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The form is old-fashioned, nevertheless we like anachronisms, so Andrzej, I acknowledged that the best thing would be to write a letter. To you, but also to those who unscrupulously like reading the other people's mail. I'am giving them absolution in anticipation. The letter would be more suitable than overwise treatise, boring and cool (treaties must be cold) , upon your works. You surely wouldn't mind if I wrote a first rate academic treatise, speaking like a don, taking measure of your works and digging them up. If I gave them a touch of axiology; gouged out of them possible paradigms; made a diagnosis; applied it; set them on their feet. Or on a plint. I certainly could do it but I do not have heart to write treaties. They should have no say in this matter. Because our conversation has been going on for tens of years I will write a letter. Such form is the most innocent.
If there is a reincarnation (as it is trivially understood) you may remember a letter I wrote you many incarnations ago. When was it? Thirty? A hundred? Three hundred years ago? Maybe more? You were someone else. So was I. We had already known the whims history refers to pictures. For example, the unfortunate beginning of the 16th century, when the Spirit of Europe suffered from one of its famous attacks. A kind of epilepsy. Petit mal. We were there. Our age-long line - painting pictures - we treated as a kind of prayer. And also as the way to make both ends meet. For there was always someone who needed pictures. By Raphael, by van der Weyden, by Cranach. Also by you and me. In the world, where one cannot do a lot of good, our job (craft? vocation?) gave us the feeling of freedom from vain idleness. Our work was modest. Did anything of it survive? Almost nothing. But never mind that. The most important is that we were there. We were watching history and its susceptibility to fall down at the meanders. For some inner, spiritual reasons (not only cultural or social) we trusted in pictures. They supported, in inestimable way, our peace of mind. This is the only explanation for their raison d'etre. They are necessary to mankind. For the animals do not know pictures. As far as it is known they do not react to them. The sparrows which grabbed at the grapes painted by Apelles - stuff and nonsense. The truth was different. A single bird was not taken in - we both know. We were the witnesses. We saw it. Didn't we? It was only a well-to-do simpleton nicknamed Sparrow who grabbed at the paintings. He was followed by all his relations who wanted to hung the pictures on the walls to prove they belong to humanity. For exactly the pictures (similarly to literature) decide about our belonging to mankind. So, they bought from Apelles plenty of painted grapes which one couldn't try or smell. Still, they were more impressive than their real prototypes. That is interesting; paying for a board daubed with paint hundreds of drachmas more than for real fruit. That is exactly what we lived on. Nobody is going to throw dust into our eyes by telling legends. We know well how it was. We all were in ancient times, weren't we? Maybe not all, but those who weren't should regret.
Let's come back to the16th century. We spent it in the world with flexible borders, ruled by changing heads (or rather dunderheads, like it is today) , under the lash of this or that destiny. Europe had strained nerves. Greed drove it to foolishness which was beyond endurance and a flood hunged by a thread. The flood of gall? Blood? Tears and sweat? There were many sins and many adequate sinners in the world. The greater was their number the greater was a desire to be purified. And at last it started. Dogmas and their authors were lynched. The lying authorities, those in tiaras and those in birettas, were mocked. The swindle of ficticious paradise was hissed. Europe was swarmed with the wave of syphilis, freshly imported from America. The Wittenbergian theses worried the papacy to death. Ninety painful bruises. With impunity, the whole armies murdered each other blindly, in the name of God (Gott mit uns).
Overt and hidden wars were going on. One economic crisis was followed by another. It was the full Renaissance! People were down on their luck. The role of pictures was to shade reality. To divert attention from it. To make things more beautiful than they were in fact.
In 1566 we were not so young. In Gent, Amsterdam and other cities or villages of the Netherlands the rebels grabbed at churches and plundered them. They dragged the beautifully pained altars out and smashed them. What was not stolen was destroyed by fire. Devastation turned against all the sacred decorum. The polychrome walls were painted with lime. And a certain painter who wanted to save some of it (maybe his own daubs) was deprived of his eyes in virtue of a popular judgement. Rebelians, the truth devotees, can always find in art an easy victim. They know, they will not find it at artists'. The one who looks for the truth in art may only find it between the lines. The global truth deficit and inclination to pretty lies on the one hand, caused an aversion to pictures on the other hand.
So again, the Bible entered the lists against paganism. But we shouldn't be misguided. The pagans (ardent lovers of pictures) were represented by the army of Catholic Spain.
Whereas the Christians were against painting and wanted to live according to commandments. After having failed at the first (second? third?) trial, they wanted to start from the very beginning. The Old Testament dictate sparred at favourite Catholic sin against the first commandment: Thou shalt not have any other gods before me. Thou shalt not make any effigies etc. For a half a millenium we had been practicing that sin - rather unconsciously. It stood for our prayer and was the way to make both ends meet. Well, for some time (fortunately short) the apostles of a new deal rejected pictures. They excommunicated them and cast, as devil's products, into fire. They say that in some other places it wasn't that bad. But where we lived, things had to represent their designations. Painted grapes made hungry human birds furious.
After the feaver had ceased (or was still going on) I wrote you a letter and you may remember it. Being different in many matters we agreed to one. We didn't mind the destructive beliefs of the common people. Maybe, we even (in words rather than in action) took part in it. At the same time, free from wrong accusations, we secretly painted our prayers. Later on, the others joined us. Shyly. More resolutly. And at last quite openly. The letter wasn't short and it concidered the wisdom of excommunication. For a curse, distrust and flames are for pictures the best criteria of durability. If they survive rebels and auto da fř - it is a proof of their power. Today, there are no traces of that rebellion. Even history - seemingly solid and neutral - doesn't want to remember about it. We met after centuries - we always meet - or our destiny called us once more to witness another revolt of the iconoclasts. Totally different from those in the times of Charles the Great, Leon III, Byzantine emperor.
This time, the combat against pictures does not care for theological sanctions. Usual sloth is its fighting slogan. A man is sold to a machine which is to feed him. He lives according to hi-tech epoch decalogue; the epoch of steam, electricity and split atom. Long ago, the pictures lost communication with sacrum, becoming usual, lay commodity, so a new application is searched for them. In such circumstances we were born again; you a bit earlier, me later; with our centuries - old weakness for pictures. We found ourselves in the world which knows only little pictures, arty-farty pictures and other visual trifles. The real pictures are in retreat. The will to be in contact with them - on the decline. Handicraft with masterly skill, once needed, was reduced to a necessary minimum. The exceptions, remaining here and there, cling to their Utopia, but the world where we meet hates exceptions. It is a new world. There are adequate scrap heaps - museums, libraries, philharmonic halls, temples - provided for old symbols. Only this what is new has the right to live at large. Evidently 'new painting' as a section of 'new art' belongs to 'new reality'. Although the words are old (art, democracy, right etc.) their meaning is different. Maybe these innovations are wise and worth respect. I do not know. Perhaps, being guests on the earth in our travelling through centuries, we shouldn't turn our nose at new order. But still, we remember our happier incarnations.
Therefore, we met during new iconoclasm. The pictures were only verbally burned, nevertheless they were burned.
They were dragged out in front of the tribunal of inquisitors. The invasion of pictures' substitute, and a triumph of free Saturdays, became a recognizing sign of the 'new world'.
Even the iron curtain was not able to stop that multitude. It is curious, that at the beginning - it could be 1966 - I was not interested in your pictures. I didn't know them. Some time went by and you showed me a few, a bit secretly, as if these were things dead and gone. You haven't painted for two years. Well, you didn't do it earlier either. To say the truth, you created pictures out of mysterious materials which you stuck and attached. These were a sort of large boards, in relief, singed, with some traces impressed on them and some incomprehensible dirt rubbed into them
(Aphthae, The Wings, The Great Hadra and many other) For a long time I have only heard about your earlier pictures. They depicted fish in more or less conventional way. In a sense, it was an iconoclastic period of your life. For there is only one step from singeing to burning. Well, the time was such that the art of painting stumbled and measured its length on the pavement. And nobody, as we see sometimes in the streets, hurried to help it.
It wheezed with abstract torpor. The steam went out of it. It was plunged in abstract mumble.
A single bird - as in the case of Apelles - was not taken in. Only one Sparrow and his mates.
Still, small groups considered themselves as painters, and this what they did was called painting. The outstanding colourists - painting with hardly any colour. Tadeusz Kantor who wanted to be the first significant painter, being unable to paint and draw. Charming Henryk Stażewski filling with paint squares and cutting with a fret-saw triangles. There were hardly any pictures around us one would wish to look at more than once. I may exaggerate but not much. There were exceptions. Nowosielski. Fijałkowski, in a sense. And later Beksiński, but it is a different story. Maybe a few more. But apart from them - pure iconoclasm. You also stuck in it a bit.
If not the academic studies which demanded brandishing a brush, I might do it as well.
Then, I remember you making on paper neither sketches nor diagrams, resembling alchemic treaties, magical books, relics of old prints. They were attractive and close to this what I did myself in a different way.
Step by step it started to turn out that it must be a continuation (incarnations!) of our earlier meetings. Our paths crossed again, at a certain time, in a certain place, according to a fatal plan. Nothing accidental. Even the fact that you were just (a half) iconoclast and me even less. We met in the world filled with little pictures but lacking the serious one. We met in the Silesia, which was turned into a spiritual desert by its political host. That potentate couldn't dedicate any other Polish city to Stalin. After all, which one? Cracow? Poznan? Czestochowa? So, the Polish ethnic Babylon was the place of our meeting. The local military cemetery had sections for different soldiers:
French, Italian, German, Russian (from before 1917) , not speaking about Polish.
Miscellaneous languages could be hard in the street. The boys from Białystok and Przemyśl worked in mines. Tenement-houses were inhabited by people from the Silesia, Lvov, Vilnius. The Catholics. The Protestants.
The Orthodox Church members. The Jews.
Therefore, we couldn't miss each other. We easily came to an understanding. With one accord we threw mud on the present time and stated that it is far from our vision of reality: a bit ahistorical, not to say - anti. The wall which was to protect us from the present day; a comfortable underground; an enclave of rescue; we made out of different materials, pictures as well. You started to paint again. We talked about it a lot. We discussed ideas requiring depiction. Our concern was not to smear some paint around.
We wanted pictures, not petty little paintings. Painting became a conversation as well. It was important to observe your solidity, the scale of execution; responsibility in relation to material. It was a lesson of this what was not taught at the academy. Maybe only the scale of your pictures was not my cup of tea, for I was not keen on large paintings. But in the beginning; years 1967, 1968, 1969, the size of your works was not bigger than average. Later on, you came back to conviction that large size equals great expression. It is a superstition lingering from the Baroque, where the pictures were a part of religious theatre. For the time being, however, you painted rather modest pictures, born out of provoked imagination and provoking imagination as well. These were mostly a kind of mirrors - partly distorted - reflecting our fancies.
It seems to me that some of the pictures we painted together.
I have not in mind The Chaos but certain - only you and me - painting games; there are hardly any traces left aftr that.
There was, for example, an icon presenting Saint Comrade Mao. Or a polyptych with the equivalents of the mantra OM MANI PADME HUM. I have a distinct recollection of a figure of Golem which has never developed from the incipience. Those days Beksiński appeared in our circle. His drawings, and later on his pictures (and sculpture objects) caused a slight confusion and great admiration. You were not influenced by his radicalism and you managed to avoid imitation. It affected me a bit, but only to a certain degree. I similarly admired Lebensztejn (he did a lot for show) , Kujawski, a few surrealists and Pre-Raphaelites. You took some other way. And later, out of the blue, they started to appear: large, excessively bright, fully ornamented and deliriously ethereal visions of new spirituality. To put it right - some titles:
The Crown of Thorns, The Lake of Soul, Cozmic mama again, Everyday, everyway, everywhere. Affected by anarchic hippie movement we debated about freedom of spirit.
The pictures presented explosion and liberation, for we belived that only explosion is able to open the space of a New Epoch. Perhaps someone is going to draw a paralell between your iconograms of that time and rock music, you used to listen to non-stop in more and more dangerous doses. The truth is that we didn't take care of ourselves. Particularly you. For I stayed at the rear. I'wanted to have a kind of taboo left for dessert. Therefore, your radicalism - also in pictures - cost me a lot of complexes and envy. The circle of our allies was growing. A group of friends became infected; we backed one another up in a contest against monopoly of ideas. But in spite of mess and topsy-turvydom which surrounded us - being either our guilt or merit - there was some magnetism which attracted people belonging to (present or future) artistic and intellectual elite.
Your studio was one of the most important staffs of Polish 'contra-culture'. It changed from a workshop to a kind of university.
Later on, into a spiritual buddhist center.
These facts were reflected in pictures. Gradual sublimation and going out of visual paroxysms of 'psychedelism' was the way which I considered perfect and admiring.
I was lost in admiration and I almost depreciated my own works. Such were these unexpectedly quiet seascapes which filled your studio. By and by also public art galleries and private collections.
Again some titles: Lucidity, High-tide, Ebb -tide, Red Sunshine. Their particular expression could be resulted by buddhist quietism intertwined with buddhist tragic approach.
Some of them developed from the backgrounds of previous pictures. Some of them were influenced by our discussions about bad condition of art. As a matter of fact our points of view were a bit apart those days.
After years of browsing through the territory of spiritualism each of us was striking his own balance. Yours was such. I admired, from a distance, your changing reality into artistic existence.
After earlier 'baroque' intoxication you headed towards serious 'classicism'. Whereas my way zigzagged. I changed the place of living.
I roamed a bit. I was astounded by cities and museums; Europe, which we knew only from tales and books, started to spread out. I was checking how hermetic is the globe of time and space.
Out of the bombastic pictures portraiting the seas, emerged your real journey overseas; to the United States from where I had just come back. I managed to catch a glimpse of you. Just to say good-bye.
Forever - as I had thought. And here opens a 'black hole' in our contacts. Your further struggle with reality I know only from later reconstructions.
Not earlier than after thirteen years I could see the reflexion of that experience in pictures. I was not prepared for it. This what I saw I considered as a kind of philosophic madness. I haven't got at hand a catalogue from your exhibition with a critical text by Andrzej Kostołowski. We both appreciate his unconventional and a bit whimsy perceptibility, his predilection for orderly mind, peculiar - at times.
In the mentioned text he called that stage of your works 'dropped' or something like that. It would never come to my mind to extract that particular detail and make out of it a transmitter of essential meanings.
Kostołowski was bewitched by that glittering. He noticed it and described.
Therefore, I asked myself a question wheather I would be able to estimate, using an angle gauge and a set square, the amount of pictures I have seen in your studio for tens years.
I was a direct witness. I know them all, or at least the lion's share. I could set such a task in front of me and even (pretending only, it's just a game) show logical connections, causes, effects, motivations and purposes which had not been noticed before.
Perhaps you wouldn't mind my describing your path towards the ideal pictue. But this I cannot do. It seems to me that I know about them (your pictures) and you more than one can perceive from dropped structure of the backgrounds with crazed, human-like mantises. Besides, this period of your painting was the most difficult for me to acquire. You brought from New York certain repertoire (New York's germ) which confused me.
At last, I became accustomed to it.
I even came to like some of the pictures even though it seemed impossible at the beginning. But finally, I did not submit to their obsessiveness.
I perceived them as a bit strange. If not our precious, centuries-long dialogue I might have critisized the effortless zeal of eroticism in your paintings; desire amongst dropped ornament. I must have shown my feelings but I didn't say a word and it was right. For now, I recognize some of them, as an expression
- artistically pointed - of your aristic and living turn.
I might have problems now to confess my error. On the one hand it was 'renaissance' of your earlier psychedelic blows; obsessions ans fascinations I had already known, but this time the context was different. I am rather far from programatic eroticism. It seems flat and two-dimentional in the pictures. I'd rather see it out of art. Even though I admired (again) vastness and perfection in realisation, nevertheless I had to get used to your new artistic incarnation. I was anxious because I couldn't express my admiration without having my say, stressing my votum separatum. A great exhibition of your works in Katowice (1992) , which can be regarded as a retrospect, was crowned with works from recent years, mostly created in New York. And - as it might appear to be - it was not a final point, closing the further perspective. To say the truth, I expected, I hoped that continuation is going to be revealed soon.
I will come back to one point. For I have to notice that sexuality you presented to your viewers - when one gets to the core of it - is not a kind of wide-spread pattern. And when you look even deeper, it starts to speak about something pretty different. It sends to questions born out of different hormones and different body organs. It's a kind of (provoking and drastic in style) bringing contrary matters to a head. Divinity and sensuality. Emotions and reason. Old and new. Right and wrong. High and low.
These devil-angels wandering through your pictures, showing their comic's complex off like earlier saints (also in pictures) their aureoles; these are just icons of fallen modern sacrum. Its relics still smoulder in churches but the major part is under the thoughtful care of business. It is a painted army of fiery and threatening (perhaps for show) creatures, formerly archangels whose swords expressed god's anger. At present - meretricis ira. We had painted so many of these angels in the 14th and 15th century that
I should have recognized them. It simply hasn't crossed my mind.
But the battle is over now. The winners are sitting safe on their thrones.
And around - corpses, shabby war machines, bomb craters.
Well, I have never seen anywhere such demoniac females. Perhaps, having changed a bit their costumes, they roam on the surface or in the underground of the urban world? And only because of defect in perception I cannot see them. But it is also possible, that the suitable place for them are nooks and corners of modern mind. The subjugated mind, subdued to the world which is invented by itself and is not able to carry its weight. Mentality of an inhabitant of Megalopolis, which intended but didn't become a global village.
Mentality of a man who believes in his feedom as long as he understands that he has always been imprisoned in entity.
As usual. As in our former incarnations. And in the present ones. Well, perhaps I overdo, but I will say frankly: I had to guard myself against these pictures. They tempted me to come back to things I had once dropped or even betrayed. I touched that fiery problem thirty (or three hundred) years ago.
I turned it over in my mind and gave it up. Today, I wouldn't be able to face it.
Well, what could I find in it? Inspiration? Reproach? Curse?
A few years after that exhibition, for sure about 1995, your artistic horizon started to unspin. I think, that an important cause of it, apart fom life and art, was that you started to use Xerox as an instrument for duplicating. As a matter of fact, not duplicating because every picture is different - but rather overlapping different icons, in most cases quotations. On the one hand scandalous comics of John Willie, on the other hand noble masterpieces of the world art
- Hiroshige, Russian icon, Coptic manuscripts or copies of the Baroque paintings engraved in steel. These multilayer pictures made a great impression on me. Such a vivid, fertile in artistic and philosophic way, exploitation of the iconosphere I have never met before. Even though I immodestly consider myself a connoiseur of pictures and their history, these works threw me into confusion and disturbed my perception habits. A very creative confusion. Looking at them
I started to notice the incipient stage of new pictures. Then, new pictures started to appear. Totally new. As if their creator was looking for something once more, from the very beginning. Pictures known. Former. Old. But always looking like new ones. Das ist eine alte Geschichte, noch sie bleibt immer neu. It is a certain old story which always looks like a new one. I could have started my letter with these words. It could have been a letter from the past or from today.
Those days the old iconosphere was disintegrating. The overwise laughter of the accusers, who always know the best, could be heard. The world seemed to be a bit empty. So, what were we to do? We painted pictures. We made both ends meet. Ouroboros. Similarly today, when the new invasion of pictures is hanging by a thread. Graffiti has been covering the walls of Megalopolis. The new divisions are waiting in the internet. Vanguard of the iconoclasts is crowded on a plint. And under the monument, something new is starting. Something we know from the old story.
I am finishing. It is late. A moth is flying around my nose. The sky is clouded over, so that night Castor and Pollux, the favourite constellation of my Laura, will not be seen over Stary Wielisław. It is going to rain at night. I am sending you Andrzej my best regards.
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