Diana Cottrell discovers the art of a tragic martyr
Black stockings, high-heeled shoes, naked women reclining tantalisingly on sofas or sitting at the table, imposing their power over squatting or kneeling men. If you share the view that women exert power over men from body rather than brain appeal, this exhibition of Bruno Schulz's art will confirm your view. But not really; he's just a teaser at heart.
The remarkable Schulz was a Polish-Jewish writer and painter, born in 1892, who spent most of his life in Drohobycz (a small shtetl in what used to be Poland, but is now Ukraine). He was recognised as a talented writer and painter before World War II. He never married, despite having a Catholic fiancée for two years, and for whom he abandoned his own faith. He lived by teaching, drawing, and woodworking. Come the occupation, he had the strange ambition to be hired as a translator for a German non-commissioned officer, Felix Landau, who indeed did hire him to paint murals for his children in the nursery of his villa in Drohobycz, surviving fragments of which are displayed at the exhibition. Having arranged all the papers to escape from Drohobycz to Warsaw, Schulz was killed by the bitterest of his ironies, in a street massacre of Jews in 1942, one day before his planned departure.
Schulz was an extraordinary writer and is sometimes compared to Franz Kafka, whose novel "The Trial" he translated into Polish. Due to poor health, he never formally studied art and mostly he taught himself to draw and paint. As a teacher, he was apparently unable to cope with boisterous children.
In the dimly lit rooms, with a background of traditional Jewish music, you can admire 100 drawings of the 250 or so existing works of Schulz, five fragments of murals from Landau's villa and one in oil. Some are illustrations for his novels, this rare combination of literary and artistic skills, that extraordinarily delicate pen, creating parallel universes, imaginary worlds into which we are drawn.
There are two walls in the main gallery, where the eerie, unearthly recently discovered murals are displayed. There is a rather shocking story about them. Unofficial callers from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem "borrowed" some murals from Landau's villa and carted them back to Israel. The remaining five fragments were transferred to the museum in Drohobycz, which kindly agreed to lend them for the current exhibition. Łukasz Kossowski from the Museum of Literature, co-ordinator of this stunning collection, hopes that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington will organise an exhibition where fragments of murals both from Ukraine and Israel might be reunited. Since it is such a sensitive subject, "this is the only institution that could organise such an event," Kossowski declared.
There is a photograph of a German firing squad in action, taken from a window, which connects terror with the images, and indeed, Schulz's fate. Yet this is also a symbol of the private republic of dreams in which Schulz lived all his short life. Despite the horrors around him, he made friends with Landau's children, even though he was a virtual slave to their father.
What might have been stressed more is the vanished world of the lost Jewish communities which once flourished here.
But yet again, we have managed to stage a wonderful exhibition, which is virtually inaccessible to non-Polish speakers. Monolingualism succeeds in suffocating such an extraordinary subject. There is not a word of explanation in any other language. I begin to find this infuriating, as we sit here on the verge of signing up to the vast multilingual EU. Press information tells us there have been exhibitions in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, in Marseilles, Strasbourg, Berlin, Munich, Tashkent, Jerusalem and New York. So, why just in Polish here?
The answer of Kossowski says everything perhaps about the mentality in a world which was closed for so long to just Poles. "No one thought of doing it any other way." Since 99% of such exhibitions in the country's museums and galleries are explained only in Polish, it just came naturally. Pleaded Kossowski: "Especially a writer as hermetic as Schulz." Yet Schulz's writings have been translated into 15 languages, including Japanese.
At the entrance to Pompeii a comprehensive guide in Polish was the first book I saw, alongside another in Russian.
See it at the Opera Building, pl. Teatralny 1, Warsaw, until February 6; later in Wrocław and Gdańsk.
The remarkable Schulz was a Polish-Jewish writer and painter, born in 1892, who spent most of his life in Drohobycz (a small shtetl in what used to be Poland, but is now Ukraine). He was recognised as a talented writer and painter before World War II. He never married, despite having a Catholic fiancée for two years, and for whom he abandoned his own faith. He lived by teaching, drawing, and woodworking. Come the occupation, he had the strange ambition to be hired as a translator for a German non-commissioned officer, Felix Landau, who indeed did hire him to paint murals for his children in the nursery of his villa in Drohobycz, surviving fragments of which are displayed at the exhibition. Having arranged all the papers to escape from Drohobycz to Warsaw, Schulz was killed by the bitterest of his ironies, in a street massacre of Jews in 1942, one day before his planned departure.
Schulz was an extraordinary writer and is sometimes compared to Franz Kafka, whose novel "The Trial" he translated into Polish. Due to poor health, he never formally studied art and mostly he taught himself to draw and paint. As a teacher, he was apparently unable to cope with boisterous children.
In the dimly lit rooms, with a background of traditional Jewish music, you can admire 100 drawings of the 250 or so existing works of Schulz, five fragments of murals from Landau's villa and one in oil. Some are illustrations for his novels, this rare combination of literary and artistic skills, that extraordinarily delicate pen, creating parallel universes, imaginary worlds into which we are drawn.
There are two walls in the main gallery, where the eerie, unearthly recently discovered murals are displayed. There is a rather shocking story about them. Unofficial callers from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem "borrowed" some murals from Landau's villa and carted them back to Israel. The remaining five fragments were transferred to the museum in Drohobycz, which kindly agreed to lend them for the current exhibition. Łukasz Kossowski from the Museum of Literature, co-ordinator of this stunning collection, hopes that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington will organise an exhibition where fragments of murals both from Ukraine and Israel might be reunited. Since it is such a sensitive subject, "this is the only institution that could organise such an event," Kossowski declared.
There is a photograph of a German firing squad in action, taken from a window, which connects terror with the images, and indeed, Schulz's fate. Yet this is also a symbol of the private republic of dreams in which Schulz lived all his short life. Despite the horrors around him, he made friends with Landau's children, even though he was a virtual slave to their father.
What might have been stressed more is the vanished world of the lost Jewish communities which once flourished here.
But yet again, we have managed to stage a wonderful exhibition, which is virtually inaccessible to non-Polish speakers. Monolingualism succeeds in suffocating such an extraordinary subject. There is not a word of explanation in any other language. I begin to find this infuriating, as we sit here on the verge of signing up to the vast multilingual EU. Press information tells us there have been exhibitions in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, in Marseilles, Strasbourg, Berlin, Munich, Tashkent, Jerusalem and New York. So, why just in Polish here?
The answer of Kossowski says everything perhaps about the mentality in a world which was closed for so long to just Poles. "No one thought of doing it any other way." Since 99% of such exhibitions in the country's museums and galleries are explained only in Polish, it just came naturally. Pleaded Kossowski: "Especially a writer as hermetic as Schulz." Yet Schulz's writings have been translated into 15 languages, including Japanese.
At the entrance to Pompeii a comprehensive guide in Polish was the first book I saw, alongside another in Russian.
See it at the Opera Building, pl. Teatralny 1, Warsaw, until February 6; later in Wrocław and Gdańsk.
