Non-Life: Anda Rottenberg on the Art of Alina Szapocznikow & Andrzej Wajda

anda_rottenberg_forum-1025708067.jpg, default, Anda Rottenberg, photo: Artur Rakowski / ArtService / Forum

Alina Szapocznikow, one of Poland’s most original artists, and Andrzej Wajda, the film director and winner of the 1981 Palme d’Or in Cannes for ‘Man of Iron’, were connected not only by friendship but also by a shared fate. Art historian Anda Rottenberg, author of ‘Trudny Wiek’ (A Difficult Age), speaks to Maria Fredro-Smoleńska about how wartime trauma and memories of the camps and the uprising shaped both artists’ work.

Maria Fredro-Smoleńska: A decade ago, during a scholarship stay in Berlin, you studied the ‘war-contaminated’ work of three artists: Alina Szapocznikow, Andrzej Wróblewski, and Andrzej Wajda. You wrote a text that was later the basis of the 2018 exhibition ‘The Perspective of Adolescence: Szapocznikow–Wróblewski–Wajda’ at the Silesian Museum in Katowice. In 2025, a revised and expanded version of the text appeared as a book titled ‘A Difficult Age’, published by Krytyka Polityczna. The year 2026 will mark the centenary of both Szapocznikow’s and Wajda’s birth – a perfect time to revisit your three protagonists. Why did you choose these three exactly?

Anda Rottenberg: I organised Szapocznikow’s first major retrospective in 1998, and the first large-scale exhibition of Wróblewski’s work was organised by Hanna Wróblewska the year before, during my time as director of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art. They were both close to me for that reason. My work on Wajda began more by coincidence, when I was asked to prepare an inaugural lecture for the Warsaw Film School. I didn’t limit myself to his war films, which are the focus of the book, but looked at his visual language more broadly. At some point, it struck me that these three – bound by war, shared experiences, similar biographies, and the fact that during the war they were all in their adolescence – formed a subject lying untouched on the floor. So I picked it up.

MFS: Wajda also served as a link between Wróblewski and Szapocznikow. He remained friends with both until their deaths. He co-organised a posthumous exhibition of Wróblewski’s paintings, and after Szapocznikow’s death, he wrote her eulogy. You recognised many visual echoes of both artists in shots from Wajda’s films.

AR: In early 1945, Wróblewski arrived in Kraków from Vilnius on a repatriation train. He immediately took his secondary school exams and began studying both art history at the Jagiellonian University and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. At the academy, he met Wajda, who began studying painting a year later. Together they organised protests against teaching methods, but Wajda soon abandoned the school. He would later admit that after seeing Wróblewski’s ‘Executions’ series, he realised he would never surpass what his friend had achieved. He transferred to the Łódź Film School in search of a language with similar persuasive power. In 1948, Wróblewski created Painting about the Horrors of War, depicting green headless fish. Eleven years later, Wajda included a scene depicting the catching and gutting of fish in his film Lotna. It was almost in passing, but unmistakably resonant – one of many examples of Wajda transferring his friend’s paintings to the screen.

Meanwhile Wajda likely met Alina Szapocznikow through her first husband, Ryszard Stanisławski – together they had formed an artistic and social circle with Tadeusz Różewicz and Mieczysław Porębski. In my book I wrote how in Everything for Sale (filmed in the winter of 1968, released in January 1969), Wajda incorporated both a display of Wróblewski’s works – wanting to mark the tenth anniversary of his death – and, although its just my own theory, a veiled portrait of Szapocznikow in the scene where Elżbieta Czyżewska behaves like the sculptor, who was known for her sexual openness, by sitting with her legs apart and declaring, ‘Love me, all of you!’ The film also includes a scene with a table – a hiding place – alluding to Jews being sheltered during the war and, by extension, to the forced emigration of Polish Jews in 1968.

Selected Works by Alina Szapocznikow – Image Gallery

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MFS: As we approach the centenary of Wajda’s and Szapocznikow’s births, you’ve said you want to focus on their biographies in particular. In your exhibition and your book, you uncovered how both artists explored ‘non-life’ in their work – how Wajda through film and Szapocznikow through sculpture transmuted what they lived and what they didn’t live through during the war.

AR: When the war began, Wajda was living in Radom. His father, an army officer, was killed in the Katyn massacre. Andrzej finished his schooling in secret classes, then worked as a locksmith, labourer, warehouseman and porter. At 16, he joined the Home Army, but when his group was exposed, he had to flee to Kraków and go into hiding. He didn’t take part in the Warsaw Uprising, and felt guilt about it, that he wasn’t one of those who died. He often repeated that only those who died deserved to be called heroes.

What stayed with him most were the things he didn’t do during the war. In his subsequent war films, he created a whole catalogue about these attitudes – and all the characters he ‘inhabits’ end up dying. Starting with his debut A Generation (1954-55), where his alter ego was not the tough communist hero Stach Mazur (Tadeusz Łomnicki) but the sensitive and nervous Jasio Krone (Tadeusz Janczar) – styled as a coiffured intellectual in a trench coat like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. When he’s cornered by the Germans, Jasio throws himself from a tenement window, preferring to die like that than from his enemy’s bullets. In Canal (1957), a blinded soldier crawls through the sewers to the bank of the Vistula, only to find iron bars blocking the way – held by his companion, he dies in a posture recalling Michelangelo’s Pietà. The cavalry captain in Lotna (1959) is doomed to die, as is of course Maciek in Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Wajda’s adaptation of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel. Each of these figures expresses the director’s thought: ‘That could have been me.’ Even Franciszek Kłos, a traitor .

While preparing the book and exhibition, I didn’t just rewatch all of Wajda’s films, I also analysed the shooting scripts. That’s when I came to understand his strategy: he needed viewers to identify with his characters as much as he did. In Andrzejewski’s novel, Maciek Chełmicki isn’t a positive hero, but in the film he is – in part because of how he’s dressed. In the novel, he wears a coat, hat and briefcase. Cinema-goers Chełmicki’s age would never have identified with a guy that formal, but a young rebellious man like Marlon Brando or James Dean they would. And that’s how the actor Zbigniew Cybulski looks in the film. He also dies at the end, in a rubbish dump, falling from a bullet in a pose echoing Wróblewski’s Execution Against a Wall (IV) from 1949. In that film, perhaps more than any other, Wajda wrestles with the idea that heroes are those who die, while the living cannot claim the title. This is clearest is the scene where Maciek lights glasses of spirits aflame as his friend Andrzej (played by Adam Pawlikowski) recites the names of fallen comrades. The monologue Andrzej Łapicki performs as the Director in Everything for Sale has a similar feel. Wajda had an extraordinary awareness of his place in history – of the duty to bear witness however he could – but he also questioned the purpose of all those deaths.

MFS: Wajda didn’t make ‘Katyń’ until 2007. When did he learn that his father had been killed not by the Germans, but rather by the Soviets?

AR: Probably in the late 1940s. Years later, in a conversation with writer and reporter Hanna Krall, he told her about a fellow student who, like Magdalena Cielecka’s character in Katyń, demanded openly that the truth be told – that the Russians had been behind the massacre. She disappeared from the school overnight. Wajda had to decide whether to follow her example or keep silent about his father’s death and finish his studies, so he could make films later. So he knew fairly early on. During his later stays in France, he met with Józef Czapski [artist and co-creator of the Paris-based ‘Kultura’ magazine. One of the handful of officers to survive the Katyń massacre and, after the war, he was sent to investigate what had happened - ed.], and I’m sure he heard many details from him as he slowly planned his film. But he took his time, waiting for the right moment to tell the story.

Andrzej Wajda: Portraits - Image Gallery

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MFS: Szapocznikow also used metaphor in her art – but her themes were not heroism or her homeland’s fate, rather the body itself: often deformed and wounded, bearing the hidden memory of wartime imagery.

She was born in Kalisz into an assimilated Jewish medical family. After moving with her parents to Pabianice, she attended primary school and a middle school for girls. Her father died of tuberculosis in 1938 – a biographical echo of Wajda’s own fatherless youth. In February, Alina and her mother were moved to the local ghetto, later to the Łódź Ghetto, where, as the daughter of a doctor, she held a somewhat privileged position. The ghetto survived until August 1944, when both were deported to Auschwitz. The camp was overcrowded, so they stayed only briefly before being sent on to Germany – first to Bergen-Belsen, then to the Duderstadt subcamp of Buchenwald. During its liquidation, Alina was separated from her mother. Certain her mother hadn’t survived, she didn’t return to Poland afterwards but went to Prague to study sculpture. As you write in your book: ‘Neither in Prague, nor in Warsaw, nor in Paris – where she continued her studies and settled permanently in 1963 – did the artist ever speak in detail about life in the ghettos or camps. Nor did she refer to them directly in her work.’ But aren’t her limbless bodies and deformed heads the afterimages of what she saw and heard in the camps?

AR: In her letters to Ryszard Stanisławski, the horror of what she saw in the camps seeps between the lines, but she also writes that she despised people who brandished their trauma or took pride in it. She was determined not to tell her story. She may have wanted to repress the facts, but she did retain the images. I was in Paris in 2018, when there was a large retrospective of Jean Fautrier there. I was looking at his works, and suddenly Alina’s sculptures, which I know by heart, appeared before my eyes. It was only then that I understood her source of inspiration. Her Exhumed is almost life-size, while Fautrier’s ‘crippled’ sculptures were small but of similar form. He too painted deformed heads. His ‘Hostages’ series had been shown in Paris as early as 1945, with a catalogue introduction by André Malraux that was widely read at the time. Szapocznikow must have known his work. Seeing his pieces likely triggered images in her mind that she later transposed into art.

MFS: Szapocznikow was celebrated for her lack of prudery and her openness about sex, something reflected clearly in her work. Was this strong focus on sexuality and corporeality her response to ‘non-life’?

AR: She was tactile from the start. People say that when she met someone, she would touch them – she was a sculptor, after all. Sexuality was never taboo for her either. Even in the ghetto, she had dated two boys at once, and in Prague, she kept two lovers at the same time. I’m not sure how conscious she was of it, but perhaps she was opened up to sex by Georges Bataille’s book Hallelujah, The Catechism of Dianus, published in Paris in 1947 with illustrations by Fautrier. She may have found in it a philosophical justification for her sensuality – as an instinctive commitment to the side of life. She also adopted from that book its direct approach to drawing nudes – one-to-one.

MFS: Her naked self-portraits featuring her mastectomy scar, sent from hospital to her husband, remain astonishingly powerful even today, when the boundaries of what’s considered bold and uninhibited have shifted so far.

AR: They were her way of affirming life. The same goes for the large marble vulvas she sculpted during a symposium in Yugoslavia in 1961 – sadly, those works have been lost, surviving only in photographs. The link between sex and death was obvious to her. It took me countless viewings to see it clearly. While preparing exhibitions of her work, every time I showed Mary Magdalene (1957) I felt something unsettling in me, though I couldn’t tell what for a long time. It was only while staging an exhibition in Katowice did I finally notice that Mary Magdalene’s head is shaped like a phallus. Since no one before me had remarked on it, I must have been seeing what I knew, not what was before my eyes. Once that clicked and I started looking at her other sculptures – like Rose, Bellissima I or Bellissima II, which are filled with sex, but have ruptured backs and are more like corpses or zombies – then I understood what she was saying.

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Anda Rottenberg, photo: Tomasz Urbanek / East News

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MFS: As you comment in the book: ‘From the outside, in purely formal terms, these torn, mutilated and essentially lifeless sculptural figures fitted perfectly within the modernist paradigm of the time. And the artist herself, in keeping with her self-imposed rule of silence on the topic of war, encouraged these sorts of approaches. At the same time, she started seeking an integrating force that might overcome death or at least balance it out.’ The rule of silence seems to have applied to her cancer diagnosis as well. In ‘A Difficult Age’, you quote Wajda’s tribute to her: ‘I learned she was gravely ill only a few days before her death. That none of us knew, that we could not see it in her, seems natural to me. When you’ve seen what she saw as a child, life is neither good nor bad. It reveals itself in cruel clarity and leaves no room for sentimentality.’

AR: She was diagnosed in 1968, operated on in 1972, and unaware that the cancer might have spread to her bones. She died in terrible pain in a hospice. After she learned she had cancer, she created Alina’s Funeral in 1970 and later the series Tumours and Tumours Personified, but she never made a habit of talking about her condition. When Wajda visited her in Paris, they no doubt had many other things to talk about. So how could he have known?

MFS: You’ve devoted half your life to Szapocznikow’s art. The British art historian Griselda Pollock has said she only discovered Szapocznikow in the 21st century thanks to you. In an interview with ‘Mint’ magazine, she said: ‘We had to look anew at Szapocznikow – at her experience of war, the body and illness. Thanks to researchers like Rottenberg, people in the West began seeing her work differently, more wisely. That’s a huge task done for us, the viewers, helping us not to look at women artists via stereotypes.’ Did you ever meet Szapocznikow in person?

AR: I saw her at an exhibition in the 1960s, but I didn’t talk to her – as a student I didn’t have the courage to approach her. I remember little from that show now, as its blurred with her later exhibitions. Afterwards, there was a large posthumous show in Łódź organised by a friend of mine, and another friend made a film about her. But I can’t quite retrieve my memory of what I saw that first time. I could have gone up to her. I could also have questioned Wajda more about their friendship.

_{Interview conducted in Polish, Dec 2025, translated by Adam Zulawski, Dec 2025}

_{Anda Rottenberg – Art historian, critic, publicist, and curator of numerous exhibitions. Director of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw from 1993 to 2001. Her writing includes}_{Art in Poland 1945–2005}_,_{Essays on Polish Art of the 1980}_’,_{Rottenberg: It’s Already Difficult}_{(with Dorota Jarecka),}_{Berlin Depression: A Diary}_,_{The List: Diary 2005}_,_{Close-ups: Essays on Polish Artists}_,_{Thank You Very Much}_,_{The Social & Emotional Kitchen}_,_Dispersal_{, and}_{From Poland with Love: Letters to Harald Szeemann}_{. Lecturer of the course Decolonized History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present at the Institution School, an international art startup dedicated to researching, developing and promoting new cultural models. Nominated for the Nike and Gdynia Literary Awards. Head of the Culture section at ‘Vogue Polska’.}

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Andrzej Wajda Centenary

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Discover the Life & Films of Andrzej Wajda!

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