Strzemiński’s War

Abstract

Theory of Seeing', war drawings, In memory of friends-Jews) (Warsaw, 2018). This article was originally published as 'Wojna Strzemińskiego' by Teksty Drugie (online) 4 (2017). It analyses selected war drawings by Władysław Strzemiński from the years 1939 to 1944, treating these as specific, visual testimonites of historical liminal events: the deportations from the Eastern Borderlands under Soviet occupation; the expulsion of the Polish population from occupied Łódź; and the genocide of the Jewish people. Mobilising both historical and neuro-aesthetic frameworks, based on the work of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, the essay proposes to define Strzemiński's war drawings as neuro-testimonies: a visual record which adopts an active process of seeing and a mode of understanding initiated at the level of neurological bodily phenomena. (KKW) Strzemiński's War Władysław Strzemiński's war drawings comprise at least seven cycles of works. I will focus on those in the collection of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, many of which were donated in person by Strzemiński in November 1945. 1 There is limited scholarship on these works. The first to refer to them was Julian Przyboś, in 1956, noting in a brief passage the peculiar suspension of the drawings between abstraction and realism, their syntheticism, unusually expressive qualities, and their focus on the concrete. 2 The poet interpreted a number of works as relating to the Holocaust. At the end of the 1980s, Janina Ładnowska perceptively pointed to the emotional content of the war works and to the importance of emotions in Strzemiński's writings, examining the drawings primarily in relation to the artist's 1936 article 'Aspects of Reality', which was devoted, among other topics, to a critical reading of Surrealism. 3 The artist's friend Stefan Krygier also stressed the role of sensation (in addition to form and seeing) and the sensitivity to the suffering of others that he believed the drawings expressed. 4 Ładnowska interpreted these works as a reaction to the 'horrors of war', a 'dramatic expression of the fate not of the individual but common to humankind as a species', synthesised in the postwar cycle of collages To My Friends the Jews (Moim przyjaciołom Żydom, 1945-1947). 5 In a similar spirit, Krygier stressed the presence in the drawings of the universal experience of the human tragedy of war. He emphasised the interpretative importance of the title and linked the works, in this respect, above all, to Surrealism. The first and only researcher to date to interpret and attend to the aforementioned works has been Andrzej Turowski, in a passage of his chapter on war in the book Constructors of the World (Budowniczowie świata), his comprehensive take on avant-garde and modern art history in Poland. 6 He noted the presence of biographical experience in the drawings, and connected them (as did Ładnowska) to the cycle To My Friends the Jews, analysing them in relation to ideas such as trace, shadow, and emptiness. 7 Most of the aforementioned authors (with the ex...