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POLISH PAINTINGS
The Society For Arts Part II The Christopher Sztyber Collection of Contemporary Polish Art may be approaching the most extensive and methodically selected representation of modern Polish paintings in the United States: work of very high quality, encompassing accomplished and renowned artists as well as exceptional new talents. There are thirty works currently featured in "POLISH PAINTINGS in the Sztyber Collection, Part I," and they will remain on display at The Society for Arts, Gallery 1112, at 1112 North Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, until January 7, 2001. Franciszek Starowieyski's Untitled (1981: Gouache on paper) poses an enigmatic visual equation. The focus of the painting's upper half is a female form, seemingly splayed for mount, but the left leg is itself an auxillary figure, devoid of limbs, with a tubular umbilicus emerging from one eye socket. A viewer notes the heads of mechanical screws which evidently affix the anthropomorphic thighs to the image ground. A larval, insect-like creature occupies the lower half of this work, and it is flat on its back, much in a posture of death, or perhaps dormancy. This latter image recalls Franz Kafka's famous story, Metamorphosis, although here it lies at the foot of a female form, either as offering, vanquished supplicant, or iconic harbinger of uncanny future. Starowieyski's melding of female torso, embryonic form, and mechanical fasteners, in its vocabulary of image element, recalls the chimeras of animate and inanimate found in the art of Hieronymous Bosch, and even more, the dark and foreboding work of contemporary German artist, H.R.Giger. But Starowieyski's use of visual motif is more iconic than the latter's: there is less a fascination with image for shock of itself, and a greater attention to the significance of their specific associations. Here, one discovers an ambiguity in the female's situation, for her pose might as well be one of birth-giver as that of mounted specimen. Untitled (1981) certainly appears as a metaphor, a parable which each viewer is invited to articulate for himself. It is a disturbing provocateur of human anxieties, and it calls to mind Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: one finds within it the logic of the hive, fostered and nourished by man's own Faustian scientific ingenuity and social accommodations. Despite the somber beauties of Starowieyski's technique and execution, Untitled conveys the unease of a Franz Kafka or Aldous Huxley....
Franciszek Starowieyski was born in 1930, in the foothills of the Polish Carpathians. From 1949, he studied at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, and was later graduated from the Warsaw Academy (1955). The artist himself has noted that, well before studying at the Warsaw Academy, "What fascinated me then was satire of the imaginary world of terrifying capitalists, top hat-clad bloodsuckers... I was fascinated by the world of evil and darkness, by Daumier and [Polish filmmaker, writer Walerian] Borowczyk...." Although primarily a fine artist, Starowieyski is noted for his active collaboration in theater (he played David in the 1982 Paris production of Andrzej Wajda's "Danton"), as well as for his contributions in poster art and commercial graphics. An artist who often provoked authorities under Poland's post-WWII Socialist regime, Starowieyski has brought discipline and a sharp edge from applied graphics into his painting. The artist may, as an individual, be a restless creator, but his work is incisive, striking and highly individual. Examples of Starowieyski's graphic art may be viewed at http://www.mrposter.com/special.html
A vocabulary of surreal biological elements, biomorphism, need not result in wry and dark prophecy. Antoni Kowalski employs a biomorphic idiom, one which creates metaphors between animate and inanimate, but in Kowalski's art it blossoms into fantasy and wondrous effect. In Red Prayer, the central focus of the painting presents what might be inspired by insect leg, saprophytic stem sheath or stems with peeling red skins. In some works, image elements recall arthropod cuticle, the familiar 'shell' of lobster and locust. At other times, the imagery seems more like cloths of varying pattern and texture. Such a basic formulation establishes a vocabulary which is characteristic for the entire painting, and in the satellite images which ring the center focus of Red Prayer, these image characteristics, in each isolated and subordinate miniature, suggestively construct visions of monk, mushroom, poisonous bamboo, where evident natural features conspires to imitate man-made artifact. In Blue Prayer, image characteristics resemble tarpaulins or tissues. Intuitive form rings true here as in much of Kowalski's art. A viewer's specific reading must decide whether a particular element resolves as celery stems cross-cut or whether they are fantastical lily-pads. And are the strange constructions which arise from the waters but wooden pilings concealed by cloths, or an aberrant form of biological emergence. Kowalski was born July 10, 1957. He is thus the heir to both Surrealism, Magic Realism, and free-form experimentation in visual execution. The artist has noted an obligation towards art and yet a need to search new areas, although he rejects much of the superficiality of conventional 'new media.' He develops earlier repertoires of expression, but always with an intent to bring something into view which is distinct, novel, and yet communicative to fellow men. Kowalski has called his major concern the states of mind on a transcendental plane and the "third eye of the mind." Antoni Kowalski studied at the Department of Graphic Art, Katowice, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Poland. Jacek Wojciechowski is a Polish artist whose work is difficult to categorize, but which delights in its detail and associations. Wojciechowski is another artist who seems impatient with reality, and yet who ranges for inspiration through time, cultures and the bric-a-bracage of the dreaming mind. He is represented in this exhibition by two works: on a flying carpet, or maybe balloon, one dark september night they brought me a wife (latajacym dywanem, a moze balonem, ciemna wrzesniowa noca przywiezli mi zone), (1994, Oil on canvas, 43 1/2"x94 1/2"); and A day before Adam was born (Dzien przed narodzeniem Adama) (1991: Oil on canvas). Many of Jacek Wojciechowski's canvases operate in Euclidian space, flat planes; but the events, or tableaux which therein transpire -- the subliminal relationships between object forms -- belong to no world known, at least in a waking state. Works by this artist were reviewed, and reproduced, earlier in www.artscope.net for "The Polish Connection," (June 2000) at The Chicago Atheneum.
The paintings of Henryk Musialowicz are somber, shadowy, and there is the indefinable air of midnight basilica or darkened sacristy about them. If they evoke sacramental icons, then in content, and the artist's intents and inspirations, they serve a faith in that part of man which, as St. Augustine once declared, is in this world, but not of it. Musialowicz himself, although aware of such comparisons, demurs and ranges beyond definable traditions. In a 1995 exhibition, "Eternal Energy," he asserted: "I am haunted by this charism of pain and suffering. I know that more than once I shall see Our Lady of Sorrow's face in that of one of my fellows. I am not interested in 'icon' art because its very orthodox and limited form does not open itself to the problems of our times, but the grief in her eyes is the sadness of the whole world." (Society For Arts catalogue: 1995). Born 1914, Musialowicz started out as a realistic painter. Beginning in 1956, he initiated an eight year laboratory of new forms which led him to a repertoire characterized by understatement -- a figurative reduction -- as well as the invigoration of a new and personal symbolism. A large portion of his art has been conceived as cycles. And many of this artist's paintings exploit subtle, glazed, layered and enamel-like effects, often highlighted by gold and silver. Musialowicz's art may begin its birth with a figurative armature, but for the artist, collaborative associations, echoings of form and past conventions, visual similes, all gather to produce a fixed and enduring center of emotion and regard. Musialowicz fashions an art which finds, as in Animalistic Landscape (1962/64: Mixed media), the common, shared archetype in paleolithic cave paintings, Celto-Iberian and Minoan bull rituals, and Middle-Eastern or Biblical art. All human cultures acquire a language for art, each with a peculiar idiom, but that artistic specific, although minted and learned, still builds upon a common human perception and experience. This is the artist's prime concern:
Musialowicz furthermore places a collaborative importance on his framing: he, together with his wife, fashions frames as an integral part of a painting's totality. Musialowicz experiments widely with surface, both in texture and reflectivity. His Animalistic Landscape (1962/64: Mixed media) reveals two ox-like forms to the fore of a reduced, abstracted horizon and ground. A upper glaze of silver is effaced in parts of the image to reveal an underlying gold infill. In the rightmost form, this gold surface is much of the animal's color. The surface throughout the painting is scored, frequently in small patches of incised ribbing. Examining closely Musialowicz's From the Series, 'Family' (1981: Mixed media: 25 1/2"x36 1/2"), one discerns the almost feminine figure, center at right, as a filigreed and softened form; at the left is a brighter, glowing, figured prominence. in form. In the lower canvas, three forms, indistinct but for their central shaft of vertical gold, emerge as subordinates, satellites... offspring. But these offspring further resemble candle forms: light renewed. The Musialowicz paintings in the Sztyber Collection warrant close scrutiny. The Society For Arts has also produced a well-written, richly illustrated catalogue, eternal energy, which serves as excellent guide to this artist's work.
Janusz Przybylski is represented by three paintings in this showing. In Atelier 06.30.1996 (1996: Gouache), a viewer's attention focuses on the central female model and the bird, framed by red color, at the upper right corner. A wheel chair at left focus stands below a horned facial mask. The general sense of this artist's studio scene is one of homage, perhaps even self-abasement before the taut, almost muscular vitality of the female model -- the surrounding figures offer a monastic air. Atelier 12.08.1996 (1996: Gouache) takes as central figures horse and bare-back rider, which are flanked by two women at right, and a male, as well as disassociated head, at left. Janusz Przybylski applies a Picasso-esque sense of distorted form: multiple perspectives are coalesced upon each image element. These works recall Picasso's classical style of the interwar era. In them, the artist freely arrays image elements in visual ensemblage, all painted on a conspicuously flat surface, with a deliberate effort to defeat dimensional illusionism. Because the components seemed gathered from disparate sources and reinterpreted into a unified canvas each calls attention to its individualized presence: a viewer is prompted to query its function -- its purpose there. The lack of any interpretive clues for the evident narrative situation, other than ambient presence in an artist's studio, focuses consideration upon a general, familiar pattern of interaction. It evokes a mime of human rituals, unspecified and open for the viewer. Each viewer at the show's opening supplied a varying narrative to interpret the painting, and in part, that fulfills an intention of the artist:
Polish art critic Lechoslaw Lamenski called Przbylski's art "a marvelous saga on the imperfections of human fate, on sin and salvation, on hypocrisy and deceit; condemning conceit and stupidity, encouraging love and tolerance, teaching how to optimistically open ourselves to the future." That may represent an intent. Or an effect. But the possibilities are all-present in the art. And worth the gallery visitor's considered attention. The artists first discovered it; exploited it; became aware. Decades later, biologists confirmed that one of the reasons humans respond to large eyes and disproportionate heads, was that they characterize infants. The traits called forth protectiveness, affection. And when they are met with, joined to serious matters of the world, a very adult world, one is struck with dissonance, forced to reconsider the whole affair: a human comedy. The work of Krystyna Brzechwa is fanciful and illustrative, and she is represented in the Sztyber Collection by Bathtub (1979: Oil on canvas), and Red Ballet (1974: Oil on canvas). Imps, waifs, nudes naif, Brzechwa's visual vocabulary is often poignant in its recourse to the large eyes of the figures, their graceful, balanced postures and implied movement. At times her expression recalls Henri Rousseau. In Bathtub, six figures sport within and about a tub which stands eerily in an open flat of land. (One is reminded of Jean Paul Sartre, posing on an ice flow to dramatize his philosophy for Life magazine.) Gallery 1112, in an earlier showing of her art, "paintings of love," noted her penchant for approaching human fate philosophically, but "with a floweret, with an arabesque, with an all-liberating laugh." Andrzej Umiastowski's two oils on canvas: Troika (Trojka) (1998), and Wedding (slub) (1997), tend to approach the life and foibles of the bourgeois with a knowing, and gentle amusement. In this sensibility, he seems akin to Max Beerbohm, although for this artist, contentment, complacency, or a Walter Mitty pleasure at mundane life is concomitant with an expanding waistline. Perhaps, in honesty, it is. Both Wedding (slub) and Troika (Trojka) are representative of Umiastowski subjects: private moments, private lives often lost in the small joys of a moment: portraits of the at times incongruously contented. An additional two paintings, by Jacek Palucha, are included in this showing: Bird's Friend (Przyjaciel ptaka); and The Profound Care for the Well-being of a Simple Man (Diabelska troska o dobrobyt prostego czlowieka); both are oils on canvas (AD 2000). Palucha paints in a crisp, clean manner, and his paintings reveal a dry, covert wit. In composition, his art recalls some of Thomas Hart Benton's expressive turn of forms in display. One viewer at the opening described Palucha's work as a Candide of folk tale. In The Profound Care for the Well-being of a Simple Man, an somewhat Paul Bunyan-like farmhand is showered with offerings by an obvioiusly well-heeled member of society. Such, however, are not mankind's realities, but his daydreams: 'All for the best, and it couldn't be better, in this best of all possible worlds.' The paintings in the Sztyber collection, despite their great variety, have an edge, content. That may arise from the judgement and taste of the collector. But, having seen a large survey of art from Central Europe, a certain distinctiveness emerges. A country such as Poland, part of European history, remained aware of the course of art elsewhere, even when it was not cultivated or encouraged. Art there has always been a vital activity of life, and modern history has offered no leisure or relief to idlly eviscerate it. One reads art writing from the U.S. and Western Europe... To frivolously speculate the fine points of arcana about art -- deconstructionism, 'Dantoism, and the ilk -- contrasts with art arising from rich ground, art which as been hardened and which has prevailed with greater vigor in the face of adversity. Post-WWII regimes which sought to totalitarianize art ended with pruning and envigorating it. In this art there is content, significance. Christopher Sztyber's son, Przemek, joins in developing the collections, which ensures a continued stewardship.
Kiejstut Bereznicki, Krystyna Brechwa, Antoni Kowalski, Jan Lebenstein, Henryk Musialowicz, Kazimierz Ostrowski, Janusz Przybylski, Franciszek Starowieyski, Grzegorz Stec, Andrzej Umiastowski, Jacek Wojciechowski, Jacek Palucha -- Thirty featured works in "POLISH PAINTINGS in the Sztyber Collection," Part I, will be on display at The Society for Arts, Gallery 1112, at 1112 North Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, until January 7, 2001. The website for Gallery 1112, The Society for Arts is http://www.societyforarts.com
Finis Part II --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Some of the most useful sources in English for these artists are the several catalogues published by The Society For Arts, Chicago, and available at Gallery 1112, 1112 North Milwaukee Avenue, in that city. Of particular note are the society's Contemporary Warsaw Masters, Grzegorz Stec, and Jacek Wojciechowski. A catalogue of the Christopher Sztyber Collection is planned in 2001. Both Janusz Przybylski and Franciszek Starowieyski are featured in Polish Contemporary Graqphic Art by Danuta Wroblewska (Ingterpress, Warsaw: 1988), available at larger Art Libraries. |
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