (1932) and “Portrait of a Daughter” (1934), are reminiscent of the work of Stanisław Wyspiański.

The outbreak of global war returned him to the front; on 2 September 1939, he left Bielsko with General Józef Kustroń’s 21st Mountain Infantry Division. After the unit’s defeat, he left Poland and was interned in Hungary. In 1940, he managed to escape to France, from where he set off for England. He was soon assigned as an education officer in the 10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade, serving in Forfar in Scotland. In 1943, he was promoted to lieutenant in General Stanisław Maczek’s 1st Armoured Division
He signed his works written during the war, as well as his dramas, with a pseudonym. In England and Scotland, he produced memoirs, “Letters to His Wife: Unsent” and “The Year 1942: A Diary”, as well as oil paintings and sketches. Using sanguine, pencil and watercolour, he fixed on paper scenes of army life, as in “A Review of a Tank Platoon’s Stopover” (1943), the 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, as in “Parachutist at RAF Station in Dunino” (1942), and English aviation, as in “Fighter at an Airfield” (1944).

Between 1943 and 1945, he designed eleven narrative and an equal number of decorative windows for Our Lady of Częstochowa and St Casimir’s Church in London. They illustrate the struggles of Poles to regain their sovereign statehood and the intercession of saints who accompany their efforts. The nation is comforted by the Mother of God, who protects those fleeing misfortune beneath her mantle, and by St Barbara, patron saint of prisoners and soldiers, accompanied by the symbol of Fighting Poland. The figures of Blessed Czesław Odrowąż, rescuer of Wrocław besieged in the twelfth century, and St Andrew Bobola, who, in a vision granted to a Dominican monk in the nineteenth century, heralded the resurrection of Poland after the First World War, confirm the divine intercession that has accompanied the Poles to this point. The hands of the faithful raised towards Mary and Blessed Odrowąż recall the compositional device employed by Mehoffer in the cartoon for the stained-glass window in Wawel Cathedral, "Sancta Virgo" (before 1910, National Museum in Warsaw). Adam Bunsch also included in this ensemble scenes relating to recent history: the campaign in France in 1940, in “Taking up the Banner”, and the period in England in 1940–1941, in “Veil of St Veronica”. 

He returned to Poland in 1945 and settled in Kraków, where he took up teaching posts at the State Industrial School (PSP) between 1947 and 1952. In 1951, his “Handbook of Drawing for Vocational Schools” was published.

After the subsequent experiences of war, the artist moved away from symbolic, narrative compositions. In the genre scenes of the 1960s, he returned to post-impressionist sources of inspiration. The paintings of this period acquired vivid colours and a coarse texture, applied in vigorous strokes of paint that leave parts of the canvas bare and create an impression of unfinishedness, as in “Cutters and Boats” (1965) and “Repair of Cutters” (1967). He strongly synthesised and reduced forms, as in “Gypsies” (1948) and “Gypsy Camp” (1948). His affirmation of nature, combined with naturalistic precision, resulted in exquisite studies of various species of plants, as in “Lilies” (1967), and animals, as in “Finches on a Pine Tree” (1967), which allude to the tradition of Japanese art. He executed these works primarily in the colour woodcut technique, which he had already practised before the war.

His love of the native landscape produced views of the Tatra Mountains and Lower Silesia, rendered in a variety of techniques. Travels in Europe – to Greece and Crete (1957), England (1958, 1961), France, Italy and Austria (1961–1962) – provided subjects for many of his landscape watercolours, such as “Knossos” (1957) and “Regent’s Park in London” (1961).

Adam Bunsch also created works to accompany sacred spaces. According to his designs, 222 stained-glass windows were executed in 34 churches in Poland and 27 in England and Scotland. The first ensemble was created just before the war: 19 stained-glass windows for the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Katowice (1936–1939). Most of them were produced by Kraków workshops, including that of Stanisław Gabriel Żeleński, with whom Mehoffer and Wyspiański had collaborated, and that of Karol Paczka.