THE ART AND THEATER OF TADEUSZ KANTOR is the first comprehensive presentation in the U.S. of this world-famous "total artist," who in the U.S. is known primarily as a theater director. It aims to present
Kantor (1915-1990) in the full context of his creativity, as one of the 20th century's greatest artists in both the theater and the visual arts.
Tadeusz Kantor, The Desk, 1975. Wooden desk, mannequin, and mixed media. From the collection of The Jewish Museum in New York. Photo: Marek Gardulski
The Art and Theater of Tadeusz Kantor opens with a presentation of Kantor's sculpture, The Desk (1975) - which was created in connection with The Dead Class performance - one of the major works in the Jewish Museum's exhibition "Theaters of Memory: Art and the Holocaust." Recently purchased by the museum, it is the first of Kantor's works to enter a major American collection. The exhibition, curated by Norman Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator, places the work of Tadeusz Kantor alongside Anselm Kiefer's The Heavenly Palaces (2004), Christian Boltanski's Monument (Odessa) (1989-2003), and George Segal's The Holocaust (1982), as well as works by Eleanor Antin, Matthew Buckingham, Fabio Mauri, and Frederic Matys Thursz.
Kleeblatt writes:
"Connected with numerous avant-garde movements including Informel painting, Conceptual Art, Fluxus, and Happenings, Tadeusz Kantor found the theater to be his fullest means of expression, particularly, the Theatre of Death phase. 'The Desk' is a sculpture related to his theatrical masterpiece, 'Dead Class' (1975). In this harrowing performance, live actors carried effigies of their younger selves, an evocation of the tragic history Kantor lived through during World War II. Kantor proclaimed in his Theatre of Death an existential despair in the face of political conflict and senseless annihilation. Born in Wielopole in eastern Poland, a town with a sizable Jewish community, Kantor kept his Jewish roots purposefully ambiguous. Yet his work from the very beginning was founded on remembrance of the 'Jewish, amputated part of Polish culture.' For an artist who grew up between the omnipresent Catholic Church and the Jewish cemetery of his hometown, the Cross and the ghost-like figure of the body of a young boy are universal symbols of death, martyrdom, and loss."
The Art and Theater of Tadeusz Kantor also includes a unique occasion to view original performances of his work: screenings of filmed records of Kantor's performances from his Theatre of Death phase was projected (November 10-16) at La MaMa. The series will continue on January 26, 2009, with a one-day International Conference at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, where Kantor's work as both theater and visual artist will be discussed by specialists, including: Daniel Gerould, Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center, Norman Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief curator, The Jewish Museum, New York; Michal Kobialka, Professor and Chair of Theater Studies, University of Minnesota; Jarosław Suchan, director of Museum of Art in Lodz, curator of Tadeusz Kantor. Interior of Imagination, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2005; and Natalia Zarzecka, director of the Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor CRICOTEKA in Krakow.
"Kantor is to Polish art what Joseph Beuys was to German art, what Andy Warhol was to American art. He created a unique strain of theatre, was an active participant in the revolutions of the neo-avant-garde, a highly original theoretician, an innovator strongly grounded in tradition, an anti-painterly painter, a happener-heretic, and an ironic conceptualist. Apart from that, Kantor was an untiring animator of artistic life in post-war Poland, one could even say, one of its chief motivating forces. His greatness derives not so much from his oeuvre, as from Kantor himself in his entirety, as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that consists of his art, his theory, and his life."
Jaroslaw Suchan, director of
Museum of Art in Lodz, curator of "Tadeusz Kantor. Interior of Imagination", Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2005
"... the fundamental (if I may use this pathetic word) idea behind my creative work has been and is the idea of reality, which I labeled the 'Reality of the Lowest Rank.' It can be used to explain my paintings, emballages, poor objects, and equally poor characters..." Tadeusz Kantor, "A Little Manifesto." Original typescript from the Cricoteka Archives, 1978