Everyone needs a stage
Daniel Olbrychski, a famous Polish actor, once again used a sword. This time, however, it was not a swashbuckling scene on a movie set, but at Warsaw's modern art gallery, Galeria Sztuki Wspolczesnej Zacheta.
Olbrychski who came to Zacheta to talk to a TV crew about "Nazis," a two-week-old exhibition showing photographs of famous actors playing Nazis drew out the sword and destroyed some of the pictures on display, including his own. He said the exhibition implied he was a Nazi and promoted the Nazi cause. "When we heard about it (the damage), we thought it was a joke," said Michal Jastrzebski, Zacheta's director of organization and legal matters. It wasn't.
"First he shattered his picture, and then those of Jan Englert, Stanislaw Mikulski and Jean Paul Belmondo," said Adam Szymczyk, the exhibition's curator.
After Zacheta informed the Warsaw prosecutor's office of the incident, the gallery temporarily closed the exhibit. The culture minister subsequently forbade the reopening of "Nazis" until the gallery provided commentary as part of the exhibit. The room in which the pictures hung contained listings of the actors' names and the productions they appeared in as Nazis.
But Szymczyk said: "The exhibition had commentary, only not with the pictures. The commentary is in the appropriate place: the Zacheta catalog. Maybe the catalog should be handed out along with the ticket."
"Nazis" is the work of Piotr Uklanski, a young artist who left Poland before 1990. Olbrychski's is one of 164 photographs on display, and shows the actor in a Claude Lelouch movie. "(The display) wasn't meant to turn people on, or say that Nazism is beautiful and make them accept it," Szymczyk said. "The average person will notice the conflict between the aesthetic package and toxic content."
Uklanski's exhibition has made the rounds in London and Berlin for instance, where "there were only serious discussions on that topic in media," Szymczyk said, "Nobody made a fuss. " The exhibit is slated to go on to Israel and the Jewish museum in New York.
"All institutions that promote and present contemporary art are exposed to this kind of reaction," said Wojciech Krukowski, the general director at Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej, a modern art gallery at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. He said contemporary art can be shocking, and people in Poland are sometimes unprepared to appreciate that kind of art because of historical events such as World War II and a resistance to new aesthetic forms.
Krukowski said he doesn't understand Olbrychski's behavior. "We got used to seeing handsome men wearing German uniforms (in the movies)," he said. "And sometimes bikers like wearing Nazi helmets" because it makes them feel powerful. But, Krukowski said, Uklanski was trying to make viewers aware of the extent to which Nazi iconography had unwittingly become part of everyday life, "and suddenly, a few fools make a joke of it."
"(Olbrychski) took the exhibit very literally, choosing the worst kind of interpretation," he said.
Krukowski finds the answer for the actor's behavior in his excessive self-regard. If that wasn't the spur, Obrychski would have spoken to the gallery privately, instead, he said.
The actor wasn't available for comment. According to his agent, Krystyna Debska, Olbrychski won't comment "because every public appearance increases his popularity," and he doesn't want people to think that's why he did it. She said the actor is happy about the support he has received from the Polish Stage Artists Association (ZASP), government officials and the general public. "And the Culture Ministry's decision also satisfied him," she said. "Even Jean Paul Belmondo sent us a fax saying that if he had been in Warsaw, he would have gone with Olbrychski and done the same," Debska said.
"I've witnessed a lot of his behavior, but this was just an irresponsible prank," said Edward Wende, a well-known Warsaw lawyer who has known Olbrychski for years. "Nobody who is normal would think that Olbrychski is a Nazi."
Olbrychski explained that he reacted the way he did because he heard a little girl in Zacheta asking her mother whether Olbrychski was a Nazi. But Wende doesn't believe that question was ever asked.
"Considering that Olbrychski has played numerous great movie roles under great directors, this (performance) was his worst one," Krukowski said. "And he directed it himself."
