Wacław Szpakowski

Architect, photographer, draughtsman, the inventor of the rhythmical lines system. Born in Warsaw on October 9, 1883, died in Wrocław on February 7, 1973.

Tue, 10/09/1883 - 12:00 - Wed, 02/07/1973 - 12:00

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Wacław Szpakowski, Multiple Self-Portrait, 1912, collection of the Museum of Art in Łódź, photo: Granger History Collection/Forum

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In 1897, together with his family, young Wacław Szpakowski moved to Riga. While there, he continued his schooling, initially in grade 5 of a tsarist secondary school, and then, from 1902, at the Faculty of Architecture of the Riga Polytechnical Institute, where he completed his engineering degree in architecture in 1911. During his studies in Riga, he would travel around Latvia, accumulating travel notes in the form of drawings and photographs, concentrating on architecture and its ornamental details.

On top of that, he received a musical education. Throughout his years spent in Riga, he played violin in a student orchestra, an activity which he kept pursuing in the decades after that, although merely as a hobby. He remained sensitive not only to the sound of instruments, however. In his notes, he would record the sounds emitted by telegraph lines vibrating during a storm, or by stones bumping into one another. He was fascinated with weather phenomena, especially extreme ones, studying storms and cyclones, searching for patterns at the root of nature and human industry alike.

He returned to Warsaw in 1911. Until the outbreak of World War I, he worked as an architect, initially in an architecture firm run by Stefan Szyller, one of the leading Polish architects, inspired by Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque forms. Then, he worked for Izydor Pianka, followed by a brief period as a director of a design studio in Garwolin. Once the war broke out, he evacuated himself and the studio to Moscow, after which he ended up in Arkhangelsk, where he would design wooden docks and continue his study of ornamentation. He began to collect Polish Slutsk sashes, which interested him due to their linear ornaments.

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Wacław Szpakowski, "A13", ca. 1924, ink drawing on tracing paper, 17.1 x 44.4 cm, photo: Museum of Art in Łódź

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He returned to independent Poland in 1919, along with Aleksandra Siemiczajewska, whom he had married during his wartime emigration. He spent his Warsaw years working in several places, such as the Ministry of Post and Telegraphs. Additionally, he would undertake architectural commissions, and he invented a new type of roofing material known as metasphalt. Between 1920 and 1931, the three Szpakowski children were born, the youngest of whom would later become the painter Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska, one of the key figures among Wrocław’s post-war artistic circles, as well as the first promoter of the works of her father, who would eventually be appreciated by art institutions after years of working in isolation.

Soon after Poland declared independence, he moved to Warsaw, where he lived on and off until the year 1943. He retired in 1933, after which he only did a little work here and there, and he would occasionally take on architectural projects during the great economic crisis. In the mid-1930s, he and his family moved to Otwock, where he won a competition for the designer of a health resort. Once World War II broke out, he took part in the resistance and joined the Home Army, though he also continued doing architectural works for the Regional Department of Architecture, and he didn’t stop drawing either. After the Russian marched into Poland in 1944, he was arrested and imprisoned by the KGB. In 1945, together with his family he moved to Wrocław, where he led an active professional life until 1958.

As early as at the age of 17, Szpakowski began to sketch systems which he would later call rhythmical lines. His sketchbooks, which he was filling for years on end, contained notes on different topics from various fields, such as natural science, construction, photography, mathematical figures, musical notation, and comparisons between architectural solutions and structures found in nature. Most importantly, however, the sketchbooks included hand-drawn systems of lines, which constitutes a geometrical record of waves, shapes of clouds, smoke, rippling fields of wheat, trunks of forest trees, etc. He was fascinated by repetitive forms in nature, from the molecular micro-scale to the shapes of spiral galaxies. At the root of nature he noticed rules of rhythm and symmetry, the two basic rules endowing his drawings with their special character. As Szpakowski himself wrote:

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These were, to an extent, experiments with a straight line, undertaken not in laboratories but rather casually, in different places and at different times, as all that was needed was a piece of paper and pencil. They came into being at home while I studied or while at university or during my engineering work – in the office, often at conferences, etc. - without having been planned beforehand. They were guided by the author’s intuition only, and complemented with what was achieved during earlier attempts. […] The resulting line-related ideas were, one might say, merely improvisations.

Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska adds:

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He wanted to prove, mathematically and geometrically, what he eventually arrived at – the linear regularity of his worlds. The order of the world, the order of nature, of the construction of leaves and trees, the forms found in nature and, instinctively, in primitive peoples’ buildings, in folk patterns, all of that confirmed him in his endeavour. At this time, his focus was on geometric lines

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Wacław Szpakowski, from the "S" series, 1939–1943, ink drawing on tracing paper, 56.7 x 88.5 cm, photo: Museum of Art in Łódź

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Szpakowski’s drawings always featured one and the same line which never ended, continuity being one of the most crucial elements of his works. Different versions of 'rhythmical lines' were not so much closed forms as fragments of potentially infinite system of refractions of a single straight line which, like handwriting, would always run from the left to the right side of the drawing.

He believed in the possibility of creating a consistent visual system for describing reality. He was fascinated with the rhythmic, repetitive structure of nature and its cyclicality, and his abstract way of thinking pushed him to search for linear patterns in various phenomena occurring in nature, architecture, science, and art. This is what became the basis of his systems for making graphic records of infinite lines, as well as the rhythmical lines systems, which he would develop later. He devised his own language of forms and signs, with the use of which he attempted to convey the molecular structure of the world through his drawings. The Dutch writer W. F. Hermans discovered in his works 'the primal passion characterizing explorers of infinity and of the construction of the world.' What interested him, rather than the final form, was penetrating the dynamic of natural processes in each of its manifestations. Szpakowski was interested in mathematical problems, and what doubtlessly had an influence on him were the new discoveries in physics that took place during his life. One could even find a link between his concept of rhythmical lines and string theory. As Serge Salat wrote:

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Szpakowski is a child of the century that discovered quanta, which are simultaneously waves and corpuscles, an infinite dispersal of form on the surface of a vacuum, a nothingness out of which all forms emerge. In Szpakowski’s work, form is impossible to locate. It’s not a form that’s becoming, but rather a probability of form which expands into the whole infinite field. It’s the paradox of an unlocated form.

Szpakowski’s first drawings of linear patterns often sprung from his research on ornaments, both those typical for folk architecture and the ancient meander. They took up three small notebooks, from the year 1900, 1903 to 1907, and 1908, containing 88 pages overall, and in a larger sketchbook from 1909, containing 50 loose sheets of paper. In the 1920s and 1930s, based on the sketches, Szpakowski began to create first series of drawings, which he then transferred onto tracing paper. That’s when he completed series AO, A, B, C, D, E, and F, with each consecutive cycle characterised by a larger degree of formal complexity. They comprise a total of around 70 drawings in different formats. During wartime, a series titled 'S', based on the motif of a spiral, joined the collection. As Janusz Zagrodzki wrote:

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A common trait of all Wacław Szpakowski’s drawings is the rhythmic repetitiveness of the course of a line, a relation endowing all the systems with similar features. The lines’ continuity, their simple sequences and tendency towards repetition create non-fragmented systems of temporal consequences ruled by certain order. On top of rhythm, it’s continuity that serves a crucial role here, incorporating all spatial-temporal forms of movement and organisation of the course of a line. These characteristic properties endow the drawings with the character of timeless structures.

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Wacław Szpakowski's notebook, 1909, photo: courtesy of Anna Szpakowska Kujawska/Museum of Art in Łódź

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Regardless of the format, the basic traits of the composition remained unchanged. Szpakowski would draft the line using a graphos, i.e. a type of a mechanical pen with a regulated flow of ink, allowing one to attain a uniform, unmodulated, one millimetre thick line. The gap between neighbouring line fragments would always equal 4 millimetres.

It’s unclear whether Szpakowski, working in isolation from all artistic circles, witnessed the birth of analytic, rational, constructivist tendencies. He may have come into contact with them at two exhibitions organised in 1910 in Riga, where he was finishing his studies at the time. However, his linear structures certainly fit into these explorations, which he also undertook in his own unique way. His works didn’t emerge within the field of art, since the author didn’t attempt to create aesthetic images of the world; rather, they were born out of inquisitive observations of nature and culture.

Although years later he would be dubbed one of the precursors of geometric abstraction, Szpakowski chose to remain outside the avant-garde artistic discussions. At the time when the flourishing of new visual forms was accompanied by equally abundant theoretical innovations, with artistic manifestos appearing all around, Szpakowski would simply draw and stay silent. According to Grzegorz Sztabiński, he 'didn’t participate in artistic life, wasn’t a part of any group of artists (didn’t even seek contact with them), didn’t participate in group exhibitions and neither did he organise individual ones. Hence, he functioned outside the time marking artistic life.'

For over a half of a century, he showed his drawings to no one save for his family. It was only at the end of his life that he described them in a critical text titled Rhythmical Lines. In this text, published in the Odra magazine, he wrote the following:

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The drawings presented here in the form of 120 tables constitute a collection of ideas whose author strives to attain visual harmony only with the use of the simplest elements, such as the straight line. The conceptions emerged throughout a half of a century (1900-1951) as concise sketches, here showcased in their pencil-drawn form on a linear grid with square meshes.

The aforementioned pencil-drawn works were created between 1953 and 1954. The 102 drawings, made with precise lines on grid paper, this time in a unified 31×25 cm format, were based on drawings sketched on tracing paper throughout the previous decades. It’s possible that, as Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska suggests, her father’s decision to precisely catalogue his oeuvre was influenced by an event from the times of their move to Wrocław. Waiting among a crowd for a train going towards the Recovered Territories, Szpakowski had with him drawings on tracing paper packed in metal tubes. When the train arrived, and the crowd started to press around it, one of the tubes fell apart, and the delicate drawings were trampled by the passengers.

The decisive factor contributing to Szpakowski’s originality was his decision to remain on the sidelines of artistic discourses, in which he seemed to take no interest at all. As a result, he developed his conception of rhythmic lines without placing them in the context of either art history of avant-garde manifestos. To quote Serge Salat:

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Between Klee’s abstraction and the Renaissance perspective there was no essential rupture as far as the emergence of form was concerned. Such a rupture does take place in Szpakowski’s works. In that regard, he is one of the most revolutionary 20th-century artists. His innovativeness is so radical that it leads to isolation.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Szpakowski was completely indifferent to his artistic predecessors. For instance, Mariusz Hermansdorfer and Masha Chlenova pointed to the potential influence of Art Noveau aesthetics on his visual explorations. According to Chlenova:

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Szpakowski’s careful observation of natural forms, along with his interest in expressive properties of a line, correspond [...] to the aesthetics of Art Noveau. In the first decade of the 20th century, Art Noveau architecture, with its simplified and modern ornamentation enjoyed large popularity in Riga, where Szpakowski’s family lived from 1897 […].

Elżbieta Łubowicz, in turn, noticed that Szpakowski’s art sprung largely from his interest in ornamentation, treated not as something purely decorative but rather, just like at its ancient source, as a metaphysical reflection of the world and the laws at the root of nature. His decision to reach for rudimentary ornamental forms, his fascination with and study of the Greek linear meander caused, as Getulio Alviani wrote: 'Szpakowski’s work [to be] perfectly timeless – suspended and aseptic, they might as well have been works of ancient Egyptians, Greeks, or Mayans. It’s endowed with the spirit and essence of an ancient script, its meaning concealed behind dry and dashed lines.'

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Wacław Szpakowski, from the "S" series, 1938-1950, ink drawing on tracing paper, 21.5 x 39.8 cm, photo: Museum of Art in Łódź

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As noted by Hermansdorfer in his first text on rhythmical lines, at the moment when Szpakowski’s works were presented to a wider audience, their forms were commonly associated with the popular at the time op-art. However, in op-art, the image would become increasingly more mechanical, minimizing the trace of the artist’s hand, whereas in Szpakowski’s drawings, despite his precision, the trace doesn’t disappear. In that regard, his rhythmic lines are visually closer to the works of Agnes Martin, the artist considered a precursor of minimalism, a self-identified abstract expressionist and an author of equally precise and delicate painterly grids.

Furthermore, Szpakowski wasn’t preoccupied with the optical effects of his lines when viewed as a whole, and he didn’t attempt to negate the narrative character of his works. Quite the contrary – he believed that they have 'inner content, which one can get to know by reading the course of the lines, tracing them from the beginning through all their refractions. For Szpakowski, focusing on the entirety of the composition led to a surface-level, incomplete perception, recognising only the ornamental properties of forms rather than the rules at their root or the author’s own thinking process.

Szpakowski quite quickly noticed that 'his line-related ideas verge on the art of music, especially on its particular element – melody, as they, too, are rhythmical.' As early as in the 1920s, he undertook his own attempts at 'translating' his rhythmic lines into sound with the use of violin. In the 1990s, inspired by the researcher Janusz Zagrodzki, the composer Zbigniew Bargielski also took up a musical interpretation of the drawings. He, however, used a piano – or, more specifically, piano strings set in motion by metal and glass objects. In 1992, Józef Robakowski, also in collaboration with Zagrodzki, realized a black-and-white short film featuring recordings of atmospheric phenomena and sounds of nature interweaved with music composed by Barbara Konopka.

Wacław Szpakowski – works [gallery]

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During the Wrocław period, Szpakowski would also transfer his rhythmical lines from paper drawings onto architecture. Using geometrical motifs, he designed indoor decorations for the Przodownik cinema, the Pafawag Cultural Centre, and a kindergarten in Narcyzowa Street. Moreover, his sketches include unrealized functional forms, such as a project of a kilim.

It was only in the 1960s that his works evoked interest among Wrocław avant-garde artistic circles, all thanks to the efforts of Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska, who presented her father’s oeuvre to critics, museologists, and other creators. Jerzy Ludwiński, a critic running the Mona Lisa Gallery, took interest in Szpakowski’s drawings, and so did artists gathered around the spot, including Jerzy Rosołowicz, Wanda Gołkowska, and Jan Chwalczyk. The first text discussing Szpakowski’s works was written by Mariusz Hermansdorfer. The first full-scale study of Szpakowski’s oeuvre, in turn, was authored by the aforementioned art historian Janusz Zagrodzki, who has also spent years promoting the artist’s works.

According to Zagrodzki, a large component of Szpakowski’s oeuvre, underestimated even by the artist himself, were his photographic explorations. His early photographs documenting architecture and its details were followed by a period of experimentation, both with the photographic matter itself – photosensitive emulsion and colourful filters – and with the composition, the peak example of which is his multiple self-portrait made with the use of mirrors, similar to the famous portraits by Duchamp and Witkacy, although, having been taken in 1912, it preceded them by several years. Szpakowski experimented with a similar composition when he photographed other people and objects, although all that has been preserved of these attempts are other people’s accounts of them.

Wacław Szpakowski’s drawings were first showcased after the artist’s death, in 1987, at the Rhythmical Lines exhibition in the Museum of Art in Łódź. In the following years, his works could be viewed, for instance, in Centre Pompidou in Paris at the Presences Polonaises exhibition (1983) prepared by Ryszard Stanisławski, as well as at Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925 in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, where Szpakowski was presented as one of the global pioneers of abstract art. His works currently reside in his family’s collection, as well as in the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, the Museum of Art in Łódź, and the National Museum in Warsaw.

Exhibitions:

1987 – Rhythmical Lines: Wacław Szpakowski 1883-1973, Museum of Art in Łódź (individual exhibition)
1979 – Rhythmical Lines: Wacław Szpakowski 1883-1973, Museum of Architecture in Wrocław (individual exhibition)
1983 – Crésences Polonaises, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
1989 – Konstruktivizmus Lengyelországban, Magyar Nemzeti Galériában, Budapest
1991 – 20th-Century Art in the Collection of the Museum of Art in Łódż, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw
1992 – Museum of Art in Łódź 1931-1992, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon
1992 – Wacław Szpakowski (1883-1973): The Infinity of the Line, Atelier 340, Brussels (individual exhibition)
1993 – Wacław Szpakowski (1883-1973): The Infinity of the Line, National Museum, Warsaw (individual exhibition)
1994 – Wacław Szpakowski (1883-1973): The Infinity of the Line, BWA Contemporary Art Gallery, Słupsk (individual exhibition)
1994 – Wacław Szpakowski (1883-1973): The Infinity of the Line, BWA Contemporary Art Gallery, Wrocław (individual exhibition)
1997 – Wacław Szpakowski (1883-1973): The Infinity of the Line, Municipal Gallery Arsenał, Poznań (individual exhibition)
1998 – Wacław Szpakowski (1883-1973): The Infinity of the Line, Old Gallery, Lublin (individual exhibition)
2012 – Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA
2015 – Wacław Szpakowski (1883-1973), Berinson Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2016 – Wacław Szpakowski (1883–1973). Rhythmical Lines, Wrocław, Poland
2017 – Grounding Vision: Waclaw Szpakowski, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York City, USA
2020 – Riga Notes: Following the Lines of Wacław Szpakowski, Muzeum of Art in Łódź

Written by Ewa Gorządek, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, December 2007. Updated in December 2016, AM; January 2022, PP.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

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