MG: When did he start painting again?
EK: In 1949, he painted his first self-portrait in ten years. I think that’s a very key moment, because he had to start over again, as he said, from zero. This was of course not the case, it was an exaggeration. But as a painter you often don’t get to start twice. So perhaps it might have been an advantage after all, it might have made him a better painter. Not having continuity, but having to start again, as an older person, now in his forties, with a different relationship to his work than he had as a young man. He had to make new decisions, he had to commit himself to that life. Which he did.
MG: Czapski’s experience as a witness of 20th-century history doesn’t seem, at least at first sight, to come to the surface in his painting? His choice of subject is often banal scenes from everyday life. As one critic once said, and this has become the title of your book, ‘They are almost nothing…’
EK: Czapski was not interested in making pictures about his suffering, his anguish, the loss of his friends. I thought of that when I saw Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyń. It’s a ‘Hollywood’ film, in the way it tells the story, with handsome actors wearing immaculate costumes. It has a certain superficiality about it, although it’s an amazing story and I’m sure it came from Wajda’s heart (his father was killed in Katyń). But my sense of watching it for the first time was: this is what Czapski did not want to do, to represent something that can’t be represented in an entirely truthful manner.
Somehow what Czapski saw and lived through could be written about, but visually for him, it was not something he could paint. The historical and religious themes that dominate Polish art were not his. The one painting that he made, which to me is a connection to his experience as a witness of history, was a painting called Białołęka, 1982. It shows five men from Solidarity who were interned in a prison in Warsaw. This was his first and only historical painting. He made it from a photograph of these men that had circulated outside Poland. He was moved by the men’s experience of imprisonment to make that painting. That to me has all the pathos that he might have painted had he painted scenes from Russia and 1940.