Showing posts with label Witold Wojtkiewicz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Witold Wojtkiewicz. Show all posts

13/03/2014

Polish Paintings That Spoke To My Soul


The following weekend Carol and I went to see Paintings From Poland: Symbolism to Modern Art 1880-1939, at the National Gallery of Ireland. When I told friends abroad about the Dublin of the noughties - they were very surprised. Our streets teemed with every race, nationality, creed and colour – and I loved it. As I said to Carol when we see all the beautiful women from around the world walking Dublin’s streets: “I am all for integration!” However, I seriously welcomed the influx of new cultures, new outlooks and new perspectives.
           

By 2007 – I did not recognize the city of my birth. What had happened to Ireland in the last fifteen years had been nothing short of miraculous. I grew up in a poverty stricken, backward and intolerant Ireland - sparsely populated by a virtually all white, all Catholic, all Irish population whose knowledge of the world outside our shores was limited to a sun holiday in Spain, the television shows of Britain and the cinema of America.
          

In the 1980s, virtually nobody wanted to live in Ireland – and even if they did they could not get a job. However, the Celtic Tiger turned our country of émigrés into a country of immigrants. When the English comedian Lenny Henry (who by the way was black) appeared on The Late Late Show in the mid 1980s he thought it was hilarious the way people looked at him in the street – it was not racism – just amazement – they had never seen a black man in the flesh! However, by 2007 - unless you were purple or pink – nobody would notice you!
           

Thankfully, conscious racism was still very rare – though it did exist. However, nagging at the back of many Irish people’s mind was the question – how long would the good times last? Already there was a worldwide economic turn down and it looked like it would get worse. How would Irish hospitality fair when jobs were scarce? Could we see the same segregation and racism that had cursed other European countries? How in God’s name could we prevent what happened in France and The Netherlands – happening here?
           

One way was integration of the foreign community into the Irish community – no ghettos, no ‘white-flight’, no nations within a nation – mutual respect and mutual understanding. Our newspapers and television stations had gone out of their way to have immigrant writers, commentators and actors in the media. Moreover Fair City, a soap opera on RTÉ 1 (kind of our version of BBC 1’s Eastenders) - had long had foreign characters, and ‘water-cooler’ stories of racism, prejudice, crime - but also deep friendship. In Dublin we had The City Channel a public broadcast station - which had programs made and featuring Polish, African and Asian news and stories of Dublin life. I remembered one night - a few years before – I had been watching African Eye – when they had a story on a young female Zulu dance group in Dublin. The first shot was of about ten young African women dressed in great authentic Zulu costumes and doing a fierce dance. Then they started interviewing the girls, and I fell out of my seat when half of them spoke in the thickest Ballymun accent I had ever heard and some said they had never been to Africa! Nothing encapsulated more for me - the shifting nature of identity in Ireland.
           

The Polish community in Dublin was one of the largest – there were Polish newspapers, Polish shops, and Polish translations in many places. Since the early 1990s, galleries like The Temple Bar Gallery - had forged links with artists and institutions in Poland. However, we had seen less of historical Polish art. Therefore, this exhibition was very important.                                                              


However, I have to say I had my doubts. Was it all just a cynical operation of political propaganda? Was it just smug artistic political-correctness? Was it just a middle-class exercise - of no importance to the common Polish or Irish man? Could art really tell us things about our new friends in Ireland? Well perhaps it was cynical propaganda - perhaps it was only of interest to a small elite – but I also thought that it was a highly illuminating exhibition. So much so that I had to say: “Bring it on! Bring on Nigerian art, Chinese art, Lithuanian art – let us all see how the other thinks - let us see the undiscovered hero's of world art - let us share our visions.”
           

As you can gather - I went with great curiosity to see this show. Poland really is another country – one I know very little about. But Carol was far less interested. What paintings we had seen on the very inadequate Irish National Gallery website were poor choices and even though she liked (with uncritical abandon) female artists – Carol had no interest in this shows ‘World Star’ - Tamara de Lempicka. As for me – I thought de Lempicka an utter joke and her canvases nothing more than calendar art - perpetrated on the art world by politically blinded Feminist historians in the 1970s. But more on this joke later. Anyway, I was not going to see that silly opportunistic woman - I was going to see my old soul mate in the madhouse - Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz.
           

As usual the first thing we did when reaching the gallery – was head for the book-shop and my girlfriend kindly bought the catalogue for the Polish show (I was practically broke.) Flicking threw its thick pages we were utterly delighted and surprised by what we saw - and could not wait to see the paintings in the flesh. At €25 and 203pp with over seventy colour plates and an exciting text - which is a fine mix of connoisseur appraisal and sociological and philosophical speculation - it is a gem. However, in parts I sensed the strain of translation from Polish to English.
           

Yet again, the National Gallery bookshop was a devilish temptation for me – but since I had only €7 in my pocket - I knew I could only look. Seeing all the newly brought in Christmas coffee-table art books - drove me mad with desire - and I had to walk briskly away from them, lest I lose my mind. Still I determined to treat myself to some at the holidays – my first buy being the essential Picasso A Life Vol.3 by John Richardson which I had waited on since buying, reading and loving Vol. 2 in 1997
           

Before going around the show, we went into the coffee shop - and my girlfriend treated me to a Mocha - and we shared a mouth-watering slice of Strawberry sponge cake which was utterly delicious.
           

After our little treat, we headed into the exhibition - that from the very first paintings – blew our minds! This exhibition of Polish art - was quite simply the strangest, most impressive and most surprising exhibition I had seen in 2007. Yes, the Lucian Freud in IMMA was a better solo exhibition – but I went to that with a total all consuming knowledge of his work, his life and his place in English society. This exhibition on the other hand was a total Jack-In-The-Box of surprises, revelations and discoveries.
           

I only knew a handful of these Polish artists beforehand (Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Tamara de Lempicka and Jacek Malczewski) and my knowledge of Poland was limited to; Napoleon’s battle at Austerlitz, Germany’s invasion and occupation of Poland in WWII and the tragic destruction of Warsaw in 1944 - after its second uprising (the first being the tormented and bloody Jewish uprising of 1943) and finally a vague knowledge of Poland under the Communists, the Solidarity movement, Pope John Paul II - and this ravaged and abused countries recent emergence as a European democracy. In other words – no more than is necessary to be a competent player of Trivial Pursuit.
           

The major first part of this exhibition dealt with Symbolist painters like; Kazimierz Stabrowski, Józef Mehoffer, Jacek Malczewski, Witold Wojtkiewicz, Ferdynand Ruszczyc, Ferdynand Ruszczyc, Konrad Krzyzanowski, Franciszek Zmurko, Wojciech Weiss, Konrad Krzyzanowski, Jan Matejko, Franciszel Zmurko Bronislaw Worjciech Linke. Yes. Yes I know. I had never heard of most of before either – but believe me they were worth checking out!
           

In their lush, morbidly coloured paintings; a Chimera (half woman /half tiger) played a violin in the countryside, tumultuous streams of human-bodies hurtled across the flat land like a whirlwind, monstrously large dragonflies threatened a family in a garden, empty rooms flickered by the light of a couple of candles, mentally broken people played with dolls as ragged as themselves, lurid colours spoke of music and death, mauve pirate ships sailed on purple seas, jesters slumped in despair, a murdered odalisque lay sprawled over fine cushions, and a faun played the reed to a barefoot girl and a baffled and ruffled group of turkeys (the critics.) Moreover, everywhere there were secret codes for Polish nationalism and independence.
           

I cannot remember an exhibition before where I was so in need of the little explanations on white plaques by the paintings. The symbols and stories behind them were essential - to their understanding as narratives. However, unlike so much conceptual art of today – the ideas behind these Symbolist paintings were genuinely odd, imaginative, complex and evocative.
           

Now earlier I mentioned that this show might have seemed an elitist exercise. However, even if you did not know much about art – you would probably have loved this show. If you liked the Fin-De-Siecle, Fantasy Art, Dark Art, Comic books, Satanism, Decadence, early Walt Disney films like Fantasia – you would have loved this show! This was where so many of the ideas of fantasy came from – but it was made by superbly trained academic painters. Moreover, if you hated Modern art and liked your paintings realistic, crammed with detail and telling a story – you would have loved these canvases.
           

In painting, I knew there were so many ways to fail - so many ways to be rotten. But there were also - so many different ways to succeed. Many of these painters were clearly men of great intellectual curiosity, passion, and skill – but god knows they had so many other things against them that were outside of their control – being born in Poland and not France in the 1860s was just one of them.
           

At its most reductive the history of Modern art in my youth - was a history of France, Spain, Germany Russia and The United States. It was assumed that the greatest artists in the world were born either in Paris or New York - or emigrated to them. It was of course a gross and stupid assumption - that shows like this proved wrong. I am not saying I found a Polish Picasso or Matisse – but I found artists at least of the second or third rank - who pulled off some fascinating and original canvases – some of them excellent masterpieces. Which reminded me of when Orson Well’s, was interviewed by Parkinson on ITV in the 1970s. Parkinson put it to Wells that he was a genius - to which Wells laughed - and replied something to the effect that there had only been two real geniuses of the twentieth century; Einstein and Picasso - and probably some guy in China we have never heard of! He was absolutely right, and how many ‘could-have-been-geniuses’ were there in countries like; Romania, Iran, Johannesburg or Hong Kong – artists who never had the support structure of a superpower state like those in France or the US.
           

The Symbolist's like Stuck in Germany, Klimt in Vienna, Kupka in Prague, Redon in Paris and Hodler in Zurich had the honesty to express their own confusion of beliefs and solipsistic and misogynistic fear of women in their art – I respect them for that. Even if you hate misogyny and want to end it –first you have to try to bring up the subject - and get men and women to be honest about their feelings. The biographies of some of the major Symbolist's - was a sad codex of human suffering, neglect, misunderstanding, madness, alcoholism and often suicide – only the Expressionists were more tortured. These dark, lush, fin-de-siècle oil paintings of almost hallucinatory intensity – spoke of a continent and humankind undergoing the most profound political, religious, economic, philosophical, sexual and eventually military upheavals.
           

Sometimes the most perceptive writers on art I found were those that hated most of it. One such writer was Leon Tolstoy who in his classic polemic What is Art? (1898) – attacked Symbolist's poets and painters in the following terms: “…there is then no reason why some circle of perverted people should not create works that titillate their perverted feelings and are incomprehensible to anyone except themselves, and call these works art, which in fact is now being done by the so-called decadents…” Strong stuff, and earlier he had written: “These are all works by people suffering from erotic mania. These people are apparently convinced that, since their entire life, as a result of their morbid condition, is concentrated on the smearing about of sexual abominations, it must mean that the entire life of the world is concentrated on the same thing.” In an age of Internet porn over-dose these paintings might have seemed a bit tame to young people - but they were undoubtedly still very peculiar works.
           

In defense of them I would have pointed out to Tolstoy the seriousness of their academic training, their sheer skill in drawing and mastery of colour and brushwork.  I knew that there was not one single painter alive in 2007 - who could have painted as technically correct as these artists – who had died only about a hundred years before. This was in large part thanks to Jan Matejko who featured at the beginning of this exhibition. Matejko taught most of these early Symbolist's the art of figure drawing, composition, chiaroscuro, brushwork and colour – but unlike most academic painters – he did not crush their creativity, identity or passion in the process.
           

Next, I would have insisted that the Symbolist's were honest and courageous men who sought to reveal their inner demons – long before Freud and the Surrealists. I would have added that their work told us just as much about the twilight of their epoch as the Impressionists. But whereas the Impressionists were the fathers of modernism – the Symbolist were in a sense the last sterile sons of a family line of Aristocratic painting. Their project was as doomed to failure as the story of their military counterparts – the brave, heroic and glorious Polish Cavalry - who charged German tanks on their horses in 1939 – and were massacred. I say ‘story’ because this version was by my day - under attack from Polish historians who said that the Polish Cavalry had actually fought quite well in their battles - and that the ‘story’ was a form of ‘black-propaganda’ by the Nazis. But then I observed that the Symbolist's themselves knew all about ‘black-propaganda’ – they had been written out of fashionable art history.
           

The Symbolist's were the first group of artists to make their own pathology the centre of their art. Where the Impressionist had emphasized the artists eye – the Symbolist's emphasised the artists mind; his fears, his longings, his ambitions, his hopes, his dreams and his nightmares.
           

In these Polish Symbolist paintings - I felt I had gone deeper into the anti-chamber of the pre World Wars Psyche - than in anything produced by Beckman or even Picasso when painting Guernica. Because evil does not come out of reason, measure, transparency and maturity – it comes from immaturity, madness, obscurity and thwarted souls. The healthy, manly art of those masters could never really explain the narcissistic, embittered souls of men like Hitler and Stalin.
           

Another odd experience I had at this exhibition was the sense I had of travelling back in time – to a very different notion of great painting. I had often read of anecdotes about the Salons – which told of enraptured visitors peering up close to the Academic paintings with their magnifying glasses – enthralled by the paint-work, detail and sure-handed drawing. What was true in the 1890s was as true in 2007 - with these canvases. You had to see them in the flesh – you simply could not see the subtlety of colour modulation, brushwork, pastose textures and deep shadows of these paintings in reproduction. There were packed ranks of visitors around the Symbolist canvases – taking in every inch of colour and line. However, by the time we had got to the more modern canvases – people were thinned out and standing off the canvases in growing boredom and indifference. I completely agreed with them. We went around the Symbolist section again - but not the Cubist, Expressionist, Neo-Classical and Surrealist sections.
           

My girlfriend and I both thought that Kazimierz Stabrowski’s bold handling of oil paint – lush, thick, pastose, glossy and opaque - applied with broad hog-hair brushes - was startlingly reminiscent to my own painting style particularly in works like Sodium Amytal, 1993 (but done with far greater painterly skill, discipline and professionalism.)
           

Four of the most shockingly modern paintings in the show were small, quick, alla-prima oil paintings on canvas by Konrad Krzyzanowski from 1906 – which in their brevity – I swore anticipated the spare canvases of Luc Tuymans and William Sasnal of my today.
           

However, after the high of the Polish Symbolist's - the show slowly degenerated into weak, academic and opportunistic rip-offs of Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism.
           

That is where my old friend in solitude Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (B.1885-D. 1939 - he was also called Witkacy) came in. I first read his amazing modern novel Insatiability – in December 1991. Witkacy was an eccentric avant-garde novelist, dramatist, philosopher and prolific painter. He suffered from mental illness - and when he heard that the Russian Army had crossed the border (joining the Nazi’s in a low carve up of Poland) - he committed suicide by taking veronal and cutting his wrists. I probably would have done the same. Therefore, it was appropriate that I had first read Insatiability – in St. Ita’s mental hospital Portrane - where I had been committed! And when in 1998 I painted ‘Art Is Dead’ I had no idea that Witkacy had declared art dead in 1924!
           

His anti-Utopian and prophetic novel Insatiability tracked the adventures of a young nihilistic Pole whose own fate paralleled the inevitable collapse of Western civilization following a Chinese Communist invasion from the East. It was not a perfect novel – in fact it was a bit of a mess – but it was also an original, highly intelligent - mixed up collection of philosophical observations on art, sex, women, madness, metaphysics, the vastness of the universe and the insignificance of its hero. The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said it best when he wrote “The whole book was nothing but a study of decay: mad dissonant music, erotic perversion, widespread use of narcotics, dispossessed thinking, false conversions to Catholicism, and complex psychopathic personalities.” It was quite simply, one of the weirdest books I had ever read (and I had read the Marquis de Sade, Bataille, Joyce and Burrows.) I had no idea if it was any good as literature - but it stayed lodged in my brain. I have to say - I felt the same for many of the wonderful Polish Symbolist painters.
           

Therefore, I went with fond hopes that his paintings would turn out to be amazing. I had seen a few of them in reproduction and thought very little of them - his Expressionist phase looked artless and badly drawn – while his Surrealist phase looked little better than the drawings in crayon many adolescents draw when high on drugs (Witkacy experimented with hallucinogenics.) However, I hoped seeing his work in the flesh would change my mind. They did not. I was devastated to discover they were pretty rotten; immature, graphic, linear, illustrative and ugly. But my fondness for this anti-hero remained – the world of art history was all the richer for his presence.
           

Then there was Tamara de Lempicka’s early painting Lassitude (c.1927) - which proved to be as bad - if not worse that I had thought it might be in the flesh. Her drawing was no better than that of a high-school student, her paint was limp, her brushwork flaccid and her anatomy as defined as a stuffed sausage skin. However, it was her painting that was on all the National Gallery’s posters for the exhibition!
           

Frankly her work had only one compelling reason to be studied in my mind – to illustrate bluntly - how tenth rate female artists like her were ludicrously overvalued, overpriced and over hyped in an art world made up largely of women; art student’s, artists, curators, historians, critics and collectors – some of whom only saw what they wanted to see. Could anyone tell me to my satisfaction I wondered - how this stupid and deceitful woman (she lied about all kinds of facts of her life – Balthus did the same but he was a genuine Master) could be more famous and written about that her male Polish counterparts like; Kazimierz Stabrowski, Józef Mehoffer, Jacek Malczewski, Witold Wojtkiewicz, Ferdynand Ruszczyc, Ferdynand Ruszczyc, Konrad Krzyzanowski, Franciszek Zmurko, Wojciech Weiss or Konrad Krzyzanowski?
           

Moreover, even if you were a craven Feminist politician - walking the concrete runways of international contemporary art bureaucracy, determined to advance your prejudices in revenge for what you perceived as patriarchal repression - why in God’s name chose her? Not one scintilla of her work was the product of the female imagination – it was the stolen grammar of Raphael, Ingres, Picasso and the Western (male) realist tradition in general. I thought the answer was that her work appealed to rich morons of either sex - who knew nothing about painting and wanted their vacuous lifestyle endorsed by such equally pushy paintings.
           

I had to giggle when I read in the catalogue that it was the only painting by de Lempicka’s in a Polish national collection and was only purchased in 1979 – I thought their past museum heads had the right opinion of her – but I doubted if future ones would be so wise.
           

However all this taken into account – this was a must see exhibition for anyone remotely concerned with art history - because it gave the lie to the simplistic notions we had about talent, success and even genius. Poland I never knew you – but then what did I really know about Hungry, Russia, Tibet or Australia?