Polish art and artists abound this time of year
Still have some holiday shopping to do?
Great bargains are out there. The Polish retail scene is bursting with new boutiques that stock made-in-Poland Christmas accoutrements such as cards, stocking stuffers, mini-candles glazed gold and cobalt, and some of the sweetest woven angels meant to hang on trees.
Some boutiques are in the mega malls. Others are a bit off the beaten path, such as the brightly lit one near the Forum Hotel on ulica Nowogrodzka, which is opposite a larger boutique that for years has carried some of the best of Polish glass and porcelain.
The network of small shops under the Marriott-LIM complex and Warszawa Centralna also are worth a look for stocking stuffers or elegant wrapping paper.
If you're an expat afficionado of Polish folk art, some major new artists' work is being brought into the stores. This month's Warsaw Insider has a rundown on some of the best shops.
Some expat artists also have gotten their act together. Eve Berton is a standout. She hung in there when times were lean, doing technical writing and editing to pay the bills while she tried one route after another to survive as an artist. Today, she's not only "legal" but has her own Web site where you can check out her stuff.
Berton is well known by expat insiders not just for throwing a good party but for her evocative pen-and-ink notecard drawings of fabulous Polish grillwork gates and windows. She sold them through major hotels and stores. But the marketing proved extraordinarily labor intensive. There is still only a rudimentary distribution system that can link artists with hundreds of small shop outlets, and the paperwork is also formidable, a holdover of tax-office bureaucracy.
So many "craft" items are in the shops this season that someone must be figuring this out. But Berton moved on to watercolors and oil paintings and many "art" creations. She sorted through conflicting legal advice to get her business registered and in early December celebrated the debut of her Web site.
Poland always has had a rich mix of artists. Graphic artists flourished under communism by making internationally acclaimed, provocative posters that expressed "captive nation" angst in dramatic ways that were hard for censors to keep up with. Some of them have found their footing in the new Poland, making wonderful theater and opera posters that can be seen on the giant, round posterboards at busy bus and tram stops.
For many other painters, this is still a painful transition. The galleries on ulica Nowy Swiat and ulica Krakowskie Przedmiescie and, less often, in the Old Town may carry their works, but buyers are spotty. Poles with millions of zlotys to burn go to art auctions. Those making good money have a jillion other priorities a car, a new flat or a house. Those struggling on the average wage of not quite $400 a month include thousands of onetime art connoisseurs professors and doctors who bought art in the pre-1989 era when prices were as low as their wages. No way, today.
Some key contemporary galleries have gone bust, including the one called Nowy Swiat, although that seems to have been a sad and bizarre case of the owner running off with the money and leaving dozens of the best modern painters, such as noted oil colorist Tadeusz Dominik, high and dry. The niche gallery in the back of the Marriott Hotel has also had problems and is shuttered.
So it's an occasion to celebrate when a really good artist puts together a strategy not just for survival but for prospering, sometimes in fields never envisioned before.
Wojciech Pakowski is one such pioneer. When we met in 1990, he was refurbishing a huge empty warehouse space at the top of a six-story apartment building, planning to use it for his printing presses and his own painting. He and his wife Anna kept half the space for their own apartment. When he went to Nebraska on an arts fellowship in 1991, I stayed in the flat for several months until the lack of a telephone drove me away. This was when it took years, not weeks, to get a telephone. When the Pakowskis returned with an infant, Antek, in tow, the art world had been turned upside down. Gallery owners weren't sure what to do next and they rarely had contact with the thousands of deep-pocket expat advisers pouring in here.
Pakowski ultimately reached into his bag of skills to pull out techniques he'd learned at the Art Institute but had never practiced like silk screening museum banners, Budimex umbrellas or India shop doorway decor. That huge loft space was often filled with banners-in-progress; the canvases were on the floor, not on the wall. Most years, he'd retreat to a castle in Germany reserved for artists and paint without any telephones or customers to interrupt him.
Antek proved to be the catalyst for a next turn. Parents of other 4-year-olds at a German kindergarten persuaded Pakowski to volunteer to teach fingerpainting. Magical! And then the Goethe Institute offered its Palace of Culture and Science reception room for a show of the kids' art. Some parents talked Pakowski into taking on older children for individual lessons, which led to occasional classes at the German and American Schools. Suddenly, the adults also wanted classes.
Those classes began to be offered through the International Women's Group, a high-voltage group of "trailing spouses" of multinational business executives. The Bristol Hotel's general manager offered an upstairs conference room several years ago to display art done by Pakowski's students including his wife. A few years ago, the Pakowskis launched a full-fledged art school that now has more than 60 students.
And in late November, Pakowski's own work got a showing in one of the most heavily trafficked spaces of Warsaw: the Marriott's second-floor Atrium corridor. Marriott general manager J. Richard Lyon, whose wife is one of Pakowski's students, is using it as a rotating space for Polish artists.
