Across Time & Distance: The Unlikely Friendship of Wajda & Czapski

andrzej_wajda_usmiech_2011_fot_wojciech_strozyk_en_czapski_1968_fot_pap.jpg, default, Andrzej Wajda, 2011, photo: Wojciech Stróżyk / East News; Józef Czapski, 1968, photo: PAP

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Their acquaintance underwent many beginnings and endings, with numerous episodes along the way. Although separated by space and time, they remained connected by a love of art and mutual admiration. The relationship between an outstanding director and an exceptional painter offers material for a good film.

Andrzej Wajda and Józef Czapski met through Józef Pankiewicz, or rather, thanks to the monograph that Czapski wrote about him. Published in 1936, it marked his literary debut, aside from his scattered essays, sketches, exhibition reviews, and portraits of famous figures. At the same time, it was the first book to connect Andrzej Wajda with art. ‘Czapski shaped my awareness of painting,’ said the director.

Painting

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Painting tools at the Czapski Pavilion, Kraków, 2016, photo: Marek Lasyk / Reporter / East News

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They studied at the same university, although at different times. Wajda read Czapski’s book Józef Pankiewicz. Życie i Dzieło. Wypowiedzi o Sztuce (Józef Pankiewicz. Life and Work. Statements about Art) about the painter and legendary teacher from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków during the occupation in 1941 or 1942, and he probably received a copy as a gift from one of his mother’s friends. It was this very monograph that, a few years later, inspired him to enrol at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, the same institution where Czapski had studied a quarter of a century earlier. The author’s second publication, a study titled O Cézanne’ie i Świadomości Malarskiej (On Cézanne and the Consciousness of Painting), was acquired by the future director himself. After beginning his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1946, he first came under the guidance of Zygmunt Radnicki, an admirer of the French Post-Impressionists, and later joined the studio of Hanna Rudzka-Cybisowa, a close associate of Czapski from university and from the period when they both co-founded the Kapists group in Paris (painters, pupils of Pankiewicz, who had travelled to France in 1924 to study colourism. They called themselves the Paris Committee, abbreviated as K.P., or ‘Kapists’).

They walked the same paths, albeit at different times. For example, they visited the Louvre. In his book on Pankiewicz, alongside a biography of this pioneer of the Colourist movement in Polish art, Czapski also recounted conversations between the teacher and his students visiting the Paris museum. Several decades later, Wajda walked the same corridors and admired the same paintings – as he admitted, he was following in the footsteps of Czapski and his mentor.

Pankiewicz discussed a wide range of painters with the students: Titian, Veronese, and the Old Masters – Bellini and Perugino; he also talked about later artists like Poussin and Rubens. For me, this book became a gospel. When I first arrived in Paris in 1957, I visited the Louvre, and I suddenly felt at home because all those paintings described by Czapski and discussed by Pankiewicz with his students at the Louvre then became my own.

– Wajda wrote in his essay Żółta Chmura Józefa Czapskiego (Józef Czapski’s Yellow Cloud).

They first met at the Galerie Desbrière in Paris in 1967. Czapski was exhibiting his paintings there, and one of them was purchased by the American writer Mary McCarthy. With Wajda, who was then accompanied by Beata Tyszkiewicz, he scarcely exchanged greetings. They made up for it only 14 years later, in 1981, when the director and his wife, Krystyna Zachwatowicz, visited Maisons-Laffitte – that was when their friendship truly began. Just a year later, the 86-year-old Czapski wrote in a dedication: ‘To Krysia and Andrzej, whom I loved without even having seen them’.

Cinema

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Works by Józef Czapski from the Aeschlimann Collection exhibition at the Zachęta in Warsaw, 2007, photo: Andrzej Rybczyński / PAP

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Czapski watched Man of Marble from the third row. He must have been impressed by Wajda’s work because, in his diary, on 5 September 1981, he noted that he would never forget the film and that he did not care what the critics said.

He watched Danton from backstage. Wojciech Pszoniak, who played Robespierre, recalled that one day in 1982, the painter appeared on set. A few months later, shortly after the premiere of the film adaptation of Stanisława Przybyszewska’s play, Czapski sent a letter of congratulations to the director. In it, he argued that the work was brilliant – and anti-democratic.

I just want to say that the film is WONDERFUL; you leave and [?] are visually dazzled – what faces, what movement! – but you are left with a whole world of problems. […] I claim that democracy is incapable of governing! That sooner or later it leads to dictatorship – but that’s not the point; the point is the problem posed in Kant’s style [?], that Depardieu is a brilliant actor, and as for the FILMMAKER, I’M LOST FOR WORDS!!! I even intended to make a portrait of Depardieu–Danton.

Czapski regarded Chronicle of Love Affairs as a film about his own youth and was delighted that, thanks to Wajda, Dostoevsky was also brought to life on screen. At that time, the director was working on The Possessed, which Czapski eagerly awaited (in a letter from 1987, he wrote: ‘What I would still like to live to see is your film, The Possessed. Sitting close by, I will be able to watch this film’).

Katyń symbolically united them. Although Czapski did not live to see the film’s premiere, he had, in a sense, helped to create it and even ‘appeared’ in it. While filming Danton, Wajda recorded on cine film what his friend had told him about his wartime experiences and his search for the several thousand Polish officers murdered in Katyn in the spring of 1940 – one of whom was Jakub Wajda, the director’s father. In the film, released in 2007, we recognise the very same scenes that Czapski described in his diaries. When, in one scene, the general speaks to the soldiers in a prisoner-of-war camp, trying to keep their spirits up, at one point he also turns to the scientists, teachers, engineers, lawyers and… a painter accompanying them. In this way, Wajda paid tribute to his friend.

Andrzej Wajda: Portraits - Image Gallery

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The feature-length film about Józef Czapski remained the director’s unproduced project. In his biography of the painter, Eric Karpeles describes Wajda’s vision:

A phenomenal subject: an elderly painter who can hardly see – who literally sees almost nothing – still paints. And he paints better and with greater passion than ever before. I would begin with a long take – the nearly blind Czapski as he is painting. In the same scene, a shot of paint tubes arranged on sheets of paper with the names of the colours written in large letters, so he knows which colour is which.

Józef Czapski – Świadek Wieku 1896–1993 (Józef Czapski – Witness to the Century 1896–1993), a 2014 documentary by Andrzej Wolski, for which Wajda and Krystyna Zachwatowicz served as artistic consultants, indeed begins with a shot of a grey-haired man at his easel in his studio in Maisons-Laffitte. Earlier, however, in 1986, Wajda succeeded in making a short documentary about his friend for French television. At that time, he also gave an interview to the Polish section of Radio France Internationale, in which he said that Czapski was characterised by his search for officers, by what he painted, and by what he wrote about art. ‘Czapski is a fascinating figure to me,’ he added.

Correspondence

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Documents of Józef Czapski, Czapski Pavilion, Kraków, 2016, photo: Marek Lasyk / Reporter / East News

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When they had not seen each other for a long time, they wrote letters. Czapski’s were longer, Wajda’s shorter, often signed jointly with Krystyna Zachwatowicz. Handwritten or typed, in the form of postcards or telegrams. The painter from Maisons-Laffitte, the director from Warsaw, Sailly near Paris, Vienna, or Berlin.

After Wajda and his wife viewed the Soutine exhibition, they sent Czapski a card with a reproduction of the painting Enfant de Choeur, along with the note: ‘Thank you for being here! And that you paint!’ In a later essay, Spacery po Luwrze (Walks Through the Louvre), the director recalls: ‘I once had the good fortune to view a Bacon exhibition with Czapski. I saw how he was able to look at things. Czapski gazed with such intensity that he seemed to blend into the picture, as if he were part of it.’

When Czapski opened the birthday envelope from Madrid, he found not only a birthday card but also a medallion bearing the image of the Virgin Mary. The parcel from Japan, meanwhile, contained sweets wrapped in silver paper, whose rice flavour he could not appreciate (as he wrote quite frankly to his friends), and a magnifying glass, which he could not use, however, as his eyesight was already too poor for it.

When Wajda, while working on Chronicle of Love Affairs, visited the studio of Tadeusz Pruszkowski – a painter who belonged to the Brotherhood of St Luke, which hated the Kapists – he copied out for his friend their little poem about the Paris Committee.

There’s a certain baboon

who worships only Cézanne.

There’s a certain bulldog

who worships only van Gogh.

There’s a gang of rascals

who worship only the French…

When Czapski could no longer write, he dictated letters and apologised to the recipients for his verbosity. Sometimes he would reflect on the past (‘That first time in Paris with the Kapists was probably one of the hardest periods of my life’). More often, he would give an account of everyday life (‘I also had an exhibition in Switzerland, which was a great financial success; thanks to that, but above all thanks to Aeschlimann, my art dealer and friend, I have enough to live on’).

He mourned that he could not distinguish colours and that his vision was inexpressible. Yet he continued to make entries in his diary, even though he could not see the letters. ‘It is not only my eyes that are failing me, but also the flow of words,’ he wrote in an undated letter to his friends – perhaps his last.

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Krystyna Zachwatowicz at the Czapski Pavilion, Kraków, 2016, photo: Jan Graczyński / East News

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The epilogue of this friendship was written by Krystyna Zachwatowicz-Wajda. After Józef Czapski’s death, she established a permanent biographical exhibition from archives donated to the National Museum in Kraków, which can be viewed at the Józef Czapski Pavilion. It features photographs, documents, paintings, sketchbooks, digital versions of diaries, and memorabilia. It also includes a reconstructed painting studio from Maisons-Laffitte, where the friendship between the painter and the director flourished.

^{Bibliography: J. Czapski, A. Wajda, K. Zachwatowicz, Korespondencja [in:] Zeszyty Literackie, No. 132/ 2015;}

^{A. Wajda, Spacery po Luwrze [w:] Zeszyty Literackie, No. 45/1994;}

^{A. Wajda, Żółta chmura Józefa Czapskiego [in:] Zeszyty Literackie, No. 99/2007;}

^{jozefczapski.pl, kulturaparyska.com, ninateka.pl, wajda.pl.}

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

Language English