Zdzisław Beksiński
Zdzisław Beksiński (24 February 1929 – 22 February 2005) was a renowned Polish painter, photographer, and fantasy artist.
He was born in the town of Sanok in southern Poland. After studying architecture in Kraków, he returned to Sanok in 1955. Subsequent to this education he spent several years as a conmstruction site supervisor, a job he hated. At that time he became interested in artistic photography and photomontage, sculpture and painting. He made his sculptures of plaster, metal, and wire. His photography offered a taste of things to come in his future paintings, presenting wrinkled faces, landscapes; objects with a very bumpy texture which he attempted to emphasise, especially by manipulating lights and shadows. His photography also depicted disturbing images, such as a mutilated baby doll with its face torn off, portraits of people without faces or with their faces wrapped in bandages.
Later, he concentrated on painting. His first paintings were abstarct art, but throughout the sixties he made his surrealist inspirations more visible. In the 1970s he entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the late 1980s. This is his best known period, during which he created very disturbing images, showing a surrealistic, post-apocalyptic environment with very detailed scenes of death, decay, landscapes filled with skeletons, deformed figures, deserts, all very detailed, painted with his trademark precision, particularly when it came to rough, bumpy surfaces. His highly detailed drawings are often quite large, and may remind some of the works of Ernst Fuchs in their intricate, and nearly obsessive rendering. Despite the grim overtones, he claimed some of these paintings were misunderstood, as they were rather optimistic, or even humouristic.
His exhibitions almost always proved very successful. A prestigious exhibition in Warsaw in 1964 proved to be his first major success, as all his paintings were sold. In the 1980s his works gained on popularity in France due to the endeavours of Piotr Dmochowski, and he gained significant popularity in Western Europe, the USA and Japan.
Beksiński eventually threw himself into painting with a passion, and worked constantly, always to the strains of classical music. He soon became the leading figure in contemporary Polish art.
Before moving to Warsaw in 1977 he burned a selection of his works in his own backyard, without leaving any documentation on them. He later claimed that some of those works were "too personal", while others were unsatisfactory, and he didn't want people to see them. The 1980s marked a transitory period for Beksiński. His art in the early 1990s consisted mainly of a series of surreal portraits and a series of crosses. Paintings in these series were much less lavish than those known from his "fantastic period", but just as powerful. In the latter part of the 1990s he discovered computers, the internet, and digital photography, on which he focused on until his death.
Beksiński 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. 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.
The late 1990s were a very trying time for Beksiński. His wife, Zofia, died in 1998, and a year later, on Christmas Eve 1999, his son Tomasz (a popular radio presenter, music journalist and movie translator) committed suicide. It was Beksiński who discovered his son's body. Unable to come to terms with his son's death, he kept an envelope "For Tomek in case I kick the bucket" pinned to his wall.
In 2003 his official site was designed by Kubicki and friends and was open in Warsaw by Beksiński's friend, agent Mr. Valdemar R. Plusa who looks after the site and owns Belvedere Gallery presenting Beksiński's Work and selling various art pieces related to His Art.
On 22 February 2005 he was found dead in his flat in Warsaw with 17 stab wounds on his body, two of which were fatal. The teenage son of his long time caretaker, who later plead guilty, and a friend were arrested shortly after the crime. It is known that Beksiński had recently refused a loan to the young man.
Zdzislaw Beksinski had contact with many artists, but the only person he taught was Adrian Kedzia, an artist who never became famous and stopped painting due to vision problems.
Trivia
· Beksiński's art was gloomy and grim, though he himself was known to be a pleasant person, and though somewhat shy, took enjoyment from conversation.
· He never gave titles to his works.
· He painted his paintings on boards which he personally prepared.
· He listened to classical music while painting and abhorred silence.
· His son was a great fan of the band The Legendary Pink Dots. After his son's suicide the bands albums' Polish editions and reissues were graced by Beksińki's digital art employed as covers, dedicated to the memory of Tomasz Beksiński.
· He is the only modern Polish artist to have had an exhibition in the Osaka Museum of Art in Japan.
· He almost never visited museums or exhibitions.
Sources
· Gryglewicz, Tomasz: Beksiński. Bosz Art 1999
· Gazeta Wyborcza, an interview with Zdzisław Beksiński
External links
· http://www.Beksinski.pl/ – Official website
· http://www.Beksinski.pl/masterlist.htm
· http://www.belvederegallery.com/Bex
· http://www.gnosis.art.pl/iluminatornia/sztuka_o_inspiracji/zdzislaw_beksinski/zdzislaw_beksinski.htm – Gallery
· http://www.polishartgallery.com/exhibition/welcome.htm Biographies and analysis of his work
Biography 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. 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. 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. by Piotr Dmochowski Introduction by Piotr Dmochowski 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. 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 extraordinary art lies far beyond meaning. BEKSINSKY'S AUTOPSYCHOTHERAPIES by Tadeusz Nyczek 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. 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. But where art is concerned, nothing is impossible. In art, Copernicus and Ptolemy can both be right. In, art the 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 Salvador Dali and Arnold Bocklin. There's a place for Kieffer and Bacon, Warhol and Balthus, Beuys and Tibor Csernus. 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... Beksinski is proof positive of this: it is still possible 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. This is how an artist's-career unfolds, stage by stage. This is the way new forms and new co½ventions are explored. 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, ...
medula666