Magical (Socialist) Realism: Andrzej Wróblewski in Ljubljana
A three-week stay in Yugoslavia together with the critic Barbara Majewska was the last trip in Andrzej Wróblewski’s short life. And although the artist didn’t exactly live up to expectations as a delegate sent on a business trip to an allied socialist republic, his work was never the same again afterwards.
Different light, different people
On October 13, 1956, the day after a Polish United Workers’ Party Politburo meeting, at which Władysław Gomułka, recently freed from prison, rehabilitated, and clearly headed for the post of First Secretary, had called for more courage in relations with the Soviet Union, Andrzej Wróblewski travelled to Warsaw to obtain a passport for his upcoming trip to Yugoslavia. On October 30, Wróblewski and the art critic Barbara Majewska boarded the plane for a three-week trip on behalf of the Commission for Foreign Cooperation. Both had been invited there as critics on a cultural exchange, and they travelled from city to city, looking around Byzantine stone churches, visiting museums, absorbing art, and enjoying the afternoon sun over the Adriatic. ‘Differently shaped hills, different smells, different plants, different light, different buildings, different people’, recalled Majewska.
Yet Wróblewski was not just a critic, he was above all an artist whose new paintings Majewska had been rather sceptical about mere weeks before. In her review of Wróblewski at the Po Prostu Salon exhibition, the critic noted that his ‘painted world (…) should rather be gathered up and interpreted as individual elements, since none of his work to date is convincing as a whole’, and that the colours ‘present in his canvases are often unsubstantiated and indeterminate’. Although there was more than a grain of truth in both remarks, looking back, they rather testify to the genius of Wróblewski’s painting, rather than its weakness.
Official duties as a delegate
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Barbara Majewska & Andrzej Wróblewski by Lake Ohrid, North Macedonia, photo: Barbara Majewska & Andrzej Wróblewski / © The Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / andrzejwroblewski.pl
Official duties as a delegate
Wróblewski’s Notatki Jugosłowiańskie (Yugoslav Notes) seem like a somewhat dry report describing the work of selected painters – the trip to Yugoslavia obviously touched him more as an artist than a critic. However, Majewska’s text for Przegląd Kulturalny was not only full of descriptions and analysis of the local painting scene, it also sparkled with almost journalistic interludes, notes on the local landscape, and selected comments from conversations on the institutional situation of Yugoslav artists. His official duties as a delegate notwithstanding, the trip proved to be a vital turning point for Wróblewski’s painting – the last in his less-than-a-decade-long yet extremely intense career.
‘Personally, I’m interested in the relationship between modern painters and folklore. I hear that a lot of splendid results have been achieved in the field’, wrote Wróblewski. In the end, it was folklore itself, rather than its modern interpretations, that captured his imagination. Judging by the works that the artist managed to produce in the last few months of his life (some in oils, but mostly using gouache, Indian ink, and monotyping), his most important visit was not to a modern art exhibition but… to the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. There he saw so-called stećci – characteristic, predominantly Bosnian tombstones decorated with relief carvings and geometric human figures; a tradition dating back to mediaeval times. Their shapes transformed and fused with the man-abstraction theme that had been present in Wróblewski’s art since the early years, and went on to populate the artist’s final works.
The personal is political
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The 'Andrzej Wróblewski: Waiting Room' exhibition at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 15 October 2020, photo; © The Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / andrzejwroblewski.pl
Today, Wróblewski’s oeuvre is usually interpreted with reference to two turning points, at the beginning and end of his career. The first occurred around 1948, when the young, freshly graduated artist attempted to reimagine realism to be relevant after the catastrophic war. The second came in about 1956, when he tried to do the same after his socialist-realist period. Socialist realism was a third, equally vital turning point that should not be skipped as if it never existed. Since Wróblewski shifted smoothly into socialist realism, looking for genuine artistic opportunities instead of mundanely complying with directives, his ‘misdemeanour’ was more of an evolution than a revolution.
The painting Matki, Antyfaszystki (Mothers, Antifascists), exhibited at the Arsenał in 1955, is the oldest work on display at the ongoing Waiting Room exhibition at Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, and it typifies that transition. Compared to his pictures from a few months before, produced in accordance with the doctrine, here we see livelier colours, more dynamic forms, some chiselled in stark chiaroscuro, some delicately sketched as irregular flat shapes, as well as some very natural scenes. The curators of the Slovenian exhibition highlight the link between his scene depicting two mothers with babies and the classical Christian iconographical theme of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
But through the brush of this artist raised in the Catholic tradition and educated in the history of art, that theme is overlaid with afterimages of familiar scenes from the socialist-realist era – a mother sitting with her child by open balcony doors, or shielding the infant from an air raid with her body. But Wróblewski needed no bombers in the background to label these mothers portrayed in everyday settings as antifascists – as if foreshadowing the second-wave feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ a decade in advance.
Against the mindlessness of the thaw
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'Presidium (Collective Scene no. 113), undated, ink on paper, 29.2 x 42 cm, photo: private collection / © The Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / andrzejwroblewski.pl
Although his involvement with socialist realism was a disappointment to him, he did not throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon realism altogether, as many other artists did once the socialist-realist laws had died out. For example, unlike the slowly rising legend Tadeusz Kantor, who swiftly dived into Parisian-style informalist abstraction, Wróblewski’s bygone socialist-realist snowdrifts melted away gradually. He seemed almost pre-emptively disillusioned at this new openness, and flew to Yugoslavia irritated at the ‘mindlessness of the thaw’.
After returning, Majewska quoted Yugoslav artists who had stated in calmly resigned tones that the era of questing was over and the entire world now lived in the shadow of France. Perhaps that was why Wróblewski, despite sympathetic interest and praise for his fellow artists, did not seem particularly thrilled by the modern art he saw on that trip. Who cares if their diagnosis was slightly incorrect, for those were almost Paris’s last spasms as art capital of the world, while it unwillingly but inexorably yielded to the new, overseas power of New York. But creating art based on imported templates was not to Wróblewski’s taste. He had not sought to escape the shadow of Moscow by finding his own ideas of socialist realism, just to thrust himself into the shadow of Paris.
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'Throne', Andrzej Wróblewski, undated, gouach, paper, 29.5 x 42 cm, kolekcja prywatna, photo: private collection / © The Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / andrzejwroblewski.pl
Wróblewski’s quest for new artistic formulae was fairly anti-colonial. Instead of radical changes of style he preferred multi-faceted stratification. A key example was his split into realism and abstraction, showcased several years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw’s Recto/Verso exhibition. At the time, its curator, Éric de Chassey stated in an interview for Culture.pl:
Text
[Wróblewski] was doing things that we would normally take as impossible for that period. It only became possible in the paintings of the late 1980s, early 1990s, with artists like Luc Tuymans, Wilhelm Sasnal, Raoul de Keyser or René Daniëls; these artists who were doing both abstract and figurative work, without thinking that there is so much difference between the two. Of course, the fact that [Wróblewski was already doing it] in the late 1940s makes it completely different and specific.
But Wróblewski certainly did consider the differences between abstract and figurative, and combined them for a reason. Abstract and realist compositions would appear not only on both sides of the same canvas or piece of cardboard, but also within individual works. His Człowiek-Abstrakcja (Man-Abstraction, 1948) is engulfed by a mechanical/floral whirl of abstract triangles from the waist upwards. A similar motif can be seen on the dashboard in Szofer Niebieski (Blue Chauffeur), and the views out of the windows of buses driven by successive incarnations of drivers often change from non-specific landscapes into total abstraction.
Embeded gallery style
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During Malevich’s pre-Suprematist period, his realism underwent a gradual geometrisation, with figures of peasants in the fields transforming into cylinders and rectangular prisms; while Mondrian’s realistic apple tree gently morphed into an arrangement of curving lines. Yet, for a change, Wróblewski’s pictorial system did not evolve towards abstraction in its entirety, only in individual details – to a certain extent, every ingredient of his painted universe seemed independent and lived a life of its own. Zbigniew Herbert felt that ‘due to bad times and his premature death, the potential of possibly Poland’s only great surrealist was never realised’. However, it was those bad times (as well as his socialist-realist phase, which ‘destroyed his art’, according to Herbert) that led to Wróblewski’s work verging on surrealism and being closer to literary magical realism.
The artist’s final phase perfectly illustrates the features of magical realism, as defined by Tomasz Pindel: a mythical view of reality, dispensing with the division between animate and inanimate objects, and no rigid boundary between life and death, or distinction between the soul and matter. Not to mention the genre’s post-colonial roots in South America and Central Europe. Even in his apparently wholly realistic works, such as Poczekalnia I (Kolejka Trwa) (Waiting Room I, The Queuing Continues), the reality splinters while retaining its own intrinsic logic. As per Majewska’s intuition, ‘unsubstantiated, indeterminate’ colours appear. In this case, the colours of the background, floor, and walls behind the seated figures glow with odd, soft reflections and seem to lose their materiality, drawing the eye deep into the painting and becoming more reminiscent of the infernal landscape of Delacroix’s La Barque de Dante than the interior of some state office.
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The 'Andrzej Wróblewski: Waiting Room' exhibition at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 15 October 2020, photo; © The Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / andrzejwroblewski.pl
That canvas also confirms Majewska’s second observation, that his painted world should be gathered up and interpreted as individual elements. The painter also incorporated it into the narrative of one of his own unmade film scripts. Quoted by the curators of the Ljubljana exhibition, the script is basically more like a precise screenplay, in which Wróblewski pays scrupulous attention to camera shots and editing. The plot begins in the waiting room, moves into the office of the sleeping state official, then finally inside his and the applicants’ heads. Apart from satirising the eternal waiting in queues, Wróblewski also weaves in memories of the war and executions, and a dreamlike vision similar to his Zatopione Miasto (Sunken City). This potential short feature was a kind of cine-exhibition of Wróblewski, depicting the new concept of ‘polyplastic realism’ that was emerging at the time. Wróblewski planned to develop it by forming a new group with his filmmaker and poster-designer friends, including such names as Andrzej Wajda and Walerian Borowczyk.
Wajda managed to partially achieve this vision of a ‘polyplastic’ combination of arts by recreating one of the Rozstrzelania (Executions) paintings in his Popiól i Diament (Ashes and Diamonds), while in Everything for Sale he made the main character attend a Wróblewski exhibition. He has also planned to make a movie about his friend, but that never came to pass. Other themes also proved to be durable. In the French director Michel Gondry’s short film Interior Design, the young female heroine – lost after moving to Tokyo, belittled to varying degrees by her family and friends, and unsure of her future – finally turns into a wooden chair, a form in which she feels fulfilled and needed at last. So, Wróblewski’s concept of Ukrzesłowienie (Chairing) also appeared in the reality of technocratic Japanese capitalism, the diametric opposite of 1950s’ socialist countries – an equally apt metaphor.
Wróblewski’s interest in photography and film was not restricted to film scripts, but also covered composition and framing. This included drawing Indian-ink still lifes and gouache self-portraits, tightly cropped in horizontal formats. These may contain even more profound cinematic inspirations. For example, an undated gouache self-portrait in which the artist’s face seems to be lit from two sides, one in red, the other in green, thus modelling the face slightly differently on each side. Considering Wróblewski’s interest in film, one might be tempted to spot a reference to historical special effects from pre-war black-and-white cinema. Coloured makeup techniques had been in use since at least the first Ben Hur in 1925, but the ultimate practical special effect of the time was achieved in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The face of Fredric March in the title role was made up in two contrasting colours – his ‘normal’ makeup in green, and makeup to give him ‘horrific’ features in red. This meant one or the other could be brought out by changing colour filters mounted on the lights and camera lenses, allowing a smooth transformation from Jekyll to Hyde in one shot.
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'Study of a Woman', Andrzej Wróblewski, undated, mixed technique, paper, 78 x 63.6 cm, kolekcja prywatna, photo; © The Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / andrzejwroblewski.pl
The Waiting Room exhibition in Ljubljana, curated by Magdalena Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała of the Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation, and Marko Jenko, examines the intense final stage of Wróblewski’s work in depth, exposing its complexity of themes and forms. It also presents works discovered more recently, and the display is completed with Yugoslav art, particularly the artists Wróblewski described upon his return, as well as one of the original stećci that inspired his later monotypes and paintings. Of course, this revival over six decades later is taking place in a completely different atmosphere to Wróblewski’s first exhibition tour around Poland. A posthumous exhibition organised at Kraków Palace of Art in 1958 later travelled around several cities, via Warsaw to the Baltic Sea. At the Palace of Art, the Rozstrzelania series was meant to be exhibited so close to the spectators that Andrzej Pawłowski, who arranged the exhibition, stood some paintings on the floor, suspended others just above it, pinned works on paper to exhibition panels, and laid some out on the floor. In Ljubljana, even small gouache and ink works form an undulating frieze considerably above eye-level, requiring visitors to crane their necks upwards – but museums are governed by a different set of rules…
The latest phase of processing and exporting Wróblewski’s work began a decade ago – somewhat in keeping with the first major trip of his career, to Holland – with an exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, organised by Magdalena Ziółkowska. Two years later, the official Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation was set up by Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała. Apart from exhibitions, it has also published the monumental, two-language Unikanie Stanów Pośrednich (Avoiding Intermediary States), crucial for further research into the artist’s oeuvre. Researching the book involved not only discovering well-publicised new works, but also ascertaining basic facts about known works, which required infinite patience. One such task was to put order into the titles, most of which had been given posthumously by his mother, Krystyna Wróblewska, as she dealt with and proto-curated her son’s legacy. Another was to examine every signature, the overwhelming majority of which had been added by Krystyna Wróblewska.
Following this pattern of repeating the artist’s historical journeys, one might say that, since the voyage to Yugoslavia was the painter’s last trip abroad, this Ljubljana exhibition concludes the ‘heroic’ period of research into his art, as well as the process of making him part of the art canon of both Western and Central Europe.
Originally written in Polish, Oct 2020, translated by Mark Bence, Nov 2020
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