Czapski: Unnecessary Yet Precious Things

Hashtag (topic)

#language & literature

#photography & visual arts

Nagłówek super artykułu

Title on page in header

Czapski:

Unnecessary Yet Precious Things

Image or video

czapski-kapelusz-EN-i-MNK-kol.jpg

Podpis dla multimediów

Józef Czapski's hat, photo: Nationa Museum in Kraków; Józef Maria Czapski, 1990, Maisons-Laffitte, France, photo: Bohdan Paczowski / Fotonova / East News

Header text color

rgb(0, 0, 0)

Enable audio for video

Off

Negative header audio button

Wyłączony

Negative side audio button

Wyłączony

Zawartość (treść strony Super Artykułu)

Tekst

At the time, he was thinking of a letter from Jerzy Stempowski about abstract art, which was indeed later published in Kultura.

We often encounter ordinary objects in Czapski’s life and work, ones that are too commonplace to be noticed. Yet it is precisely such objects that carry the most intense memories of their owner or user.

Text size

standard fonts size

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

Paris Committee, artistic group, 1925, photo: Polona National Library

Right column

A button

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

They were pen-and-ink drawings. I would draw on a slanted board and then fill in the illustration with black ink. It was an enormous amount of painstaking work.

Right column

The costs of the second ball, held on a barge docked on the Seine near the Alexandre III Bridge, were covered by an industrialist from Łódź, and the honorary committee included Maria Pavlovna Romanova, Grand Duchess of the Russian Empire and

Podpis obrazka

The Paris Committee, artistic group, 1925, photo: Polona National Library

Picture width

full width

Display image with no height limit

Off

Tekst

We’ll return to Chopin and music later in this article. For now, let’s immerse ourselves in painting.

Easels

During Czapski’s pre-war stay in Paris, he spent many hours wandering the corridors of the Louvre and pausing before lesser-known paintings. He would set up his easels – having obtained the necessary permission on account of the educational nature of his visits – and copy works by Poussin, Corot and other artists. He also set up a makeshift workspace on the Côte d’Azur, where he ‘attempted to capture the sensations evoked in him by the lush, luminous colours of the South,’ as Karpeles recounts. The sea inspired in him no less admiration than the mountain landscapes he had painted not so long before on small pieces of cardboard during his holidays in Zakopane.

Text size

standard fonts size

Podpis obrazka

Józef Czapski in his studio in Maisons-Laffitte, 1984, photo: Museum of Literature / East News

Picture width

full width

Display image with no height limit

Off

Tekst

His studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, which he’d begun in 1918, were interrupted by a military mission. After joining the Polish army, he was assigned the task of locating five officers from his regiment (it turned out they’d been shot by the Bolsheviks). Later, Czapski took part in the Polish-Soviet War.

After the war ended, he continued his artistic education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He never stopped painting, even when another war broke out in 1939 and he was mobilised, then imprisoned in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps. In his sketch Tło Rosyjskie (A Russian Backdrop), Czapski recalled that, apart from peeling rotten potatoes and catching bedbugs, he found time for reading and ‘daily drawing, with a terrible pencil, on paper as rough as cotton wool – that was my salvation’. He managed to obtain some ‘children’s paint’, and, with small splashes of watercolour, he created portraits of his fellow prisoners and a still life featuring the wooden tub used by the soldiers to wash themselves.

Text size

standard fonts size

Podpis obrazka

View of the reconstructed room of Józef Czapski from Maisons-Laffitte, exhibition at the Józef Czapski Pavilion in Krakow, photo: Mirosław Żak / photography studio of the National Museum in Krakow

Picture width

full width

Display image with no height limit

Off

Tekst

He used his sketchbooks not only for drawing, but also for taking notes about various things, such as the colours of individual elements of a picture that were later transferred to a canvas. ‘Sketching was a form of expression that Czapski mastered with great fluency; he was as eloquent in the art of drawing as he was in speaking French, Polish, German and Russian,’ claims Karpeles. Some regarded this form of expression as hostile and suspicious.

A map of Paris

We know from prisoner of war testimonies that interrogations by the NKVD lasted many hours, even days, without any breaks for sleep, and included torture and blackmail. But Czapski, in contrast, added a humorous element to his own account of when he was interrogated. The interrogators found it suspicious that he’d been a painter in Paris. He described his experience in Memories of Starobielsk:

Text size

standard fonts size

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

‘What instructions did the Foreign Minister give you when you were leaving for Paris?’ the interrogator asked me.

Right column

Edward Lozansky & Józef Czapski during the Pen Club Forum de Paris, France, 1987, photo: Anna Beata Bohdziewicz / Fotonova / East News

Tekst

Czapski had no way of explaining that one could also leave Poland for reasons other than espionage, or that a map of the city could be bought on every street corner in Paris.

Mirrors

Text size

standard fonts size

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

Alongside travel sketches and still life paintings, often featuring vases (empty or filled with flowers), golden platters and glass goblets brimming with fruit, as well as cutlery arranged in geometric patterns or a

Right column

Józef Czapski, 'Self-portrait with a Lightbulb', The painting is in the private collection of Michael Popiel de Boisgelin and is on permanent display at the Palace in Kurozwęki www.kurozweki.com, photo: Grzegorz Kozakiewicz / Forum

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

A corset

Right column

I’m so accustomed to my two corsets; one corset was my daily painting, which was as essential as breathing; it forced me to exert myself, for I knew that even a few days’ break would be detrimental to me; the second corset was my diary,

Podpis obrazka

Drawings in Józef Czapski's diary, photo: Grzegorz Kozakiewicz / Forum

Picture width

full width

Display image with no height limit

Off

Tekst

His diary

For him, his diary was a way of ‘checking the day’s pulse’. In the introduction to The Torn-Out Pages – the only excerpts from the diary edited and prepared for publication by Czapski himself, which was published after his death, in 2010 – we read:

I’ve kept a diary throughout my entire life, interspersing what I write with drawings and quotations from books: notes in the margins of my paintings, written mostly while painting or immediately afterwards; a daily account, an examination of conscience, unfulfilled resolutions, countless repetitions, moods, ‘philosophising’, and, with the passing years, increasingly more reminiscences.

Text size

standard fonts size

Fullscreen gallery items

Text

Józef Czapski with his sister

Podpis obrazka

photo reproduction: CAF / PAP

Text position

left bottom

Text

Józef Czapski surrounded by female readers

Podpis obrazka

photo: Laski Diffusion archive / East News

Text position

left bottom

Text

Józef Czapski and Zbigniew Herbert, 1958, Paris

Podpis obrazka

photo: Władysław Sławny / Forum

Text position

left bottom

Tekst

And beyond this: flashes of insight, moments of idleness, headaches, dreams, phantoms, lust for life, attempts to find himself in solitude, private rebellions, official reviews. Adam Zagajewski, author of an essay collection devoted to Czapski titled Najwyższy Człowiek Świata (The Tallest Man in the World), maintained that in Czapski’s diaries it is no longer the soldier or the journalist who speaks, but ‘an artist, an aesthete and a scholar, yet also a man experiencing the worries and joys of life, and a tireless craftsman of painting’.

The pre-war ones were lost, while those written during the war were partially included in Inhuman Land and Oko (The Eye). Excerpts from the period between 22 March 1942 and 31 March 1944 only saw the light of day in 2022. Hundreds of notebooks remain unread in the archives of the National Museum in Kraków. This is also where his paintings that have not been purchased for private collections are kept.

Text size

standard fonts size

Tekst

A commuter train

Striking contrasts, intense colours, and the bold contours of individual elements in a composition are common features of many of Czapski’s paintings. However, two of them have as many differences as similarities.

The first is titled Pociąg Podmiejski (Commuter Train), painted in 1967. Through the window in the door between the carriages, we see an elderly woman dozing. Behind her emerges the silhouette of a man, whom we recognise only by his black hat. The second oil painting, Młody Mężczyzna na Czerwonym Tle (A Young Man against a Red Background), is dated 1980. The reclining figure of a young man on a train reading a book is not as brightly lit as the earlier scene, yet it is still intriguing in its play of contrasting colours. Czapski’s paintings create the illusion of photographic composition, of observing people in everyday situations. When discussing Czapski’s paintings, Andrzej Franaszek highlights the artist’s fascination with the theatricality of human life, and his pursuit not of realism, but of expressiveness and intensity of experience.

Text size

standard fonts size

Podpis obrazka

A photograph featuring the painting 'Young Man on a Red Background' (1980) by Józef Czapski at the National Museum in Krakow, taken during a meeting celebrating the 120th anniversary of Józef Czapski's birth, photo: Kuba Ociepa / AW

Picture width

full width

Display image with no height limit

Off

Tekst

These two train paintings evoke distinct periods in Czapski’s life. The later one is associated with poverty, but also with carefree youth – in the 1930s, the artist had often travelled from Warsaw to Józefów, where he was living with his partner Ludwik Hering. The earlier painting, on the other hand, is unambiguously associated with Parisian chic, the promise of fulfilment (and exhaustion) – the very title of the painting alludes to the railway line connecting, presumably, Maisons-Laffitte with the French capital. And this was not the only means of transport Czapski used.

Text size

standard fonts size

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

A motorbike

Right column

Józef Czapski Monument, Szare Szeregi Scout Square in Kielce, photo: Monkpress / East News

Tekst

‘The Dovecote’

Text size

standard fonts size

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

Józef Czapski once recalled that his grandmother, Elżbieta Hutten-Czapska (née Meyendorff), could never remember the names of people she met but was able to identify every bird living on her estate in Stańków.

Right column

'The Dovecote' (Gołębnik) by Józef Czapski, 1938, photo: Polish Museum of America

Tekst

The debt

The Literary Institute’s relocation from its rented office at 1 Avenue Corneille in Maisons-Laffitte to its own building nearby at 91 Avenue de Poissy in 1954 was made possible by a loan from Count Stefan Zamoyski. To repay the debt and attract new subscribers to Kultura, editor-in-chief Jerzy Giedroyc sent his personal ‘foreign minister’ to South America. Czapski began his nearly four-month-long journey to Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela and Argentina on 8 May 1955. As usual, he made sketches and notes during the trip, some of which can be found in his essays published in Amerykańskie Ścieżki (American Trails) and Tumult i Widma (Tumult and Spectres).

Text size

standard fonts size

Podpis obrazka

A view of the reconstructed room of Józef Czapski from Maisons-Laffitte, an exhibit at the Józef Czapski Pavilion in Krakow, photo: Mirosław Żak / photographic studio of the National Museum in Krakow

Picture width

full width

Display image with no height limit

Off

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

In Rio de Janeiro, he gave a lecture on the poet Cyprian Norwid and had an exhibition of his own paintings in the cellar of La Petite Galerie.

Right column

A 1,600-kilometre drive inland to the Orinoco River, where I met a pharmacist from Silesia who’d set up a pharmacy there in 1910 and treated people with herbs – in those days, he often wandered around the area muttering to himself, ‘My

Tekst

Czapski’s mission was a success: the debt was repaid, and Giedroyc used the remaining funds to set up the Kultura Foundation, which provided support, among other things, to the Polish opposition.

In the spring of 2019, the painter Grzegorz Kozera set off for South America to follow in the artist’s footsteps. He brought back photographs, small objects, notes and impressions from his journey, which he used to create a series of collages titled Widzenie Powtórne (Second Sight).

Text size

standard fonts size

Tekst

A sofa

At night it served as a bed, but by day it turned into a mini-writing studio. ‘The sofa was his literature, his philosophy, his meditation, and his melancholy (for if he doubted his own talent, his own vocation, it was not when he was at his easel but on the sofa),’ claimed Zagajewski in his essay Piłowanie i Błysk (Honing and Shine).

Lying there, ‘leaning against a pillow, […] bent like a jackknife, with Gothic knees raised high’, Czapski jotted down notes, drew, replied to letters, and took books down from the shelf above him. When he received good news, ‘he would jump for joy on the sofa like a pike leaping in a stream’.

Text size

standard fonts size

Podpis obrazka

Józef Czapski on his couch, Maisons-Laffitte, France, 1987, photo by Anna Beata Bohdziewicz / Fotonova / East News

Picture width

full width

Display image with no height limit

Off

Tekst

‘Józef Czapski’s father, a count and owner of estates in Belarus, had lived in a palace in Przyłuki,’ wrote Zagajewski, ‘while he had his own soft castle, the towers of which were bottles of Morand, its roof a poem by Herbert, and its staircase the weighty volumes of Malraux’s writings on art. The garden was replaced by two windows, behind which swayed the boughs of French chestnut trees.’

The sofa on the first floor of the house in Maisons-Laffitte was a silent witness to Czapski’s final words, uttered in German – the language in which he’d spoken to his mother – before his death on 12 January 1993: ‘du holde Kunst’ (‘O blessed art’) from Schubert’s song An die Musik (To Music).

Text size

standard fonts size

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

A prayer book

Right column

Cover of the poetry collection 'To Go to Lvov' (Jechać do Lwowa) by Adam Zagajewski, 1986, photo of a collective edition

Tekst

Golden nails

The books Czapski chose to read were neither obvious nor random. While suffering from the lung ailments that plagued him in childhood, he sought refuge in the fantastical world of Jules Verne, his aunt often read Leo Tolstoy’s morality tales to him as bedtime stories, and his own discovery of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata sent shivers of excitement through him. He came across Stanisław Brzozowski’s Legenda Młodej Polski (The Legend of Young Poland) at a dentist’s office, and it allowed him to grasp ‘who he is and who he might become’. He recalled a particular thought from Brzozowski’s notes written in Florence: ‘Not stoic immutability, but the ability to overcome the wounds one has suffered.’ He often said that such quotations kept him alive, holding him together ‘like golden nails’.

Text size

standard fonts size

Podpis obrazka

Bookshelves in a view of the reconstructed room of Józef Czapski from Maisons-Laffitte, an exhibit at the Józef Czapski Pavilion in Kraków, photo: Mirosław Żak / photographic studio of the National Museum in Kraków

Picture width

full width

Display image with no height limit

Off

Tekst

When he set off to fight in the Second World War in September 1939 – with his intellect and sense of humanity also serving as weapons – he tucked Gide’s diaries into the pocket of his army coat. In the camp at Gryazovets, he managed to get hold of a tattered copy of Balzac’s novel A Woman of Thirty. He tracked down the book that was his talisman – Arthur de Gobineau’s Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale (The Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia) – in a second-hand bookshop in Tehran. He later passed this copy on to Czesław Miłosz, who incorporated many of its thought-provoking reflections into his book The Captive Mind. The writer who had the greatest impact on Czapski, however, was Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time became the focus of lectures that Czapski gave to his fellow prisoners of war, and later, after he managed to acquire the complete volumes of this work, he always carried it with him wherever he went.

Text size

standard fonts size

Columns style

both columns static

Left column

A piano

Right column

Józef Czapski, photo: reproduction by Andrzej Rybczyński / PAP

Tekst

Czapski shared a special bond with Chopin. It was next to his monument in Łazienki Park in Warsaw that Czapski broke the heart of Catherine Harrison, who was in love with him and with whom he remained friends until the end of her life. In Inhuman Land, he described the performance of the Polish composer’s works by Jan Holcman for the soldiers of General Anders’ Army on a rainy evening in a garden in Uzbekistan: ‘The clarity of the use of the pedal, the clarity of the key strokes, the dynamic phrasing and build-up of the crescendos could be distinctly felt, even though the piano was out of tune and some keys produced muffled or wobbly tones.’

And it was Chopin’s music, coming from a worn-out cassette tape-player, that accompanied Czapski on the morning of his death.

Text size

standard fonts size

Podpis obrazka

A view of the reconstructed room of Józef Czapski from Maisons-Laffitte, an exhibit at the Józef Czapski Pavilion in Kraków, photo: Michał Łepecki / AW

Picture width

full width

Display image with no height limit

Off

Tekst

_{Originally written in Polish, translated by Scotia Gilroy, March 2026}

_{Sources: Józef Czapski,}_Czytając_{, Kraków 2015; Józef Czapski,}_{Na nieludzkiej ziemi}_{, Warsaw 1990; Józef Czapski,}_Patrząc_{, Kraków 2016; Józef Czapski,}_{Świat w moich oczach}_{, Ząbki–Paris 2001; Józef Czapski,}_{Wyrwane strony}_{, Warsaw 2010; Józef Czapski, Wojciech Karpiński,}_{Korespondencja}_{, Warsaw 2025; Józef Czapski, Andrzej Wajda, K. Zachwatowicz,}_{Korespondencja}_{[in:] „Zeszyty Literackie”, no. 132/ 2015; Eric Karpeles,}_{Prawie nic. Józef Czapski. Biografia malarza}_{, Warsaw 2025; Adam Zagajewski,}_{Najwyższy człowiek świata}_{, Kraków 2023; jozefczapski.pl; Andrzej Franaszek’s fanpage}

Text size

standard fonts size

More Super Articles

Title

Snapshots of a Portrait: The Wartime Diaries of Józef Czapski

URL

/en/feature/snapshots-of-a-portrait-the-wartime-diaries-of-jozef-czapski

Thumbnail

Title

The Alchemy of Print & Light: Masters of Polish Illustration

URL

/en/feature/the-alchemy-of-print-light-masters-of-polish-illustration

Thumbnail

Title

Józef Czapski’s Investigation in an ‘Inhuman Land’

URL

/en/feature/jozef-czapskis-investigation-in-an-inhuman-land

Thumbnail

Introduction

In a letter to his biographer Wojciech Karpiński, Józef Czapski once wrote: ‘I suddenly understood, thanks to you, that there might be space in a literary journal for things that are unnecessary, non-political, yet precious.’

Not standard color version

Off

Summary

We often encounter ordinary objects in Czapski’s life and work, ones that are too commonplace to be noticed. Yet it is precisely such objects that carry the most intense memories of their owner or user.

Cover

czapski-EN_01303349_0140.jpg

Thumbnail size

standardowy

Footer label

Read another feature article:

Tagi

anders' army

colorists

józef czapski

katyń