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Beksinskis Werke sind in Warschau, Posen, Krakau, Sanok (Polen), Göteborg und Osaka zu sehen.
 
Beksinskis Werke sind in Warschau, Posen, Krakau, Sanok (Polen), Göteborg und Osaka zu sehen.
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True to the image of his work, Beksinski is a secluded
 +
man. He does not appear in public, and does not exhibit his
 +
paintings. When museums or collectors exhibit them he does
 +
not show up. He works on his paintings twelve hours a day
 +
against a background of classical music. They are always
 +
painted on hardboard, signed on the back, and they bear no
 +
titles.
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He was born on February 24th 1929 in Sanok, a small town
 +
near the south-east border of Poland. His father was a
 +
surveyor, his grand- father a building contractor, and his
 +
great-grandfather Mathieu, an insurgent of 1869, was the
 +
founder of a wagon factory. Under the German Occupation
 +
Beksinski continued his studies at a secondary level, first
 +
in a school of commerce, then in a clandestine highschool. In
 +
1947, after the Liberation, he entered the Faculty of
 +
Architecture in the Mines and Steelworks Academy in Cracow
 +
under pressure from his father. In 1951 he married Miss
 +
Sophie Stankiewicz, and in 1952 he obtained his degree in
 +
architecture. Due to the obligation of work which was at that
 +
time imposed on young graduates, he started working in a
 +
State building enterprise where he supervised the building
 +
lots.
 +
Although he had been drawing since his early childhood,
 +
he applied himself to it seriously in 1959. He also
 +
concentrated on paint- ing, photography and sculpture, and
 +
thus prepared his way out of a profession which he disliked.
 +
In 1958 his only child, Thomas, was born.
 +
In the same year his first exhibition of plastic
 +
works, and especial- ly abstract relief, was held in Poznan.
 +
At that time he was still a member of the Union of Polish
 +
Artist-Photographers and he took part in numerous exhibitions
 +
of photography in Poland and abroad.
 +
In 196'0 he abandoned photography and in his plastic
 +
works broke away from the avant-garde. This break was felt by
 +
some as an act of treason, since his early creation had
 +
aroused much hope among the partisans of abstract art. But it
 +
was also this step towards fantasy expressionism, noted
 +
during the exhibition of 1972 organized by Mr. and Mrs.
 +
Bogucki in the "Contemporary" gallery in Warsaw, that was to
 +
make him known to a wider public. The polemic aroused by his
 +
painting reached its climax in 1975 when after a poll
 +
organised by art critics he was declared "the best painter in
 +
the thirty years of the People's Republic of Poland" thanks
 +
to the votes of certain participants who gave him almost all
 +
their points, while others refused to give him even one...
 +
ln 1977 he left Sanok and moved to Warsaw only to isolate
 +
himself from the world even more radically because of the
 +
inconvenience arising from the celebrity he now had in his
 +
home town. When he moved into the Polish capital he hoped to
 +
mingle in the anonymous crowds of a big metropolis. Despite
 +
the curiosity he arouses, he refuses to take part in any
 +
manifestations and accepts neither awards nor medals. He has
 +
practically ceased to exhibit, receives only one or two
 +
journalists a year, when he grants them an interview which
 +
does not touch upon current events.
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A charismatic personality and a man with a profound
 +
spirit, Beksinski has never left Poland, doesn't speak any
 +
foreign language and has never been a member of any
 +
ideological group; he hates and despises politics.
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 +
by Piotr Dmochowski
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 +
Introduction
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 +
by Piotr Dmochowski
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 +
As he explained in a text reproduced in our previous
 +
book, Beksinski has always executed his paintings and
 +
drawings in either of two manners, which he respectively
 +
calls 'Baroque' and 'Gothic'. The first is dominated by
 +
representation, the second by form.
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Among the paintings produced during the past five years,
 +
those executed in the 'Gothic' manner have become more and
 +
more frequent, so much so that pictures in the other style
 +
have almost disappeared.
 +
Those light-filled landscapes, those figures drawn with
 +
extra- ordinary precision, those disquieting buildings are
 +
increasingly absent from Beksinski's work. Instead, simple
 +
contours of human silhouettes, or faces filled with myriad
 +
fragment of matter in closely- graded colours. The
 +
backgrounds are for the most part flat; nothing lies behind
 +
the silhouettes and faces, From the void they come and into
 +
it, scarcely identifiable, they instantly dissolve. These
 +
works are stark in the extreme and are in small format. Like
 +
the low-reliefs executed by the artist from 1958 to 1960, and
 +
his early drawings, they are almost abstract.
 +
The second book we are devoting to him testifies to this.
 +
We have incorporated two innovations, which complement
 +
our first work published three years ago:
 +
 +
First, we thought it would be useful to show the
 +
different stages involved in the creation of a painting. In
 +
fact, when we saw the video showing the results of
 +
Beksinski's daily work, recorded by the artist himself, we
 +
were amazed to see that during the first week nothing was
 +
happening on the hardboard everything seemed vague. Once
 +
the artist finally hit on an idea, that part of the work
 +
which, to a layman, would appear the most tedious and
 +
difficult was executed in the space of a single day as if it
 +
was just some minor detail.
 +
Unfortunately, Beksinski is incapable of painting if
 +
anyone is watching, which is why he has never agreed to allow
 +
the different stages of his painting to be photographed at
 +
the end of each working day or every time he changes his
 +
mind. So all we can get from him are his own video
 +
recordings, from which we produce printed reproductions,
 +
whence their rather poor technical quality.
 +
The second innovation we decided to incorporate into this
 +
new book consists in showing the highly individual creative
 +
process involved in Beksinski's latest drawings. Around a
 +
fixed element, which is repeated in each drawing, the artist
 +
constructs a series of variants by adding more elements or
 +
removing others. Here again, we are able to observe the
 +
stages in the birth of a drawing, the artist's moments of
 +
hesitation, the variants of a particular fragment, until the
 +
work is finally completed.
 +
We have but one aim in mind in introducing these new ex-
 +
planatory methods: namely to make the reader aware that the
 +
artist's hesitations and searchings during the creative
 +
process stem essentially from considerations of form and
 +
technique. This is what opponents of Beksinski's work refused
 +
to understand when he was still almost exclusively painting
 +
'Baroque' pictures. Even then he never dreamt of expressing
 +
any particular message, any general idea or any symbol, as
 +
his detractors kept insisting. Even then, the only thing that
 +
mattered was 'how it would be painted'. But each painting
 +
appeared to be so heavily overlaid with representation that
 +
it has not been easy for us, as a propagator of his art
 +
demonstrate the artist's intention.
 +
By showing Beksinski's new paintings and drawings, in
 +
themselves near-abstract, and by illustrating the successive
 +
stages in their creation in this book, we hope to put an end
 +
to all these reproaches about ideology, hidden messages and
 +
literary intepreta- tion and to demonstrate that this
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extraordinary art lies far beyond meaning.
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 +
 +
BEKSINSKY'S AUTOPSYCHOTHERAPIES
 +
by Tadeusz Nyczek
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 +
When James Joyce's 'Ulysses' was published in 1922, one
 +
critic made a statement that has gone down in history: that
 +
after this book, no one would ever be able to write a simple
 +
realist novel again. Which would imply that there are certain
 +
revolutions that rule out any retrograde movement. After
 +
Copernicus' discovery that the earth was round, did the flat-
 +
earth theory not completely lose its validity? It might have
 +
seemed, then, that literature was afflicted with the same ban
 +
on the retrograde, since the discovery of Joyce threw the
 +
very sense of the survival of conventional prose into ques-
 +
tion. The old form, finding itself disowned, would never be
 +
born again.
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There was a similar attitude to painting. After the
 +
impressionists, who could ever have imagined that classical
 +
painting could still have its followers? No one, surely, and
 +
even Iess so once the art world had experienced abstract art,
 +
surrealism, pop art and conceptual . art. For followers of
 +
the revolution in form, the calling into gues- tion of 20th-
 +
century art forbade any return to the past. Monet and
 +
Mondrian could never be succeeded by a Moreau or a Courbet.
 +
And after Picasso, how could any artist try to paint like
 +
Bocklin.
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But where art is concerned, nothing is impossible. In
 +
art, Copernicus and Ptolemy can both be right. In, art the
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earth can be round and flat at the same time, because in this
 +
unique world of artistic creation, true freedom of choice
 +
reigns supreme. A close look at the history of 20th-century
 +
painting is enough to convince us. Even today, as we approach
 +
the turn of the century, there's room at once for Moneran
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Salvador Dali and Arnold Bocklin. There's a place for Kieffer
 +
and Bacon, Warhol and Balthus, Beuys and Tibor Csernus.
 +
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So are we living j in an age of electicisrn? Maybe we
 +
are. But in any case this also means that the artistic
 +
revolution of the late 19th to the early 20th century, from
 +
Seurat to Mir6, is just one choice among many. Even after
 +
Malevitch's black square there's still nothing wrong with
 +
painting sunflowers...
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Beksinski is proof positive of this: it is still possible
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to marry water with fire, tradition with modernity. His own
 +
experience as a painter should be a lesson in humility for
 +
those doctrinaires for whom 'being faithful to form' is
 +
nothing more their a craven obedience to current fashion. And
 +
this cannot be put down simply to the fact that Beksinski
 +
started out thirty-six years ago as a photographer Or, after
 +
his photography period (1965- 19%), to Beksinski's work on
 +
sculptured reliefs (1982). Or again, to the reputation he
 +
gained as a graphic artist during the years that followed.
 +
Or, finally, to the fact that it took several years for the
 +
world to realize that here, indeed, was e painter of immense
 +
stature.
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This is how an artist's-career unfolds, stage by stage.
 +
This is the way new forms and new co½ventions are explored.
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Beksinski was trained as pn architect. His first forays
 +
into plastic art are consequently marked by a certain
 +
prudence, as if he felt they might overstep the norms and
 +
categories 'in force' at the time.
 +
Beksinski confirms this himself: it's true (and there is
 +
no reason to doubt what he says) that his contacts with the
 +
art world of the fifties were, to all intents and purposes,
 +
non-existent. They are still practically nil today and are
 +
limited to meetings with his closest friends. But, for Polish
 +
painting, the fifties were a time rich in ferments. After
 +
Stalinism, which spawned socialist realism, creative artists
 +
sought to distance themselves from the rigid forms of
 +
naturalism. Stalin's death and the politically-motivated
 +
revelations made by Khrushchev about Stalinist
 +
totalitarianism gave rise to a short-lived breach in European
 +
frontiers and at last gave Polish ar- tists a glimpse of 'new
 +
horizons'.
 +
And on these new European and American horizons, Polish
 +
artists encountered, above all, the avant-garde. Abstract
 +
art, informal art and (to a certain extent) tachisme reigned
 +
supreme. The different genres went into the melting-pot and
 +
very soon every tradition was denied: the work of art itself
 +
and hence the painting, the drawing, and the sculpture per
 +
se. All manner of hybrid genres were spawned, and with them
 +
kinetic and op art. Liberated, the artistic act was no longer
 +
dependent on anything, and the outside world ceased to serve
 +
even as a pretext. Art was living through an era of
 +
narcissism and was as self-sufficient in ideology as it was
 +
in forms and sources of inspiration.
 +
Beksinski or Beksinski at the start of his career, at
 +
least, when he had no direct contact with the artistic life,
 +
attended no ex- hibitions and did not fraternize with other
 +
artists this Beksinski could not have failed, however, to
 +
be highly attuned to the 'spirit of the age'. His photography
 +
was therefore of a semi-abstract nature. The images
 +
represented highly constructed situations compositions
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refined in their perverse simplicity. The relief-pictures
 +
that he had just begun to make (not 'to paint', but just 'to
 +
make') in 1958 were themselves prepared from specially welded
 +
metals that were subsequently applied to a metal or wood
 +
surface. These works display an infinite richness of
 +
handling. From the contrasts obtained with the specially
 +
prepared wire, sheetmetal and metal splinters, sprang
 +
countless associations of visionary effects. Here again, the
 +
artist categorically refused any suggestion that he had been
 +
inspired by real phenomena or objects. He was opposed to
 +
their metaphorical interpretation. The postulate that his art
 +
was independent of all symbolism and literal meaning was to
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accompany Beksinski throughout all the ensuing creative
 +
years.
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But a fatal misunderstanding was to arise between the
 +
artist's intentions and how the public perceived his work.
 +
For Beksinski was to transform the form of his art; more
 +
precisely, he was to modify his philosophy of the work of
 +
art. He discovered that he felt much closer to 19th-century
 +
painters (and writers and musi- cians too) than to those of
 +
the 20th century, and that his spiritual temperament and his
 +
imagination were far more at home in tradi- tion than in
 +
denial of tradition. So it was no longer Pollock and Rothko,
 +
Rauschenberg and Hartung, but Bocklin and Friedrich, Turner
 +
and-Klimt to whom he felt closest.
 +
All the same, Beksinski's unique character does not
 +
reside in the fact that for twenty years he has been painting
 +
at least as well as, if not better than these artists. What
 +
is unique about him is that he rejected every artistic
 +
ideology programmed by them, and that in place of ideologies
 +
he introduced the conscience of man in the second half of the
 +
26th century, complete with all his existential and
 +
intellectual experiences.
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So those who see, in the 'old-style' painting of
 +
Beksinski, the resurrection of a long-dead tradition, are
 +
much mistaken. Although we are living in an age where
 +
everything is possible hanging a chair from an electric
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wire is just as permissible as painting a bunch of daffodils
 +
against a yellow background Beksinski is no 20th- century
 +
Turner or Friedrich. He is neither a symbolist nor a
 +
surrealist. Even less is he a realist or a painter of
 +
fantasy. Nineteenth-century painting*ad its own ideology: the
 +
mystique of vanitas venitatum', the miracle of Nature, the
 +
despair of existence, the horror of living in the shackles of
 +
tyranny. The painter of the time felt that he was part of the
 +
world he lived in, irrespective of whether his relation- ship
 +
with that world was a good or a bad one. He wanted to modify
 +
it or at least reflect it in the distorting mirror of his
 +
paintings.
 +
Beksinski, by contrast, lives removed from the world
 +
This-may seem something of a paradox but it is nonetheless
 +
true. At most, the world supplies him with what he needs to
 +
subsist on, plus the objects that inspire him: this is a
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hind, this is a seashore... But that's all. And even these
 +
were superfluous to the relief works he executed at the start
 +
of his artistic career.
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 +
The, abstractionism that marked his early creative
 +
years turned out to be an unforgettable experience for him.
 +
Only the tangling of wires has become that of the veins on a
 +
human body. The background light that shines transparent
 +
through the layers of low- relief is transformed into the
 +
light shining from the windows of his ghost-houses, or from
 +
between figures sitting amid empty land- scapes.
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I am well aware that I am tackling a subject that is
 +
almost im- possible to prove, as the abstract is, after alI,
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far removed from the figurative. A yellow patch on the canvas
 +
may symbolize the sun, bvt the reverse seems to be
 +
impossible. In other words, it would appear to be out of the
 +
question that the sun could symbolize a yellow patch. If the
 +
artist paints a brown rectangle in the middle of an egually-
 +
divided surface, with blue at the top and green at the
 +
bottom, l could interpret this as an expression of his
 +
anguish in the face of existence. lf, however, the same
 +
artist were to paint a man wearing a brown coat in the middle
 +
of a green field under a clear sky, the first question will
 +
inevitably relate to the man and the empty field. What are
 +
they doing there? And the man who is he? What is he looking
 +
for? In effect what's it all about? Only another painter,
 +
untouched by the content of the picture, will ask the right
 +
ques- tion straightaway: what is the relationship between the
 +
brown coat and the green field? Is it a happy choice? Is the
 +
composition correct? And so on... But for the general public,
 +
the man in the picture will go on standing there for ever.
 +
This is why Beksinski, who for twenty years has been
 +
painting the strange scenes taking place in his semi-theatre,
 +
will never be able to get rid of the spectator, who will
 +
obstinately insist on asking questions about their meaning.
 +
Beksinski will reply that there is nothing there but visions
 +
from the subconscious. And that he was not trying to express
 +
any particular message when he painted a decomposing body or
 +
a group of wolves under a hot-air balloon soaring high in the
 +
sky. And that these are obsessions that have come straight
 +
from psychoanalysis. Then the spectator will ask the s me
 +
question again and the misunderstanding will persist, im
 +
utable, with each side sticking fast to its position.
 +
We ought, in fact, to take a closer look at these
 +
obsessions, because better than anything else, they provide
 +
an explanation of the character of Beksinski's painting.
 +
Although Beksinski has insisted in countless interviews
 +
and conversations that his pictures have no intention of
 +
modifying the world (i.e. that they express no ideology) and
 +
that they do not seek to serve as a distorting mirror for it
 +
(doubly emphasizing the absence of ideology), then, perhaps,
 +
these paintings can tell us something about their author.
 +
This would already be quite something, since Beksinski is no
 +
abstraction but a creature of flesh and blood like all of us,
 +
living here and now in the 20th century. And his experience
 +
could turn out to be our own ex- perience.
 +
His pictures will thus first of all tell the spectator
 +
that he is deal- ing with a neurotic. The repetition of
 +
certain accessories, the con- stant recurrence of seemingly
 +
cult objects are enough to convince observers that this is
 +
the case.
 +
Take a look at the heads in Beksinski's art. In the past,
 +
he photo- graphed them. Then he sculpted them, after which he
 +
drew them.- And finally he painted them in every possible
 +
variant, as he did with his figures seated in a kind of arm-
 +
chair in the middle of a land- scape strewn with the filth
 +
and rubbish of our urban culture. For thirty years, the
 +
vision of the Crucifixion has never left him. For thirty
 +
years he has striven to photograph, scuIpt, draw and paint
 +
objects in the wind or in twilight. For years, his paintings
 +
have shown something burning, something growing on living or
 +
dead bodies. Leaves fly in the air; a figure is constantly
 +
out walking with a dog- or wolf-like creature; fragments of
 +
architecture, houses, castles and bizarre buildings float
 +
above the ground. Another familiar figure is a multi-fingered
 +
musician playing the flute or the clarinet.
 +
These motifs recur like the subjects of nightmares. Can
 +
it be that they torment Beksinski as the ghosts at Prospero's
 +
bidding tormented Caliban in Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'?
 +
Beksinski, like any good disciple of psychoanalysis, frees
 +
himself from these obses- sions by painting them and
 +
externalizing them.
 +
So, if there absolutely has to be a goal behind these
 +
paintings, could the aim be the artist's own
 +
autopsychotherapy?
 +
However, there is most probably something else involved
 +
here, namely the accomplishment of A Task. This seems
 +
mystical, but what l am thinking of is really very simple:
 +
all of us are carrying out a task. Survival is cif course the
 +
most obvious one. For others, work is the most important
 +
thing. Theologians have yet another suggestion to offer,
 +
nameIy that the Task consists in spreading the Word of God.
 +
Finally, there is a different task, the most disinterested
 +
one of all because it is accomplished away from the human
 +
cons- cience: what I mean by this, of course, is Art.
 +
This is why artists often admit that 'Something' is
 +
speaking through them, that they are just carrying out the
 +
Will of Another. This is not necessarily God or some Superior
 +
Power. The 'Something' cen be a psychic need, not all that
 +
much different from daily needs like defecating and
 +
breathing. The nature of this singular imperative divides
 +
painters into those who depict sunflowers and those who paint
 +
executions; it produces the composer who will go on writing
 +
symphonies after Iosing his hearing, or the author who, night
 +
after night, will fill reams of paper with poems about the
 +
devil's supremacy over God or vice versa.
 +
BasicalIy, all Beksinski does with his life is to paint
 +
and to exist. Perhaps, moreover (as he avers), the one is
 +
organically bonded to the other? In other words, he lives
 +
because he paints and he paints because he lives. So it is
 +
not surprising that there came a time when , he became bored
 +
with executing semi-abstract relief-pictures because the
 +
universe they refIected had become a tedious one. It was as
 +
if one was condemned to a lifetime of alternately eating
 +
boiled eggs and chocolate mousse... True, the ways of
 +
combining abstract forms are infinite. But perhaps it is this
 +
very infinity the certitude of this infinity the becomes
 +
sterile It would appear far more interesting in that a much
 +
stricter discipline is imposed on drawing and painting to
 +
p@'nt the world of objects. In a way, this task demands more
 +
skill... fer if there are so many possibilities of creating
 +
forms and objects, they are still executed according to the
 +
rules of the game. What's 'so wonderful about painting a hand
 +
that looks like a saucepan? What is wonderful is to paint it
 +
perfectly.
 +
The 'horror vacui' that dominates Beksinski's paintings
 +
(or at least those executed between 1968 and 1987) is proof
 +
positive of the perverse pleasure he gets out of the creative
 +
process. All those veins, nerves and folds, the proliferation
 +
of objects and bodies, all that obsessive effort to cram
 +
every inch with anything ss long as it constitutes pictorial
 +
material, i.e. brush-strokes on the support.
 +
If the Main Task in Beksinski's life has turned out to be
 +
neither architecture (for which he was trained), nor
 +
photography, nor even music, which he listens to from morning
 +
to night, but pain-ting, who can be astonished that he has
 +
made the brush-stroke an art in itself? Who can be surprised
 +
that he seeks perfection in his craft because the craft alone
 +
can impose others' perfection on him? lf he ever happens to
 +
look at other artists' paintings, he does so exclusively from
 +
the craftsman's standpoint. He is like Casanova, who sought
 +
ceaselessly to invent fresh erotic positions, each one more
 +
perfect and polished than the last, for each, ever-new
 +
paramour (but basically for himself), to the point of self-
 +
arinihilation.
 +
But we must not go too far. For some time now from the
 +
mid-1980s onward, to be more precise a marked change has
 +
been noted in Beksinski's painting. There are fewer and fewer
 +
pictures that his detractors could qualify (wrongly) as
 +
anecdotic or literary, complete with 'heroes' and 'plot'.
 +
First and foremost, the three-dimensional vision of
 +
Beksinski's earlier works gives way to pictures that are
 +
almost flat The back- grounds that formerly created an
 +
atrnosphere and emphasized events in the foreground have
 +
disappeared. It is as if a thick fog now obscures the half-
 +
real, half-dreamt world of Beksinski's earlier paintings.
 +
Only the foreground remains. In these foregrounds are
 +
figures, solitary for the most part. If there are several of
 +
them, they clasp each other in a kind of love/death-embrace,
 +
for they are left to their own devices in this immense void.
 +
Lovers of Beksinski's 'typical' work will be astonished,
 +
and perhaps worried, by the way his paintings have evolved.
 +
They will find it incomprehensibhe. What on earth made
 +
Beksinski change the poetry of his pictures when for all
 +
these years his art has formed a coherent whole? Why, as he
 +
goes forward, is he turning back?
 +
 +
For there is no difficulty in realizing that his
 +
painting is indeed turning beck and, thirty years after it
 +
began, is starting to describe a great ellipse. Or that by
 +
going back in time,- it is drawing closer to its beginnings.
 +
To confirm this, let us take a look at the composition of
 +
Beksin- ski's earliest and most recent work. His drawings
 +
dating from 1958-1962 were composed, if not in perfectly
 +
axial fashion, at least on the basis of the golden mean, in
 +
accordance with the rules of the Renaissance. Large surfaces
 +
were counterbalanced by smaller ones, and a plain background
 +
would often feature a single pictorial accent.
 +
The same applies to the paintings of 1987 to 1991. We
 +
find the same flat background formed solely by pictorial
 +
means, back- grounds close to those of Turner, but even
 +
harder to define. Con- trasting with the background, figures,
 +
axial for the most part, appear in the foreground. They are
 +
often depicted in some strongly ac- centuated movement; when
 +
this is the case the figures give the im- pression of being
 +
caught in a freeze-frame, as if just a fraction of their
 +
movement had been captured on film. We can see further proof
 +
of this in the multiple representation of certain elements
 +
their hands, for instance, or the folds in their cloaks.
 +
These are all well- known photographic effects.
 +
The novelty resides also in the other relationships
 +
existing be- tween background and figures. By following the
 +
rather traditional rules of perspective, Beksinski's 'older'
 +
paintings (1968-198'7) showed space divided into planes. If
 +
it so happened that the outline of a figure or object was
 +
obliterated (which was seldom the case) this was due solely
 +
to the presence of mist, smoke or other natural phenomena in
 +
the picture.
 +
The new paintings are characterized by an entirely
 +
different type of relationship between background and
 +
figures. Very often but not systematically, however the
 +
figures emerge from an apparently neutral, 'meaningless'
 +
background. I stress the word 'emerge', since the
 +
obliteration of the outlines of 'meaningful' objects (or
 +
figures) and their fusion with the 'meaningless' background
 +
create an im- pression of the birth, from the background, of
 +
what eventually takes concrete shape as an object or a human
 +
body.
 +
 +
This pictorial device, neutral in appearance only, is
 +
perhaps employed just to diversify the surface of the
 +
picture. Be this as it may, in this context it takes on a
 +
deeper meaning. Because if Nothing (the background) .is
 +
capable of giving birth to Something (an object or a figure),
 +
we may acknowledge, then, that the object is merely
 +
concentrated Nothingness. Given this hypothesis, the artist's
 +
affirmation that giving form to paint on a surface is what
 +
really interests him takes on its full force. Art, he
 +
maintains, is clearly not a matter of painting anecdotes,
 +
which would then need to be 'understood' (this was never the
 +
case, in fact, but it was difficult to prove while the object
 +
represented called for a literary explanation), but of
 +
realizing the prime objectives of every painter: composition,
 +
colour, drawing. In other words, the quest is for the
 +
autonomy of Art, a quest common to every artistic
 +
revolutionary from, the impressionists through to conceptual
 +
artists.
 +
Beksinski's move towards pure painting is also revealed
 +
by the fact that it is currently near-impossible to
 +
'describe' or 'interpret' his new pictures. They are no
 +
longer 'scary' as his previous works were because of their
 +
seemingly narrative motifs like skeletons, crucified figures,
 +
walls with cracks appearing in them, and all- enveloping
 +
spider webs. The figures in his new paintings lend themselves
 +
to no description, no interpretation, particularly because
 +
they are reduced for the most part to simple outlines, to the
 +
remains of something with no destiny, no goal. They are
 +
ghosts of a faraway echo of real objects.
 +
In some of the paintings, elements of the figures become
 +
somehow detached and dissolve into the background like a wisp
 +
of cigarette smoke floating in the air'. If there was any
 +
doubt in the past on the past of Beksinski's detractors, it
 +
is quite obvious today that what is important about his
 +
pictures is exclusively the way they are painted. And his
 +
technique is dazzling something rarely achieved these days.
 +
This is how tradition has been reunited with modernity
 +
the tradition of a perfect craft allied to modern-day
 +
thinking on painting.
 +
Sometimes people say: "Let's see how well you draw
 +
and I'll tell you if you're a real painter"
 +
Before he revealed himself as an accomplished painter,
 +
Beksin- ski was known above all as a graphic artist as one
 +
of the greatest graphic artists, in fact. His erotic
 +
obsessions, to which he gave life in dense, almost
 +
caricatural strokes, were on a borderline between the
 +
grotesque and the anatomy manual and opened the way to fame.
 +
His drawing period lasted for more than sixteen years (1958-
 +
1974). During the later years (between 1968 and 1974) it
 +
spawned veritable 'graphic paintings', where only the
 +
technique employed (black chalk) and the colour (black and
 +
white) distinguish- ed them from paintings proper.
 +
This period was followed by a long pause that lasted
 +
fourteen years. It could have seemed that Beksinski would
 +
never return to drawing. But he did take it up again in 1988.
 +
Here too, as with his paintings, he went back to his original
 +
source, his drawings of the late fifties: modest drawings
 +
almost sketches.
 +
But the difference is obvious at first sight. The older
 +
drawings were more precise, more accurate. The artist's
 +
stroke cut out the body-object with truly supernatural
 +
precision. Nearly all his recent drawings are sketches, too.
 +
Some of them give the impression of being dashed off in a
 +
hurry. They are lighter, airier, and reveal an . artistic
 +
freedom that could almost qualify as casual. They are in some
 +
respects akin to the oil-paintings produced at the same time.
 +
We find the same composition, the same plain background this
 +
time formed by the neutral whiteness of the drawing-paper.
 +
And it is just as easy to discover the same motifs: a figure,
 +
a head, or sometimes two beings entwined...
 +
 +
But here again, something entirely new has appeared,
 +
something which in turn forces us to concentrate our
 +
attention much more closely on form than on content: starting
 +
out with a parent-drawing, which serves as a canvas for
 +
further manipulations, Beksinski selects a fragment he is
 +
particularly satisfied with; he then continues to draw, using
 +
the fragment as a basis on which to try out another variant.
 +
The manoeuvre is repeated, often many times over. In this way
 +
he produces a whole series of variants based on the repeated
 +
fragment, which is completed in part by other elements,
 +
different every time. Each drawing is therefore at once a
 +
separate entity and part of a greater whole.
 +
The passage of time enables us to see the extent to which
 +
Beksinski eludes over-simplified classifications. As long as
 +
he was being 'modern', he was congratulated on his
 +
contribution to 'the progress of art' along the only positive
 +
path, which, in 1950-60, appeared to be the avant-garde. Then
 +
he began to paint in a 'traditional' manner, which was a big
 +
success with a public who adored art that gave the impression
 +
of being 'meaningful'. Today, by en- deavouring to combine
 +
these two trends upon the surface of a single painting or
 +
drawing, he is proving that, for a true artist, there are no
 +
artificial rifts between pictorial categories. In the same
 +
way he ' is reconfirming his own personality and his
 +
independence of every trend in contemporary art. His
 +
importance and stature will grow with time, as was the case
 +
for so many artists living on the fringe of the world. For,
 +
when all's said and done, the only world there is exists
 +
within the souls of true artists.
 +
 +
 +
PRINCIPAL EXHIBITIONS 1987-1991
 +
December 1987. Exhibition. Gallery Wahl. Warsaw. June
 +
1988. Exhibition of photography. Museum Historical. Sanok.
 +
October-November 1989. Exhibition. Dmochowski Gallery. Paris.
 +
October 1990. Exhibition. Toh-Ou Museum (Museum of East
 +
Europe). Osaka.
 +
Permanent exhibition at the "Toh-Ou Museum" (Museum of
 +
East Europe) Osaka. Japan.
 +
Permanent exhibition at the Historical Museum. Sanok.
 +
Poland. Permanent exhibition at the "Dmochowski Gallery".
 +
Paris. France.
 +
 +
FILMS 1987-1991
 +
Two short films have been made on Beksinski and his work
 +
since 1987:
 +
1987 "The Dream" by Bogdan Dziworski 1990 "The
 +
mystery of Beksinski" by Jozef Gebski
 +
 +
A SUMMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY 1987-1991
 +
1988-1989 "BEKSINSKI": a monograph published by A. and
 +
P. Dmochowski (in French and English)
 +
1990 "BEKSINSKI": a monograph published by Arkady (in Polish)
 +
1991 "BEKSINSKI": a monograph published by Ramsay (in French)
 +
-->
  
 
<font color=white>Unsichtbar: Zdzislaw Beksinski</font>
 
<font color=white>Unsichtbar: Zdzislaw Beksinski</font>
 
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[[category:Maler]]
 
[[category:Maler]]

Version vom 28. Oktober 2007, 23:26 Uhr

country pl.gif Polnischer Maler, Grafiker und Bildhauer ; geboren 24. Februar 1929 in Sanok (Polen), gestorben 22. Februar 2005 in Warschau (Polen)

Galerie Weblinks

Zdzisław Beksiński schloss 1952 in Krakau ein Architekturstudium ab. Bis 1955 arbeitete er dort im Baugewerbe und kehrte dann nach Sanok zurück. Seine erste beachtete Ausstellung fand Jahre 1964 in Warschau statt.

Seine oft mystisch wirkenden Werke sind dem Surrealismus zuzuordnen. Seine Gemälde erinnern an die Bilder von H. R. Giger, wrken jedoch, da sie in Öl gehalten sind, wärmer und dadurch beunruhigender. Obwohl Verfall, Beklemmung und das Unheimliche stets wiederkehrende Motive sind, haben Beksinskis Bilder keine Titel. Der Maler äusserte sogar: "Bedeutung ist für mich bedeutungslos."

In Polen hatte er regelmässige Ausstellungen und Fernsehauftritte und galt als einer der wichtigsten Künstler des Landes.

Einige seiner Werke waren in Kalenderform über den US-amerikanischen Versand Morpheus International zu beziehen, und eines seiner Bilder zierte das Buch Die Stille nach dem Tod (Alien Contact, 1998).

In der Nacht vom 21. zum 22. Februar 2005 wurde er von zwei Jugendlichen aufgesucht. Es waren der 19-jährige Sohn seines Angestellten und dessen 16-jähriger Cousin, die Geld von ihm borgen wollten. Doch Beksinski weigerte sich und hatte vor, zuerst mit dem Vater des 19-Jährigen zu sprechen. Als er nach dem Telefon griff, zog Robert K. ein Messer heraus und stach 17-mal auf den Künstler ein. Zwei der Stiche waren tödlich.

Beksinskis Werke sind in Warschau, Posen, Krakau, Sanok (Polen), Göteborg und Osaka zu sehen.


Unsichtbar: Zdzislaw Beksinski