April 2025 marked the centenary of Franciszek Duszeńko’s birth. A prominent sculptor associated with Gdańsk, the rector of the local State Higher School of Visual Arts and creator of monuments of great importance to Polish art, he was named one of the patrons of 2025 by the Polish Sejm.
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Franciszek Duszeńko was born on 6th April 1925 in Gródek Jagielloński near present-day Lviv. He thus belonged to a generation doubly marked by the turbulent history of Europe. Duszeńko entered adulthood with the outbreak of World War II, and after it ended he had to leave his native land, as it became part of another country. Did these events influence the artistic sensibility of the future sculptor? Did they enable him to translate the most difficult historical events of the era into stone compositions?
Duszeńko began his studies during the war at the State Institute of Fine Arts in Lviv, an art college founded in the 19th century, which during the occupation was degraded by the Soviet authorities to the status of a vocational school. Even then, his most important teacher and master was the sculptor, pedagogue and organiser of artistic life, Professor Marian Wnuk. It is said to have been Wnuk who dissuaded Duszeńko from his dreams of painting and persuaded him to take up sculpture. Before this could happen, however, the young artist had to survive the war. He was a member of the Home Army (he adopted the pseudonym ‘Gustaw’, which his relatives called him by until his death), until he was sent to the Nazi German Gross-Rosen concentration camp in July 1944, later to Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg (as prisoner number 86262). After liberation – like many of his compatriots – he searched for his family who had gone missing during the war, but also for his teacher, Marian Wnuk.
After the war, when the city’s academic and artistic community had to relocate from Lviv, which had been absorbed by the USSR, Wnuk became the head of the Sculpture Studio at the Tricity’s reborn Higher School of Fine Arts (it began operating in Sopot, later becoming the Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk). Duszeńko continued his studies there until he received his diploma in 1952 and took charge of the Sculpture Studio. He remained associated with the Tricity and the Gdańsk university until the end of his life.
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Great Armoury in Gdańsk. Today there are located building houses, amongst other things, the rector’s office and the library of the Academy of Fine Arts, photo: Diego Delso/Wikipedia
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From the beginning of his professional path, Duszeńko combined art with teaching. Even before gaining his diploma, he became an assistant at the Faculty of Sculpture, and in 1956, shortly after obtaining his master’s degree in art, he became the head of the Sculpture Studio, which he ran until 2000, educating several generations of artists. Between 1970, when graduates began to be assigned to the professor, and his retirement in 2001, more than eighty graduates emerged from his studio. From 1960 to 1964 he was Dean of the Faculty of Sculpture, and from 1981 to 1987 (two terms) he was Rector of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (renamed the Academy of Fine Arts in 1996). Although Duszeńko himself created rather monumental and dignified works, he urged his students to experiment and explore, to act in unconventional and original ways. In 2013, during an exhibition devoted to the artist’s oeuvre, he was remembered in the pages of Dziennik Bałtycki by his pupil and graduate student, Julita Wójcik:
He was surrounded by the aura of an educator, a very dignified person. Perhaps because his monumental projects (Westerplatte, Treblinka) followed him. It turned out that the professor was very respectful of his students and urged them to experiment. This is why I think that such different artists came out from under his hand. He allowed us to leave our work unfinished. Exploration was important. I still take his advice to this day. He urged us to experiment, not to be afraid. He used to say that works did not have to be finished, that it was important to search and that it was important that they were created in the context of the place and time in which they were made.
Other alumni of Professor Duszeńko included Grzegorz Klaman, Dorota Nieznalska and the current Dean of the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Professor Robert Kaja.
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Gdańsk, Długi Targ, in the foreground, the sculptures on the porch of the tenement house Długi Targ 8, photo: Wojciech Stróżyk / East News
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Duszeńko’s first important professional experience – like that of many artists or architects of his generation – was working on the reconstruction of ruined cities. The sculptor was part of a team involved in reconstructing the architectural details of buildings lifted from the rubble of the Main Town in Gdańsk. Duszeńko created portals, sculptures and bas-reliefs. He created, among others, figures of female sphinxes flanking the stairs of the tenement house at 8 Długi Targ Street, figures of knights in the portal of the tenement house at 40 Długi Targ Street or the bas-relief portal of the tenement house at 99 Ogarna Street.
Soon afterwards Duszeńko began to take part in competitions for monuments and commemorations, of which there were many after the war (although not all the winning projects were eventually realised). The first of these were held while the doctrine of socialist realism was still in force, which promoted realism and monumentalism. Both of these features of sculptural art were not alien to the sculptor-realist Marian Wnuk’s upbringing, and these aesthetics were not related to current politics in his case. Thus, at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, Duszeńko designed for competitions such as the Liberation Monument in Gdańsk, the Chopin Monument in Kraków, and the Partisan Monument in Lublin. Even then, the sculptor’s main preoccupation was to find a contemporary form for a monument, understood not as a single stone or bronze object, but a spatial premise in which the sculptural composition is as important as its immediate surroundings. For this reason, since the beginning of his work, Duszeńko has willingly collaborated with architects. One of them, with whom he co-created not only competition works, but also his most important projects, was Adam Haupt.
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Franciszek Duszeńko, the monument at Treblinka, photo: Krzysztof Wojciechowski / Forum
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In 1954 a team consisting of Franciszek Duszeńko, Adam Haupt, Franciszek Strynkiewicz won the first prize in the competition for the design of the Treblinka memorial along with the development of the camp site. Although socialist realism was not officially abolished until two years later, in 1954 the competition jury selected an innovative and abstract, yet poignant, work for realisation. The site of the Treblinka camp was destroyed by the retreating Germans, so neither the buildings nor other material relics of the genocide perpetrated there, in which 800,000 people were murdered between 23rd July 1942 and autumn 1943, have survived. The artists’ project encompassed an area of over two hectares in the forest, which they divided into separate island-like concrete fields on which they placed 200 stones of various sizes, engraved with the names of the villages from which the transports to Treblinka arrived. In 1978 one of them was also dedicated to Janusz Korczak. The centrepiece was an eight-metre obelisk made of granite blocks topped with a relief in which the shapes of human faces and hands can be discerned.
Franciszek Duszeńko, the monument at Treblinka, photo: Adrian Grycuk / Wikipedia
The place where the bodies of the victims were burned was marked by artists with basalt blocks sunk into the ground. The monument at Treblinka is a brilliant embodiment of Duszeńko’s view of monumental sculpture, which the artist saw as a kind of designed landscape. In this case, he succeeded in materialising this vision in a poignant ‘landscape of the Holocaust’, whose eloquence is legible to anyone, even without words or descriptions. ‘Treblinka by Haupt and Duszeńko is one of the greatest masterpieces of Polish art in the 20th century, of Polish art in general’, wrote Professor Jacek Friedrich in a monograph dedicated to the sculptor published in 2014.
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Westerplatte Monument, photo: Łukasz Dejnarowicz / Forum
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In 1963, Duszeńko, Haupt and architect Henryk Kitowski won the competition for the design of the Monument to the Heroes of Westerplatte in Gdańsk (the monument is also known as the Monument to the Defenders of the Coast). Their concept was realised in 1966. And here they created the landscape: a tall stone obelisk-monument was created, but no less important is the area surrounding it. At the heart of the site is a monumental sculpture set on a 22-metre-high mound, consisting of 236 huge granite blocks, some of which have been preserved in their raw form, while others have been given reliefs showing the silhouettes of a soldier and a sailor, the inscription ‘Glory to the liberators’ and the names of the locations of important battles. The entire 25-metre-long obelisk was intended by Duszeńko to resemble a bayonet thrust into the ground. The monument surrounds an open area with earthen ramparts, platforms and steps, as well as the preserved buildings of the former military base.
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St Joseph’s Church in Gdynia, photo: Anna Cymer
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The monuments at Treblinka and Westerplatte are undoubtedly the most important works in Franciszek Duszeńko’s oeuvre, and milestones in the history of Polish sculptural and monumental art. But the artist also had works on a smaller scale to his credit. His works from the 1970s include the intimate, realistic statue of Maria Konopnicka standing in the Polish Scouts’ Square in Gdańsk, and the elaborate Monument to Polish Artillerymen at Towarzystwa Miłośników Torunia Square in Toruń, again composed of stone blocks and figurative elements. Franciszek Duszeńko also designed occasional medals and created sculptures for public interiors (for example, the Baltic Philharmonic or the Palace and Park Complex in Ostromecko in Bydgoszcz). In the 1980s, he also designed religious works, e.g. the Redemptor figure for the historic Redemptorist Church in Zamość.
St Joseph’s Church in Gdynia, photo: Anna Cymer
In 1983, the sculptor won a competition for the artistic design of the interior of the Saint Joseph Church in Gdynia. The huge, modernist, almost brutalist temple, designed by Leopold Taraszkiewicz, was conceptualised at the end of the 1950s. Less than three decades later, in its austere interior, full of light coming in from the high windows, a five-metre bronze figure representing Christ the Beloved hung above the altar. The sculpture was suspended on a single steel bracket 80 centimetres from the wall. The work by Duszeńko is the most important artistic accent of the church’s vast interior.
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Monument to the Polish Artillery in Toruń, photo: Wikipedia
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Marii Konopnicka's Monument, photo: Błażej Śliwiński / Gedanopedia
Franciszek Duszeńko was the co-founder of the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, a mentor to many generations of important, valued artists, an important figure in the Polish artistic milieu, but above all a creator who changed the understanding of monumental sculpture, broadened its meaning, showed how important figures and events can be commemorated in many ways, including those that had seemed almost impossible to commemorate appropriately. The Gdańsk artist’s works oscillated between classic realism (such as the church sculptures of the 1980s), austerity and modern syntheticism (such forms can be seen in the Monument to the Heroes of Westerplatte) and symbolism, such as the stones at Treblinka. However, they should never be viewed in isolation from their surroundings. Just as the stone fields are supplemented by the Mazovian forest of Treblinka, so the slender silhouette of Jesus on the blank wall complements the cool interior of the concrete church.
On 24th July 2024, the Polish Sejm passed a resolution declaring 2025 the Year of Franciszek Duszeńko.
