The artist Marek Zulawski, translation & Polish-British culture

Hi,

I'm away this week, but I still have something prepared for you. Inspired by the mention of Józef Czapski in previous newsletters, I thought I would translate his 1963 piece for Kultura magazine in which he awarded my father Marek that year's art prize.

Czapski was a fascinating figure, who, outside his prolific work in literature and painting, was the soldier who investigated the Katyń massacre. Meanwhile, Kultura was a Paris-based magazine run by Poles that had a huge influence on Polish culture.

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The Kultura Art Award for 1963

Józef Czapski at an exhibition, 1958, via Culture.pl

In 1932 in Warsaw, the Zachęta gallery's old and sleepy pond was overgrown with duckweed. In contrast was the modern new building of the Institute of Art Propaganda (IPS), a battlefield for young artists like the Kapists and Łukaszowskis. Among the older painters, it was Czyżewski versus Pruszkowski. 

At one of the IPS exhibitions, a small, unassuming still life, green pears on a white platter painted with sensitive flecks. The artist was Marek Żuławski, the son of a poet, then a student at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts working under Tichy and Kowarski. At the time, young Polish artists were discovering colour, using it to build paintings. They were influenced by the likes of Cézanne, Seurat and, more superficially, Bonnard. For those unfamiliar with that era, it's hard to appreciate how a small painting by an unknown young artist with an inexorable feel for colour was pleasing — lost among the other canvases that didn't have even a hint of awareness about the basic elements of painting.

Just a couple of years later, the character of exhibitions in Warsaw changed dramatically. Bonnardism spread rapidly with ease, such ease that this mannerism degraded into a superficial trend. I lost track of Żuławski during this time. He travelled the world and eventually settled in England. I recall seeing only one of his paintings from those years — a pale, post-impressionist piece, almost elegant. It didn’t appeal to me, perhaps unfairly, as I was then seeking out stronger forms of expression, walking through doorways in the "literature of painting" that we Kapists had fought so hard against.

It wasn’t until after World War II, in London, that I re-encountered Żuławski's work. The influence of London's war period had a profound effect on him (similar to what happened with Potworowski). Today I still have Żuławski's canvases from that period in my mind's eye: the black bridges, the red and gold of a sunset over a black London, the geometric, simplified faces. At one point, even Cubism began to influence Żuławski — his workers in pubs, his lovers on empty beaches set against a tiled smooth sea peppered with wild rocks, his collages filled with great taste and artistic culture.

From that time on, I visited Żuławski's studio almost every time I was in London. His works were always a surprise for me: whether it was the faces of miners or sailors where I could still feel distant traces of Kowarski, or his large canvases filled with brutally expressed biblical or religious images, or his large decorative pieces like the one he created for the Homes and Gardens pavilion at the Festival of Britain in 1951. These paintings, with their diverse topics and unexpected ever-changing textures, gradually lead us to canvases that are even more synthetic and even brutally sonorous. Despite the almost exclusive dominance of abstract art among the ranks of young artists in England, Żuławski did not become a painter of pure abstraction, neither geometric nor lyrical. In one of his statements, he expressed disdain for randomness in art, rejecting automatism, action painting and Tachism.

Reflecting on his own work, the artist recalled that he once went through a period where he attempted to sever all external influences — a vain hope. One would have to be like Nikifor, a primitive, to develop and paint with such independence and purity, cutting oneself off from the world of crossing currents around us as if in a glass bubble. But Żuławski is no primitive: starting with post-impressionism, cubism, he went through the varied influences of both Romanesque and Byzantine mosaics; and indirectly, abstract trends also influenced him (perhaps socialist realism at some point?).

Marek Żuławski, already a big name, will have a meaningful role in the development of Polish art. He is one of the most prototypical amongst us of this era of upheavals, which has expressed itself in painting via mutually affronting (or perhaps, in the longer term, complementing) revolutions.

For more about Czapski, particularly his infamous war experiences, check out this great article by Mikołaj Gliński:

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That's all for this week. Many thanks for reading. If you want to support the newsletter, please forward it to a friend or donate here.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / TranslatePolishMemoirs.com / Other stuff

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