Polish Art Gallery

A few sentences are all that is required to present the biography of Zdzislaw Beksinski. He was born on 24th February 1929 in Sanok (now South-Eastern Poland), with which his family had been connected ever since the times of his grandfather Mateusz Beksinski. In 1947, on finishing grammar school in Sanok, Beksinski enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology. After graduation in 1952, in compliance with the regulations for the employment of graduates then in force, he lived first in Cracow and later in Rzeszów, and finally, in 1955, returned with his wife to Sanok.

He initiated his work as a photographer, and in 1958 presented some excellent work at several exhibitions in Warsaw, Gliwice, and Poznan. However it was his work in drawing and painting, and partly also in sculpture, that brought him his first successes. In 1964 Janusz Bogucki put on an exhibition of his work in the Stara Pomaranczarnia in Warsaw, which turned out to be his first major success, since all the exhibits were sold. The exhibition Bogucki organised in 1972 presented a new trend in Beksinski's work, which years later he would call his 'fantasy period', which continued in his biography until the 1980's. In the summer of 1977, following a decision by the authorities of Sanok to demolish Beksinski's family house, the artist and his wife and son moved to Warsaw. In February 1984 he became associated with the Parisian marchand Piotr Dmochowski. In 1997 Beksinski started his computer photographic montages.

Beksinski's numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad, and also the substantial number of publications by him, including catalogues and albums, and the innumerable interviews with him and films about him have put him into the narrow group of the most talked about and best known Polish artists. He once made the following ironic remark about his own life, 'Writing your own biography is a sign of even greater vainglory than making declarations like the ones I have written at the request of the makers of this catalogue. But whereas occasionally it might seem to me that I know what it is I'm thinking about, and that I'm. thinking what I'm. thinking, which makes me feel right to tell someone else about what I think I've been thinking about; I'm. certain that I don't know anything about my own past except everything, but everything is about as much as nothing. Presumably the most important fact from my life is that when I was ten I got an air-gun for my name-day, and that later I shot at chickens with it, but is this fact of interest to anyone besides myself? Apart from that, presumably I was born, and I shall be doing my best not to die, but I'm. sure I won't manage it.' Beksinski does not participate in what's known as the life of the arts, preferring the seclusion of his studio; he doesn't even attend the vernissages of his own exhibitions. That's why in his case it's not the official biography, which has no sensational events in it, is the most interesting thing, but his artistic life, which is associated with all the changes that have taken place and are taking place in his work all the time.

Finishing film school and making films was the young Zdzislaw Beksinski's dream of a career. However, his father persuaded him to study a more practical subject, and in a war-devastated Poland architecture seemed a practical option. He made up for his unaccomplished dreams by turning to art photography. His work in photography shows him as an exceptionally dynamic artist in search of his own, strong mode of expression. He moved from mocking the Socialist Realism, through quasi-reportage, a variety of experiments with form, a quest for interesting and diversified textures, to works which were close to Surrealism or Expressionism. The confrontation of the face of a child with that of an old woman, the portrait of a girl with a torn-out face, a head covered in gauze, nudes tied up in string, or montage consisting of a couple of photographs (usually reproductions) and a completely unconnected text stuck onto a slab make the viewer anxious and provoke questions about the sense of the associations that arise.

However, the unusual power of the artist's imagination could not find its full expression in photography owing to the technical limitations, but it was freely expressed in his drawings, paintings, and partly also sculptures. Nothing has survived of his juvenilia sketches, except for a school tableau. Beksinski created an artistic workshop for himself and arrived at his own form of expression by sheer hard work, in a solitary manner, with no corrections from tutors of friends. His early pictures were Expressionist in character: 'Figures crying out in the wilderness,' he recalls, 'people with heads of stone, women in childbirth, people in the act of copulation, defecation, dying, people being executed by firing squad or by hanging, prisons, windowless cities etcetera etcetera. In terms of style it had something of Cwenarski or Wróblewski about it; I could even do five large-size paintings in a day; I was absolutely uncritical; I got impatient quickly, so I could see no sense in polishing off or touching up what had been rapidly painted in tempera or sketched in charcoal onto a huge sheet of cardboard. Nevertheless I think that was the only time I was really sincere. Or maybe just naive?' We know this period only from what Beksinski has told us about it, since he destroyed all that he did in the period, judging it too exhibitionistic and naive.

The explosion of abstract art that occurred around 1956 turned out to be particularly fascinating not only for the young generation. It was in this trend that the idiosyncrasy of Zdzislaw Beksinski's talent manifested itself, allowing him to achieve his characteristic individual climate using his own means. His black or white reliefs in diverse textures suggested destruction. By piling layers of plaster and paint on top of each other he was hoping time would intensify this process, slowly and irregularly revealing new layers.

However the drawings and sculptures he was creating were distancing him off from pure abstraction. In his sculpture, in which he applied the negative form he had borrowed from the works of Henry Moore, there were two dominant motifs: the head, and the human figure. On the other hand his drawings revealed vast ranges of an aggressive and sombre vision, and the dominant theme in them was eroticism. Some of these drawings later acquired titles which the artist made up post factum on the basis of a game of loose associations. He would apply a diversity of techniques on diversified formats: pencil, pen, crayon or charcoal drawings, monotypes, heliographs. That was when a whole spectrum of his seeking after form revealed itself: from his 'classic', symmetrical arrangements, to his dislodged compositions, or ones which contradicted the basic principles of composition. In some of his works the lines were delicate, fine, almost invisible; in others the drawing would become virtually a monochromatic painting, spacious and with a play of light and shade. The eruption of subjects, the drastic way in which they would be presented, and the freedom in approach to form and composition revealed an artist unboundable by any barriers, aesthetic or customary. Beksinski opened up to the sub-conscious, not afraid of what he would encounter in it, and it was from these experiences of drawing that the paintings of his 'fantasy period' developed. That was when a technique to which the artist has remained loyal to the present day was confirmed and stabilised: his painting in oils, less frequently in acrylics, on hardboard. Using the smooth side of the board, he would paint in such a manner so as to hide all the brush-strokes, to conceal the entire process of painting. The picture was to be a mirror image of an inner vision, and an observer looking at it was to become oblivious of the technique of painting, and of the very nature of the painting as 'painting'. He said at the time, 'I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams. This is an apparent reality, which nevertheless contains an enormous amount of fantasy details. Perhaps other people's dreams and imagination work in some other way, but with me they're always images which tend to be realistic in terms of the play of light and shade and perspective.' When he put these works on exhibition in Warsaw in 1972, he split the recipients into intransigent opponents, who regarded what he was doing as a reality that was not art, or that it was simply kitsch, and into whole-hearted enthusiasts, who acknowledged his work as the most exciting occurrence in the contemporary arts. He also achieved something absolutely unheard of: he aroused the interest of the mass recipients, who are, after all, quite indifferent to what is the most exciting occurrence in the recent arts. It seems that he filled a vacuum with his painting, which in world art had been partially filled by Salvador Dali, but had no counterpart in Poland, though Dali had nothing in common with Beksinski, except for the mimetic technique and the surrealist atmosphere, but with an entirely different poetics. The public, which had become tired of experiments with form, and perhaps also of the monotony of the alienated artistic language of the Avant Garde, turned with curiosity to painting which applied traditional means to dramatically express the anxieties of the age. In his scrutiny of the sub-conscious, Beksinski addressed the same needs of his public, which had been aroused by psycho-analysis and existentialism. His visionariness and its dark mysteriousness transferred the dimension of the observer's experience from aesthetic and intellectual contemplation to the psychological sphere. But a great deal of misunderstanding arose over the reception of this art. On account of their apparently literary quality, Beksinski's pictures called for some sort of key for their deciphering. Brought up on Romanticism and especially on the symbolism of Mloda Polska (Art Nouveau), more and more often the Polish observer wanted to have their content and symbols explained, particularly by their creator, who refused to give any explanations at all, and even declined to give the most elementary explanation of all, titles for his pictures. 'I never ask myself, "what does it mean?" either with respect to my own pictures, or anyone else's. Meaning is absolutely meaningless to me. It's worth as much as the taste of chocolate in a literary description. I can't understand how the question of meaning can be so important to people as regards their relationship with art. . . .However, what I encounter most frequently is a semantic reception based on a description of the objects in the picture. From my point of view and as regards my own paintings, nothing could be further from the truth. . . . A semantic and semiotic analysis of vision is as absurd as a schoolbook criticism of Konrad's Great Improvisation speech in Mickiewicz's Dziady [Forefathers' Eve - the greatest classic of Polish Romantic literature]. What's important is not what is visible but what is hidden... Or in other words, what is revealed to the soul, not what the eyes can see and what can be named.' But not only the question of interpretation evoked controversy. Beksinski was accused of a range of formal inconsistencies and of having departed from the Post-Impressionist concept of the picture as a pictorial plane filled up in a particular order. The order in Beksinski's pictures was purely psychological in character. The play of colours, the meaning of colour, texture, compositional relations etc. seemed irrelevant to him, or even obstacles in the achievement of his aim, which was the manifestation of a sub-conscious vision. In the categories of this kind of aesthetics his pictures appeared absolutely worthless, bereft of all problems belonging strictly to painting. Beksinski evaded this kind of evaluation, defending the right to apply his imagination freely. The exhibitions held by Teatr Stu of Cracow in 1977 was deliberately entitled 'Pictures by Zdzislaw Beksinski', instead of 'The Paintings of ...'.The artist wanted to definitively dissociate himself off from traditional aesthetic evaluation. The brush was only a vicarious instrument for the formulation of his visions, just as nowadays the computer is becoming something of the sort. 'I prefer to be observed from the point of view of psychology, or even psychiatry, rather than of that artsy-fartsy Art with a capital A,' he said in one of his interviews.

His most spectacular of group of pictures from the 1967-1983 'fantasy period' is in the collection of the Muzeum Historyczne of Sanok. It is an extraordinary witness to a vision full of drama, anxiety, and destruction not so much of the outside world but rather of a spiritual or psychological world. In a winter landscape with a repulsive emptiness and deadness, a blind boy leads a cadaverous figure made up of junk. Somewhere in the distance a rider with the head of a bird is moving in the same direction. The boy is pointing with his finger at something we don't see in the picture, something neither he nor the corpse-like figure can see. Where is this strange crusade heading for? In the centre of a metaphysical landscape of 1978 there are some ivy-covered ruins of an edifice. Each of its apertures leads into a different space, into a different light and time. Is it real? 'There's an old Chinese paradox which says that we don't know when we wake up whether it's evening or morning. It sounds far more likely that we awake in the evening, and that all through the day when we are asleep we try to understand the world of the night, which is so splendid and enormous that it eludes our miserable powers of reasoning and ordering completely. We stand like a small child, bedazzled by an avalanche of incomprehensible details, and when we have finally fallen asleep and in our sleep go to work and build those stereotypical settlements in which we think we live, in the morning when we are asleep we arrange all those marvellous details and endow them with an order of meanings, so as to make them perceptible to our not very bright intellects.' In another of his pictures, a small figure moves holding a torch moves through a ravine of monks' corpses. Is there some outcome of this voyage through Beksinski's pictures? Do we experience this half-waking dream in the same way as he does, or in some other way, each of us weighing up his own anxieties and secrets? Is this dream of Beksinski's pictures for us - to use the words of Witold Gombrowicz - 'pregnantly terrible, with an undiscovered meaning,' where 'everything touches us more profoundly, more confidentially than even the most burning of the day's passions'? Pictures are painted, after all, to make an impact with their atmosphere on our feelings, not with their content on our intellect.

The 'fantasy period' brought Beksinski fame and it seemed the artist would remain loyal to it. But already by the early eighties he was gradually abandoning this spatial and most often landscape visionariness, restricting his motif to one or a few figures, usually placed against an indefinite background. His pictures became much more synthetic; and now it was not the 'photographing of a dream' that was the most important, but painting itself. 'I'm. going in the direction of a greater simplification of the background, and at the same time of a considerable degree of deformation in the figures, which are being painted without what's known as a naturalistic light and shadow. What I'm after is for it to be obvious at first sight that this is a painting I made.' In the 90's a certain differentiation may be discerned in the manner of painting chosen by the artist. In some of his works figures are produced with a sculptor's sensitivity, and occasionally are even reminiscent of his sculptural forms of the 60's Some of his pictures appear not so much to have been painted, rather as sketched in coloured lines, from the topsy-turvy of which figures emerge and conduct their solitary dramas. Finally there are pictures executed in an extremely pictorial, synthetic way, in which the automatic operation of form and colour precedes the theme presented. In the computer photo-montages of his recent years there is a return to the painting of the 'fantasy period', with spatial landscapes carrying a heavy metaphysical charge. The artist applies a far-reaching degree of deformation in almost each of his objects, including the human body.

The phenomenon of Beksinski's art is associated above all with the embodying, 'materialisation' in his artistic techniques of 'images of the sub-conscious', which are no doubt symbolic of his inner experiences, and to a large extent symbolic of the spiritual states of contemporary man. The terror of death, disintegration, destruction, loneliness, is ever-present. Whether Zdzislaw Beksinski's art is leading us to despair, or whether it works on the grounds of a catharsis; whether he light which we encounter all the time in his art brings just a little bit of hope - will forever remain the personal reflection of each of its observers.

Wiesław Banach

Wiesław Banach - art historian, director of Historical Museum in Sanok. He is an author of numerous essays and reviews on Beksinski's art. He also prepared and oversaw many exhibitions of the Artist. The Museum in Sanok has a large collection of works by Zdzislaw Beksinski.
*This text is part of the Introduction to the album "Beksinski", published by BOSZ in 1999.

By Tomasz Gryglewicz

Many Faces of Beksinski's Art - Analysis

The work of Zdzislaw Beksinski may be sub-divided into two periods different in character and duration: his Avant Garde period, which lasted merely a few years, and his second period, in which the artist has been developing his own image, characteristic of his art and recognisable to his recipients. An architect by education, after three years of practice Beksinski quit the profession to devote himself to the visual arts. His decision to enter on a career in the arts coincided with the political thaw of October 1956, which in the arts in Poland - after the previous spell of Social Realism and isolation - brought an enthusiastic reception of the Avant Garde from all over the world. Beksinski joined in the contemporary art trend, and soon earned success and made a reputation for himself, especially in experimental photography and sculpture, in which - alongside his plaster casts - he used untypical materials, such as metal and wire, to build structures delicately balanced on the border between pure abstraction and allusion, frequently distant, to the shape of the human body. This was quite a common phenomenon in that period, within the framework of informal abstraction, and also within modern abstract sculpture.

The 1960's just as for many of the recent protagonists of hot abstraction, brought a radical switch in the work of Beksinski towards an art trend described in the Polish terminology as metaphorical painting. In the global art the term usually applied to this kind of art is Fantastic Realism, since albeit the scenes presented in it are painted realistically, yet the reality is totally unreal, as if from a world of dreams or hallucinations. Beksinski started to create first drawings and later paintings which were overtly figural and visionary in nature with a strong element of Expressionism: a characteristic of his mature work.

In his drawings made after 1960 there is a palpable fascination by the human figure in scenes full of violence and sex, which was characteristic of the entire movement called the nowa figuracja active in that decade. But his way of presenting the human body started to depart more and more from its real appearance, and Beksinski became more and more fascinated by ugliness: skin that was decomposing and separating from its underlayers, an exaggerated presentation of the network of veins and nerves, bone structure.

In his chronologically later period as a painter alongside the human being, or rather its spectre or corpse, there now appeared new motifs which, putting it briefly, expressed the concept of vanitas, the vanity of the material world, which is doomed to death and decomposition. Each of Beksinski's pictures seems to be saying, 'memento mori: remember thou shalt die,' and the message is especially forceful in his representations of the most widespread religious symbol in our civilisation: the crucified figure. In Beksinski's pictures the Crucified Man, too, has succumbed to the destructive force of time, since all that remains of his body is a trunk without a head or lower limbs, hanging from deformed arms.

This invoking of the idea of vanitas situates Beksinski within an extremely broad tradition, deriving not only directly from Surrealism, which gave birth to Fantastic Realism; but it also linking him with the Late Middle Ages, the times of the work of Grünewald and Hieronymus Bosch; with the Mannerism of the Brueghels; with Baroque; and above all with Romanticism and Symbolism, with the works of Arnold Böcklin and Alfred Kubin. Beksinski paints vast expanses of wilderness or boundless stretches of billowing sea, dramatically convoluted vortices of clouds over the horizon; mysterious burial-grounds and ruins; Gothic cathedrals structured as if of bone or built of dry, twisted boughs; shipwrecks; skulls, skeletons, wolves, nocturnal scenes; the glow of moonlight etc. But he penetrates even more profoundly into the world of unreal reality than was possible in the art of the nineteenth century. His visions become more individual, typical only of his own personal visions, of his own individual style.

His scenes, which might even seem quite likely, are marked by a spectral deformation. Beksinski is capable of endowing an ordinary setting with a grotesque atmosphere, achieving a demonic effect of alienation.

Beksinski's visionary painting took on its full shape in the 1970's This does not mean stagnation. His creativity has been evolving all the time and undergoing transformation in the subsequent decades. The 1990's brought another significant transformation within his permanent paradigm of style and content. He sublimated his expressive means more and more. He reduced his motifs and signs, concentrating on the figures and faces, mutated and made unreal. As always, he was interested in the structure of the body surface, treated almost always autonomously, however, separately from the inner construction. His third dimension, perspective depth, was reduced to a plane, a smooth background in silvery greys. A specific kind of decorativeness appeared.

Every artist has some sort of image, some sort of vision that fascinates and terrifies him. Such an image lurks deeply hidden at the bottom of the layers of his sub-conscious, closely guarded from the light of day, since it is too personal, too sensitive. This applies especially to those artists who, using the world of their inner imagination, paint fantasy. Their rudimentary, traumatic visions are materialised in their works in forms artistically processed and adapted to such an extent that their original meaning is neither clear nor legible to recipients. Sometimes however the artist reveals just slightly more of the mystery surrounding his visions; sometimes this happens in those of his works which are not typical in terms of form, in which the elements of aesthetic transformation have been reduced to a minimum, while the pictorial content has been presented more unambiguously and explicitly. Thus they may constitute a specific kind of key to understanding a given artist's work, providing the symbols and motifs in them recur in other works by him in an artistically more sublimated shape.

In two of Beksinski's 1968 heliotypes there are some naked figures: a man hanging from a post and a beautiful woman who is torturing him, her face covered by a scarf or a wisp of hair. There exists a direct narrative relation between the two figures. In the first picture the woman is pushing a sharp object into the man's side; in the second one his dead body hangs motionless, and the woman holds the sharp object she has just taken out. These two small works are distinct from the background of Beksinski's graphics and drawings by their realism, and especially through the magical effect of the three-dimensionality in the idealised treatment of the very sensuous, youthful female nude, as contrasted with the cumbersome man.

The figure of a beautiful woman often symbolises death. An example of this is offered by Jacek Malczewski's Thanatos series. On the other hand the archetypal association of death with eroticism, and the elements of masochism and misogyny suggest links with the Polish graphics artists and masters of drawing of the interwar period, especially Bruno Schulz. These works relate not only to a strictly erotic content. The figure of the hanging man will return in his numerous presentations of the Crucified, which perform the function of a metaphor for the artist's fate - a typical feature of Expressionism in the wide sense of the term.

We should recollect here that Beksinski does not like the content of his work being too concretely analysed. Although the presentational layer tends to be extremely developed in his works, he never fits them out with literary titles, as if ostentatiously, as his forebears, the Surrealists, did. That is why the symbolism and significance of his works may be even more elusive. Rather the recipient is immersed in a specific, sombre atmosphere, instead of deciphering particular visual signs and symbols. In this sense Beksinski's art is asemantic, in compliance with the artist's declarations. However, at the bottom there are the archetypes, profoundly hidden in his sub-conscious, which express man's most primitive impulses: fear of death, decomposition, and ugliness, and fascination by physical beauty and eroticism.

Tomasz Gryglewicz

Professor Tomasz Gryglewicz is an art historian. He has been a fellow of the Jagiellonian University Institute for the History of Art since 1973, and the Institute's Director in 1996-1999. Since 1995 he has been Head of the Department of Modern Art , a distinguished connoisseur of contemporary art, author of the books Groteska w sztuce polskiej XXw. (The Grotesque in Polish Twentieth-Century Art), Kraków, 1984; and Malarstwo Europy Srodkowej 1900-1914 (Central European Painting, 1900-1914), as well as of numerous publications on late 19th- and 20th-century painting. He is also an art critic, and a member of AICA.

By Wiesław Ochman

Zdzislaw - an Artist and a Friend

Before I met Zdzisław Beksiński I already knew his paintings. The encyclopedia entry "Zdzisław Beksiński" occupies some 60 words and does not define the mysteries and meanings either of the man or of his works. I don't believe any painted art, and definitely not the art of Beksiński, can be adequately described in words. You have to discover this art for yourself. The perfect co-ordination of the form and subject of his works bears a metaphysical effect on the observer, and it is difficult to express the essence of that impact in words. Fascinated by Beksiński's works, I conducted a visual experiment. I arranged a series of reproductions by old masters - Velasquez, Titian, Rembrandt, Bosch, and a few others closer to our own times - side by side with some reproductions of Beksiński. I wasn't interested in comparing them, although I'm sure Beksiński shares a joint feature with all of them - a faultless workshop. What I wanted to do was to confirm my belief that Beksiński's art has a deeper, more complex genesis than is claimed by the ambient opinion that his roots go back chiefly to Surrealism. It was clear that the attractive, but rather illustrative character of the works of Salvador Dali was out of place with the profound metaphysics of Beksiński's oeuvre. The power of Beksiński's impact emerged very suggestively from my juxtaposition. The gravity of his ascetic form, sophisticated colour schemes and harmony make his works perfectly concordant and in line with creations universally acknowledged as outstanding. I realised with great satisfaction that it was a good thing Beksiński was alive in our times. In the old days, great artists painted chiefly "on commission". Now, when I am more familiar with Beksiński the man and the artist, I know that even a supreme hierarchy could never force him to do anything "on commission". What he values most is freedom and creative freedom, and no kind of commissioning him for a specific subject could ever be a success. So if Beksiński had been a painter in those bygone days, he would have been painting for himself, which is what he is in fact doing today, too. The fact that his pictures have won universal recognition no doubt pleases him, although he is one of those artists who never goes in form compromise, and definitely not with respect to himself. He sees a picture's beauty in a singular way. For him a beautiful painting, if we are to use the term, is one which has been impeccably made. Hardly ever in conversations with Beksiński are the subjects of his works discussed. A rather superficial interpretation of his works concentrates on the purely anatomical reading of the components of its form. For me his works are a reproduction of sculpture. Perhaps thanks to the power in these pictures I tend to notice the anatomical aspects of his figures less than I do their painterly descriptions. In the period when fantastic landscape were often the subject of his works, Beksiński also described the situation. There was something mysterious, totally incomprehensible but fascinating, going on in the range and space of his paintings. He evoked an atmosphere that was difficult to describe but coherent none the less. He was painting in a wider manner at the time, using "planes of colour". They were neighbourhoods of colour in a remarkable taste and harmony.

Finally the computer came into Zdzich Beksiński's life. He acquired a colossal amount of knowledge on the subject, amazing and sometimes even embarrassing the specialists. That special character trait of his emerged, which makes him try to master whatever interests him as thoroughly as possible. We did not have to wait long for this artist continually in search of new forms of expression to use the computer to accomplish his visions and to create something which in my opinion is fundamentally different from typical "computer graphics". Beksiński exploits the potential offered by the computer, but he is never influenced by the programs it provides. He has worked out his own language of artistic expression, and the computer is merely the physical means to manifest the artist's imagination. Everyone will agree that these works are "genuine Beksiński". Zdzisław is not sure how he should treat his computer creations. As unique items, or should they be numbered like short series, like graphics? Here again he has his doubts, because of course they're not graphics. That's just like Beksiński: honest and responsible to himself and his prospective customers.

At one time there came a radical change in the painterly execution of his pictures. He started creating something like a spatial network of sophisticatedly constructed lines, giving the impression of three-dimensionality. There was no question of any chiaroscuro in this. He also limited his palette of colours to three or four, and applied black and various shades of grey in a sensational manner. The story, of which there had been not much before, disappeared from his work altogether, and one element emerged as the subject of the picture. A cross, a figure, or two figures joined together in a weird but still imaginable embrace, a piece of architecture, a face, a cathedral, monumental and domineering female figures marching straight at the observer.

When I ask Zdzich how his pictures arise, thinking of the subject, since I can see the painterly solutions for myself and sometimes am lucky enough to be able to follow the various stages of their creation, he says that in fact whenever he begins at his easel he never really knows what the end result will be like. Of course what is meant are the dreams and visions, but I'm not sure they are the ultimate factor deciding about the shape of the picture. Beksiński paints because it is "his daily bread". He exists through painting. He treats it as a form of existence, and he doesn't really care if people see it as the effects of the work of an artistic genius. The astonishing phenomenon of this art cannot be explained by a perfect workshop or unique subject-matter. I think that in these works there is an energy that makes them attract the eye and draw the attention. They are fascinating both for adults and young people alike. Beksiński the artist has one great asset. He is not after originality at any price, he does not worry, like thousands of other artists, about coming up with something which will interest the media. In this day and age popularity sells extremely well. What is amazing is precisely that Beksiński achieved fame and success in art thanks to the quality of his work, bypassing the battlefields of visual aesthetics and nihilism, which are often conjured up for special events. He pursues his own painting far from all the manifestos and the isms. He has his ardent admirers, but there are also those who reject his painting. This only goes to show the power of this art. I suspect that Zdzisław is aware that he is creating a timeless and universal art. I suspect it, because I don't think that any discussion on this subject could lead him to an unambiguous assessment of his own achievements. He must certainly be aware that only an authentic, absolutely faultless and unique oeuvre has any chance of withstanding the test of time, the severest, most objective verifier and judge of aesthetics. The problem of time and existence in it crops up very often in our discussions.

Beksiński doesn't fit the conventional image of artists at all. He is exceptionally modest and - I don't hesitate to say this - distrustful of people. Maybe this is due to the fact that in his heart of hearts he is a pessimist, although in his immediate relations with people he always gives the impression of serenity and composure. He keeps his pessimism to himself, though it must have some sort of effect on his decisions and appraisal of a situation. On the other hand he is a person of unquestionable sensibility, continually giving his support to a variety of charity campaigns and institutions, and donating his pictures for charity auctions.

He loathes official meetings, crowds, or flashy events. It is extremely rare for him to be induced to come to the opening of his own exhibition, and every time he leaves his house for such an occasion it's a big experience for him. This would indicate that Beksiński has his established lifestyle, and excursions of this type beyond his own beat distract him in his work and everyday affairs. When a round birthday was looming ahead for him, he became worried at the mere thought that he could be celebrating it with some kind of official or national forms of recognition. At home he always receives his visitors wearing what he likes best - jeans and a shirt, and the very thought of having to put on a jacket and tie, followed by the further consequences of having to receive the distinction makes his stomach turn. On the other hand he enjoys giving interviews and answering difficult and personal questions.

There are no chance occurrences in Beksiński's behaviour. It seems he can't spare the time for superfluous activities. Perhaps he wants to record his presence within the bounds of existence as effectively as he can. With his painting he's already earned himself a place in history; while the computer is no doubt a good place to register and store his achievements.

When I was singing in the Washington Opera, the album of Beksiński's works came out. I bought a few copies and during the last performance gave them to my colleagues as a farewell gift. All of them without exception were amazed at the quality and nature of these works. One, looking at a sombre and beautiful picture said, "I wonder if this man can laugh." I replied that he had a tremendous sense of humour and a keen wit, that his attitude to himself and to life was somewhat ironic, but that he loved life, and if there was a chance to win an extra hundred years on the lottery he'd definitely be playing regularly and hoping to win.

I have to admit that Zdzisław astonishes me with his knowledge, not only on painting. Our discussions on the visual arts always inevitably digress into purely technical matters. It's never a question of artistic elation or inspiration, but rather of the rationality in a painter's ideas.

Music plays an enormous role in Beksiński's life, it's everywhere in his house. His collection of recordings says a lot about its owner. In addition he knows a lot about music; his knowledge allows him to converse freely on a variety of topics. He knows his composers and their works from the Baroque to the present-day ones who are known only to a handful. His opinions on music are very concrete and convincing.

Beksiński definitely has a complex personality, but at the same time he is an excellent conversationalist and a superb friend. In none of his conversations have I ever heard any critical remarks by him about the work of other artists.

Although his work gives the impression of settling accounts with eternity and being an attempt to "tame" the world's greatest mystery, Beksiński is close to life and people. Close to the world, but not to the world of TV and the papers, which doesn't interest him much. He has his own world… I've never seen any newspapers in his house. Either he reads through them quickly and gets rid of them immediately, or he has no use for them, as the outside world, particularly politics, don't interest him very much. So how come he is so well briefed about everything? Probably from "the world's biggest dustbin," as he sometimes describes the Internet. He must certainly be feeling lonely after the loss of his wife Zofia and son Tomek, but he is not alone. I remember Zosia as a quiet, slender and attractive woman with beautiful eyes. At the time she was ill: aware of the situation she was brave, and every time I saw her my admiration for her courage and determination rose. For a few years Zdzich's life was like sitting on top of a volcano. On the one hand there was Zosia, the hours of whose life were running away faster than anybody else's; and on the other there was Tomek, a charismatic promoter of young avant garde music and an excellent translator of film scripts (Monty Python), whose wish it was to terminate his life when he wanted to. Only after his loss did I realise how good his translations were. He not only translated the texts, but transmitted the atmosphere as well, which must have been much more complicated. He was certainly a well-educated, extremely intelligent person, with a tremendous sense of humour.

I always leave the house in ulica Sonaty wiser, not only having seen what Zdzisław is working on, but also enriched by a lot of new information in a variety of fields. Whenever I phone Beksiński, I ask how he is.
"Well, I'm alive and moving about like a fellow in his advanced years," he says.
"And what are you doing?" I ask.
"I'm sitting in front of the computer trying to do something," he replies, "but this computer's slow, I should get a new one, but to do that I'd need to paint something. Only once I buy a better one it'll already be out of date, because somewhere in the world someone will have come up with an upgraded model, so I'll have to upgrade as well, and as you know, I'm not selling any of my computer works."
"But you're painting?" I continue.
""Yes, but in the morning, when the light's good."
"What are you painting?"
"Now, that I don't know. We'll wait and see when I finish it."

So Beksiński's works sometimes come from a ready vision, sometimes from a dream, and sometimes from the artist's "wandering about" on the board.

A woman journalist once asked me what Beksiński was like. "A genius in painting," I said, "whose works were fascinating in the 20th century and will go on being fascinating in the 21st and later centuries."
In addition he's an ordinary person but mysterious like his paintings. His painting can't be translated into the language of reality, because there's some sort of mysticism about it, in the sense of the impact it makes on the imagination. Beksiński has his mysteries, an explanation of which might perhaps be found in his paintings, but personal references are of no significance in the reception of this art. What counts is the impression it makes, and anyone who has seen Beksiński's work will certainly never forget it.

A subject which sometimes crops up in our conversation is the meaning of his works. Beksiński has consistently refused to be drawn into making comments on this issue, claiming that his works have no symbolic or moral sense. I agree with this, since Zdzisław is in no way either a moralist or a symbolist. However, since, according to J.L. Borges, "Intelligence is closer to doubting than to nodding in agreement," everyone has the right to their own interpretation of what they see. I shall therefore insist that each of Beksiński's pictures has a meaning, at least for its recipient. Zdzisław says that when he paints he does not try to communicate some meaningful idea. He paints a picture that suits his imagination of the work's nature. The artist doesn't have to know how his work will influence his recipients. Although I'm not too fond of intellectual and philosophical interpretations of paintings, when I think of Beksiński's works I come to the conclusion that by creating an atmosphere of horror, or sometimes of the grotesque, this artist is building up an illusion which is perhaps a border station between existence in reality and the passage into non-existence or, if you will, into eternity.

Wiesław Ochman

Wieslaw Ochman - world famous opera singer, art collector and painter in his own right. A close friend of Zdzislaw Beksinski.
*This text is part of the Introduction to the album "Beksinski 2", published by BOSZ in 2002.