Getting Excited about Public Transport
Nov 23, 2023 11:30 pm
Hi,
As regular readers will know, the big and very cool Marek Zulawski exhibition is still on at Toruń CSW. And this week I want to share a review with you.
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An artist on an artist
The artist and journalist Wojciech Antoni Sobczyński wrote an in-depth review of the Toruń exhibition. It was printed in the weekly Tydzień Polski, and is due to be published again in both Pamiętnik Literacki and POLART's Hybryda magazine.
I enjoyed reading the review, especially since my father was both an artist and journalist too - I think he would have appreciated the detail put in here.
It's quite long as you can see, so I'm only translating a couple of sections here. The first is to do with when Sobczyński was in his 20s.
After arriving in England in 1968, I spoke with my uncle Jerzy Zarnecki. He was then a professor of art history and the vice director of The Courtauld Institute of Art, and a recognised authority on Roman art as well as an enthusiast of contemporary art.
I asked him for some guidance about life in England, especially about the art world in London. I didn't want, as a novice, to waste a one-year scholarship by making juvenile mistakes. I didn't know then that that one year would turn into a lifetime.
His list of recommendations was long. First on the list were obligatory visits to places important for a man of culture. The British Museum was highlighted in red, and he listed departments such as Greece, the Parthenon Frieze, Egypt, Assyria and others filled with cultural achievements from around the world. Then he listed the equally important National Gallery, with its paintings by both old and newer masters. In third place was the modernism at the Tate, and finally his beloved Courtauld Gallery with its collection of Impressionists and Fauvists. And that was just the beginning.
I asked about what was new, as that was close to my heart, about contemporary galleries and the artist community. When the conversation came to living Polish artists, the most important one, according to my uncle, was Marek Zulawski.
Coming back to 2023, the second section here is about part of the actual exhibition happening now.
I have never seen such a large collection of his works before. They fill every room on the second floor of CSW Toruń without leaving an inch. I could rediscover them, remember some of the reproductions I'd seen in books.
The paintings were impressive in colour, size, variety of technique and style, all leading the viewer along the artist's winding path of development. The excellent exhibition arrangement was the collaborative result of the previously mentioned curators, Katarzyna Moskała and Mirosław Supruniuk, who manage the collection of the Emigration Archive at the University of Toruń.
The exhibition, partly chronological and at the same time split into themes, is surprising from first glance. Against the purple walls of the first room, lit up point-by-point using specially installed lights, were important figurative paintings with a particularly expressive narrative and were all dedicated to the fate of man. The purple background of the walls gave the exhibition a classic character, calling to mind favourable associations with the great galleries of the world.
The central spot is occupied by a large painting entitled "Hungarian Women at the Grave of the Fallen" (1956/7) - faces like stone, simple, frozen in pain. The painting understandably caught my attention for its relevance. I thought to myself - if the artist were alive today, he would almost certainly be depicting similar martyrdom themes from today's conflicts, which, unfortunately, there is no lack of. Will the world never change?
Next to the "Hungarian women" hangs a painting of a man with his hand dramatically raised in the air - "Stop Before It's Too Late" (1958). His tragic gesture warns of a catastrophe. Which one?... Perhaps the atomic one, the shadow of which Żuławski's generation lived under and we all continue to live today.
Next appears a painting of a Spanish peasant woman returning from work during a harvest. In one hand, she holds a rake, in the other she lugs a heavy bundle. Her face is ravaged by the hardships of the ending day. I look and think of the village where I grew up as a child. I know well what hands destroyed by hard work look like. It's exactly how the emaciated peasants looked in Van Gogh's early paintings.
Further on the same wall hangs the small portrait "Jewess" (early 1950s) - beautiful, well-executed, cubist.
It is impossible to describe all the paintings even in just the introductory room. I felt even then that the exhibition had moved me to a state of emotion, contemplation, admiration and appreciation.
You can learn more about Wojciech Antoni Sobczyński and his work here.
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A Canadian fawns over Warsaw's public transport
If you've spent time in Warsaw, you've probably used its public transport. It has only two metro lines (a third is coming after 2030...), lots of packed buses and trams, and honestly you probably didn't think that much about it.
Well, this Canadian Youtuber thinks that it's amazing. His channel, all about public transport, has over a quarter of a million subscribers. People probably listen to his opinion. But from watching the video, I'm not sure he's actually visited Warsaw...
To be fair, he does rightly say it makes no sense how Warsaw Central Station is not connected to any metro lines. But he fails to mention how if Warsaw has good transit, it's partly because it was basically destroyed in WWII and rebuilt by communists who remade all the main streets to be annoyingly massive - it does happen to be good for trams but was probably designed for having lots of marches everywhere.
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That's it for this week. Thanks for reading. Don't forget that if you've a comment or question, you can always hit reply and write to me.
Adam
Adam Zulawski