„W Polsce Ludowej, o którą walczyłem, przeżyłem piekło”. Szkic o współzałożycielu Grupy Krakowskiej, Bolesławie Stawińskim

Abstract

“I went through hell in the People’s Republic of Poland I had fought for.” An essay on Bolesław Stawiński, a co-founder of the Grupa Krakowska [Krakow Group]

Bolesław Stawiński was a co-founder of the Grupa Krakowska [Krakow Group] Artist Association (active in 1930–1937). After World War II the artist was based in Bytom. Despite his former alignment with Communist organisations, he grew reserved about the new Communist authorities in the post-war reality, and distanced himself from social realist aesthetics. His final exhibition (one of his four individual presentations after 1945) took place in 1963. The Bytom gallery, Kronika, organised a humble retrospective of Stawiński in 1992. In the early period, his work drew on constructivist and cubist advances, but the artist redefined his optics and approach in the wake of WWII and his later, near-monochromatic figurative compositions tended towards a dialogue with the heritage of impressionism and Polish colourism. His oeuvre demonstrates a fascination with light and colour, ostensible repercussions of his years of work in the sewers, as Stawiński himself observed in his Życiorys [Life], as well as being, thematically and anecdotally, an escape from the dictates of politicised language and identity of social realism into a private domain.