He studied at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Łódź between 1945 and 1947 under the supervision of Władysław Strzemiński. When the academy changed its profile to one focused more on applied arts, he moved to Kraków. He received his diploma in 1950 at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts. He belonged to the Self-Taught Group (Grupa Samokształceniowa) led by Andrzej Wróblewski (together with Andrzej Wajda, Jan Tarasin, Walerian Borowczyk and others).
After his studies, between 1949 and 1953, Strumiłło was an assistant to Eugeniusz Eibisch at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and, at the same time, to Tadeusz Grygiel and Adam Rychtarski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. He cooperated with the Polish Chamber of Commerce after moving to Warsaw in 1956. He designed exhibition pavilions and travelled extensively throughout Europe and the Far East. He visited Nepal, India, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Mongolia, China, Syria, Turkey, Siberia and the Caucasus, among others. From 1977 to 1980, he worked as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He was one of the initiators, and since 1977 also the organiser, of the interdisciplinary meetings ‘Art and the Environment’ in Wigry and of the International Sculpture Plein-Air ‘IntegrART’.
Between 1982 and 1984, Strumiłło held the position of the chief of the Graphics Presentation Unit at the UN General Secretariat in New York. After returning to Poland, he settled in Maćkowa Ruda on the Black Hańcza River, where he built a larch house and engaged not only in creative work but also in farming and horse breeding. In the academic year 1987-88, he was a lecturer at the Suwałki branch of the Academy of Catholic Theology, and from the 1990s to 2008 he taught at Mazurian University in Olecko and at Białystok University of Technology.
Andrzej Strumiłło was an artist with an enormous and varied artistic output. He expressed himself in many materials and techniques. He was an artist with an extraordinary imagination, in whose works various motifs appeared: from the poetic and metaphorical to the abstract, all connected by a deep message of existential significance. The artist himself emphasised that his artistic attitude was strongly influenced by Władysław Strzemiński:
I was lucky enough to come straight from a Lithuanian-Belarusian provincial backwater to the best school there was in Poland after the war: the Strzemiński school. [...] It was a shower of rationalism and order, discipline and methodology in the study of the development of artistic consciousness and vision.
During his studies in Kraków and immediately after his graduation, Strumiłło took up themes typical of the Socialist Realist period in his paintings, which he developed in an ‘aesthetic poetics’. An example of his work from these years is the monumental painting Nasza Ziemia [Our Land] (1953-54). The canvas was created in Mazury, in the village of Krzyże on Lake Nidzkie, where the artist lived for some time. The subject of the painting pertains to events from contemporary Polish history – the resettlement of Poles from the Eastern Borderlands to the Western and Northern Territories. While working on the canvas, the artist used the then inhabitants of the village of Krzyże as his models. He painted all the elements of the composition – people, objects and landscape – from life.
In 1955, Strumiłło participated in the famous National Exhibition of Young Visual Arts ‘Against War, Against Fascism’ at the Arsenal in Warsaw. His Portret Podwójny (Double Portrait) was awarded a prize at the time. The artist’s first book illustrations also date from this period, e.g. for Przygody Li Ta-Hai (The Adventures of Li Ta-Hai) by Maria Janina Majewska in 1956. He later illustrated, among others, works by authors such as Hans Christian Andersen, Jules Verne, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Jan Kochanowski, Wisława Szymborska and Mieczysława Buczkówna.
Strumiłło’s later work is extremely rich and was shaped by the artist’s countless travels around almost the entire world (Europe, Asia, North America), which he narrated:
I had my first exhibition in Beijing as part of a cultural exchange. It was 1954, and the experience of the avant-garde of Władysław Strzemiński, with whom I studied in Łódź, and the colourists of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where I was finishing my studies, was overlaid with calligraphy, symbol, succinct shorthand, the mystery of millennia-old layers of ink rubbed on stone. This fascinated me.
He was interested in Asian traditions and canons of beauty. Many of their elements permeated the artist’s work. Drawing and photographic series were created at the time: China (1954, 1961), Far East, USSR (1958), India (1959, 1970, 1972), Mongolia (1967), Vietnam (1969, 1970, 1978), Nepal (1974, 1980), Japan and Thailand (1978). During a trip to China, Strumiłło learned the secrets of ink painting. From his Asian expeditions, he brought back hundreds of reportage drawings, in which his attention was drawn to the landscape and the human being. He also created oil paintings, took photographs and was constantly expanding his unique collection of Asian art.
Strumiłło became interested in photography as early as the 1940s. It was then that he took his first photographs with a Leica camera. During his travels, the artist produced reportage photography as documentation of the architecture, art, nature and culture of the countries he visited. In the 1970s, he used photography in painting, pasting newspaper cuttings onto canvases (Fotografie z Gazet [Newspaper Photographs]) and painting on photo emulsion.
A culturally different experience from the Far East was Strumiłło’s trip to New York in the early 1980s, about which he said:
In Manhattan, I was able to confront the experience of travelling in Asia with a world of concentrated capital, energy, dynamic processes. I observed a society of perfect organisation, great efficiency and unlimited consumption. Once I made an absurd effort – I made a tour of the shops and counted all the toothbrush models on offer. I counted up to 120 in one day. Isn’t that crazy? And yet New York fascinated me, I met interesting people there, I took 11,000 photos.
Strumiłło selected the photographs he took and composed them as needed by a given exhibit or book into series, including Samochody (Cars), Sztuczna Kobieta (Artificial Woman) and Detal (Detail). In the United States between 1982 and 1984, he also created series of paintings such as Okna (Windows), Exit, Mandalas and Ulice Nowego Jorku (Streets of New York). An echo of the artistic reflections from his stay in New York was the artist’s exhibition at the Museum of Art in Łódź in 1993 titled City 1983-1993. Its subject matter focused on the city as a metaphor and a specific city – that is, New York. In it, the artist showed paintings, photographs, objects and stone arrangements that provided a symbolic take on the theme.
In Maćkowa Ruda in the Suwałki region, Strumiłło created a series of paintings that were very important for his work: Stosy (Stacks, 1987), Psalms (1988), inspired by Czesław Miłosz’s translation of the Bible, and Apocalypse (1993). Stacks are almost abstract paintings with only allusive references to reality. The Psalms series, which was created for the White Synagogue in Sejny, consists of eighteen large canvases illustrating selected passages from the Old Testament. Apocalypse, on the other hand, is a series of twelve paintings. He said the following about the latter’s composition:
The twelve stones of the foundations of the New Jerusalem are twelve great letters. The twelve great letters are the twelve images I paint. I should call them mysterium fascinous or misterium tremendum – a story of our fears, of the fragility of the human condition and of the longing for the New Jerusalem.
Both biblical series have an illustrative and dramatic character accentuated by a dark colour palette and expressive lines. The artist also did not neglect his most familiar area of creativity after painting – drawing. In 1987, he created the series Kamienie (Stones) and in 1990 the series Ołtarze (Altars) and Kule (Balls), all done in ink. Ołtarze are mystical in character, with themes of Eastern spirituality implemented in a creative manner. Also inspired by the East are the drawings of the series Kule, maintained in a meditative atmosphere.
In his multifaceted art, Andrzej Strumiłło created a highly expressive language of poetic and metaphorical imagery. He operated with symbolism and philosophical subtext, largely shaped under the influence of Eastern culture and Christian tradition. Diverse sources of inspiration fertilised the imagination of this artist, who said of himself that he was ‘an artist of the borderland of elements, those hidden in nature and those dormant in man, the builder of civilisation’. One of his great inspirations was also wild nature – the Masurian landscape and the Białowieża Forest.
In 2008, the Centre of Contemporary Art, Andrzej Strumiłło Gallery was established in Suwałki, financed in part by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. It presents the artist’s works in painting, sculpture, photography and drawing, as well as part of his Asian collection. The exhibition includes fragments of large-format painting cycles: Psalms (1988), Apocalypse (1993), Okna (1984); photographic series: New York (1982-84) and 7 Kościuszki Street (1980); book illustrations and drawings, gouaches and stone sculptures. An Asian Chamber has also been organised at the gallery, where one can see woodcuts, prints, ceramics, objects of worship, as well as everyday objects from the Far East and the Middle East which the artist brought back from his numerous travels.
Strumiłło also published three volumes of poetry: Moje [Mine], Jak [How] and Ja: Poezje Wybrane [I: Selected Poems], Ja 2 (I 2), and STO (One Hundred). In 2008, his book Factum Est was published – a collection of diaries and illustrations from the years 1978-2006. Strumiłło, together with Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Venclova, was also the originator of Księga Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego (Book of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) – a collection of essays by twenty authors from Poland, Lithuania and Belarus pertaining to the tradition and heritage of the Duchy of Lithuania. This publication, in Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish and English, was published in 2009 by the Borderland Foundation (Fundacja Pogranicze).
He was an active participant in activities for the benefit of the Suwałki region, a member of the committee of the Włócznia Jaćwingów award and the Scientific Council of Wigry National Park. He was a member of the Union of Polish Photographic Artists. He has also made great contributions to the art collections of the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków and the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw.
He has received numerous decorations, awards and distinctions, including the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, and an award of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 2005 he was awarded the Gold Medal Gloria Artis by the Minister of Culture and Art. Posthumously, in August 2020, he received the Honorary Orpheus – for the poetry book 69 published by the Strumiłło Gallery (the award was received by his daughter, Anna Strumiłło).
Andrzej Strumiłło’s oeuvre includes over 120 solo exhibitions at home and abroad and nearly 150 publications. He has shown his works in, among others, Warsaw, Wrocław, Kraków, Szczecin, Łódź, Katowice, Olsztyn, Elbląg, Toruń, Płock, Radom, Suwałki, Beijing, New Delhi, Ulan Bator, Hanoi, Kathmandu, Tokyo, Berlin, Bremen, Antwerp, Milan, Duisburg, Prague, Bratislava, Moscow, Leningrad, Kaunas, Druskininkai, Šiauliai, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, New York, Meadville (Pennsylvania). He has also participated in a difficult-to-establish number of group exhibitions (including those representing Polish art abroad), including in New York, Havana, Bielefeld, Edinburgh, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Genoa, Lyon, Düsseldorf, Hannover, Münster, Leverkusen. He also participated in the São Paulo Biennale (1969) and the Venice Biennale (1972).
Andrzej Strumiłło closed his collection of writings Powidoki: Wiersze i Zapiski z Lat 1947-2019 (Afterimages: Poems and Notes from 1947 to 2019) with a poetic inscription titled ‘Poranny Niepokój Egotysty’ (Morning Anxiety of an Egotist).
Having lived a long time I treasured my tracks
Today I see but a dry leaf
I count down the seconds
I ask myself during sleepless night
Who will shed a tear
Over my ashes
Who will warm my gravestone
Who will carry on my name
And go my way
27.07.2019
Originally written in Polish by Ewa Gorządek, April 2011; updatek by JRK, August 2020; translated into English by PG, May 2023