Things Keep Their Secrets My Country Had Been Rather Poor in the Domain of Visual Arts for a Long Time

04 I 05 Things Keep Their Secrets My country had been rather poor in the domain of visual arts for a long time. As late as in 1857 an eminent Adam Zagajewski exile critic -Julian Klaczko, the then exiled author collaborating intensely with the famous Parisian maga• zine La Revue des Deux Mondes- could claim that in Poland, a northern country, only music and poetry were able to flourish, not painting or sculpture, these being capable of thriving only in the European South where the clement nature itself invited human eye and hand to a beautiful competition with God. Just then, or a few years later, a new generation of artists came into being who passionately exerted themselves in producing can• vases and sculptures. But Polish aristocrats, many of them immensely wealthy, still preferred to collect Italian painting... When you walk through the very interesting permanent gallery of Polish XX century art in the Krakow National Museum you're all the time divided between an admiration for some strikingly ori• ginal talent and impatience with artists who all too lite• rally followed examples from Paris and Berlin (actually two northern capitals, if one bothers to look at a map). The industrial city in Silesia in which I grew up (its name is Gliwice -my American friends ask me for help when they need to pronounce this difficult for them sound) was even worse off both in the realm of visual arts and music. A pathetic operetta ensemble playing eternal hits by Franz Lehar and other giants of the light muse stood for the inexistent philharmonics. And yet in the nondescript gray building sheltering this boring institution I had once an inkling of my future musical adventures and passions: Drei Maederl um Schubert was the title of a Singspiel -if my memory doesn't fail me- that exposed the legend of Franz Schubert, one of Revisiones l os 12007105-14 the greatest geniuses of melody creation ever, even if here he was seen in a rather banal scenery, a perfectly life in the new place, in the streets no one loved. Our domesticated bachelor, a rather shallow guy (but the city craved for representation, for colors and sounds portraits of Schubert we know show him in similar and words too... Our city was naked, or felt naked; its Biedermeier light). portraits disappeared; it needed help, needed new And visual arts were not much better off. There were dress. Artists and poets were desperately needed. some painters in my city and one of the buildings in the Some connection existed, as I learned much later, small but on some days quite charming Central Square between the provincial city of Gliwice and the interna• housed the local chapter of the national association of tional avant-garde movement; Hans Bellmer, author of visual artists. The most known among the Gliwice daring, originals dolls, somebody who participated in artists was an energetic lady who incessantly delivered the Surrealist movement, had links with the city. plenty of homespun landscapes representing local A lot had changed: in 1955,56 the worst of Stalinism churches, streets and parks (P. Acedanska). This was in came to an end, a more humane variation of itself a pioneer activity insofar as this very city had just Communism emerged -still very far from a free, demo• then changed its nationality. Because the borders shif• cratic society but at least much less murderous than its ted, Gliwice, beforehand a part of Germany, and called predecessor. Yet another hiatus occurred in the century Gleiwitz, was incorporated into the new, postwar that had gone through so many of them. The century had Communist Poland. Its churches, streets and parks had face covered with deep scars. What was Bildung in such been certainly represented hundreds of times before by a capricious environment? Could you still use this ele• German or Prussian brushes (or even, probably, by gant notion, forged in peaceful German university some Polish ones, as the city before the WW 2 had a sig• towns? Bildung was apparently covered with scars as nificant Polish minority). But now these older canvases well... My schools were infected by the most simplified either burned down or were taken by German refugees version of the Marxist thought: history was over, the to Bavaria or Rhineland where -in the complex eco• imperfect, strange, sinful bourgeois society was dead or nomy of remembering and forgetting- they must have dying and a new world had just been inaugurated, an played an important role of sentimental keepsakes. In easygoing, pleasant society where laughing workers the same way canvases and watercolors, and photo• exchanged innocent glances with young peasant girls and graphs from Lvov were indispensable nourishment for equally young party activists explained something to a the never-ending nostalgia of those who had to leave group of older people, probably trying to convey to them this beautiful, Baroque city. There was an urgent need the joyful message: the nightmare of human suffering to re-represent local churches, streets and parks... to has finally ended, now let's sing and dance. The original make them exist doubly, not only on the retina of the sin has been cancelled. The change resembled the passa• newcomers' eyes but also on some permanent material ge from the dark brown colors of the historic paintings of support so that the pressure of old memories, of images French or German schools to the bright pastels of Degas of the lost city of Lvov does not strangle the fragile new and even brighter paintings by Matisse. From William 06 I 07 Bouguereau to Henri Matisse, what a leap! What was everything that mattered in the public space (I except Bildung supposed to do in this unexpected context? here private life, the life of family -but even this was fre• The change of political climate which happened quently invaded by the omnipresent state) was divided around 1956 made it possible -among many other between the suffocating political system and a rigid things- for French Impressionists to invade, with their Catholic church; the territory that the Church offered luminosity, with their flowers and He de France lands• seemed so much better than the narrow ideological capes, the much darker space of my Silesian city. The field proposed by the Communist state. The same political thaw which had transformed a rigid Communist proposition -this was obvious- could only Stalinist regime into a more tolerant though still be reinforced by the frantic activity of the political poli• Communist system had as its harbinger a sudden ce. And so it was, as it became absolutely apparent explosion of jazz-both the older, New Orleans style jazz when the archives of the German Stasi, Polish SB, as well as several modes of modern jazz. In Warsaw and Czech secret police, etc., etc. were opened after 1989. in Krakow there was another explosion of music: Yet living in the cage of a binary system, between the Witold Lutoslawski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Party and the Church, had its limits; art, even when Gorecki and other composers celebrated the end of the experienced only through very modest means of repro• Stalinist nightmare with the opening up of their style. ductions sold in local bookstores and through musical Still, not them but Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, records (plus some live jazz concerts) presented somet• Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davies entered in triumph the hing like a third option, like a solution to the dilemma gates of my city. One of my classmates trained intensely everybody faced then. as a jazz drummer; I had some English so during more There were many books in my parents' apartment. boring courses I would translate for him articles on My father had also a strong interest in painting. Max Roach and other famous US drummers, my only Whenever he traveled -which became possible to some salary for this being my satisfaction that at least in the extent after 1956- he would visit museums and galle• subordinate capacity (subordinate clause) of a transla• ries. I remember his early visit in the Dresden's Zwinger tor I was able to join the new musical world. and some art books he was able to bring home. He These were for me first signals -imperfect indeed- acquired a good knowledge of European and Polish that the world of art existed. Easily debased by trivial painting but never trusted himself to develop any gene• use (Van Gogh's Sunflowers' reproduction for instance, ralizations having to do with art; he kept a mystical ter• the reproduction of this incredible painting which was seness as far as art was concerned. But sometimes, an ardent appeal of the flowers' zest for life, became much later, when he'd visit us in Paris in the eighties or favorite decoration of many rooms, soon covered by in the nineties, a remark uttered by him in the Musée dust and indifference) they nonetheless were witnes• d'Orsay or in the Louvre would suddenly betray some• sing the existence of something better, of art. For a long body who knew a lot about both the technique and his• time I was growing up within a binary system where tory of Western art. And my grandfather on the pater- rial side was, before the WW2, when he could afford it, Mahler's symphonies where military marches coexisted a modest art collector. Before he departed from Lvov with lyric strings like diverse components of a great city -expelled from this city by the decree of history- he got where behind noisy markets one could come across rid of most of his treasures.

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