Wojciech Fangor
Nudes, 1945-2010

 

FIGURE TROUBLES, by Dominic Eichler
This text is part of the publication “Wojciech Fangor – Nudes”, published by GNYP and The Fangor Foundation in the context of this exhibition.

The pluralist oeuvre of Wojciech Fangor (1922–2015) reflects many of the artistic polemics and geopolitical upheavals of the past century. His reputation primarily rests on his innovative, abstract Modernist Op-art paintings that reached full maturity in his New York period in the 1960s. But considering Fangor’s long, transatlantic life and his diverse output, there is much more to excogitate. As a young man, Fangor had the benefit of traditional artistic training. During the Second World War in his birthplace, Poland, he received private tutelage from two much-admired art professors, Tadeusz Pruszkowski and, later, Felicjan Kowarski. Fangor found he could paint and draw whatever and however he wished and, as a result, his early works are full of confident stylistic sampling. Later, he would put his shape-shifting technical ability to good use in postwar communist Warsaw. It was not until 1958 that his celebrated spatial fuzzy-edged geometric abstract work emerged. But alongside this important body of work, Fangor continued to practice and develop his visual language in other ways as well. From the mid-1970s onwards, for example, came decades of playful postmodern re-figuring, quotation, and collage. Sensitive and talented, Fangor never ceased his engagement both with emerging art ideas and art history until his last day in the studio.

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This catalogue documents work shown in the solo exhibition Nudes (Gnyp Gallery, 2024), the latest in an ongoing series devoted to some of the artist’s lesser known subjects and groups of work, such as Fangor’s pulsating Television Paintings or transitional Interfaces series. The exhibition showcased a collection of rarely seen paintings and many drawings that explore the naked human form with all its variety and cultural resonances. The Nudes exhibition included works dating from Fangor’s artistic beginnings in the turbulent and difficult late 1940s, right up until the visually effervescent and experimental large-scale partially painted collages he produced in the 21st century. Nudes was mounted in close cooperation with the Fangor Foundation, which is completing the artist’s extensive catalogue raisonné. In the past few years, this combined activity has added to the understanding of the breadth of Fangor’s work. It has also proposed an inclusive appreciation of his experimentation across mediums and contrasting styles. The intention of focusing on his non-canonical work is not to diminish Fangor’s significant contribution to abstraction. Instead, it is to explore his oeuvre in the spirit of the artist’s own open-mindedness. An approach that no longer needs, for instance, to be limited to notions such as the abstraction/figuration divide of the Cold War era. It also gives more attention to the radically shifting cultural-political realities the artist faced and his variegated creative response. The motif of the exhibition suggests itself naturally, as Fangor drew and painted the human form continuously during his life. This was the case even while he was presenting his highly successful abstract work to exhibitions and for sale. By taking just a small section of his oeuvre as a case study, the implicit premise of Nudes is to consider the artist’s work as a vibrant, interwoven, contrasting, self-reflective whole. (It also draws attention to Fangor’s vulnerable, intimate side.) Instead of suggesting a heroic linear progression with a mid-point aesthetic climax, what emerges is a thoughtful and ethical artist in a long conversation about art and society. Drawing was an essential personal and artistic activity for Fangor. Teeming with everyday and bohemian life, his nude work variously depicts intimates, friends, and other not-yet-identified models, in both academic and avant-garde styles, thus evidencing a form of ongoing artistic research. Several early sketches, each entitled Akt męski (Male Nude, 1948), show men standing and bending—the lean of their bodies perhaps suggesting some wartime depravation or physical labor. Other contemporaneous works explore Cubism (Akt kubistyczny, Cubist Nude, 1948), or a hybrid semi-abstraction like Henry Moore’s, while others still return to classicist modes such as more realistically rendered, reclining female nudes. Decades on, Fangor’s second wife, the artist and art historian Magdalena Shummer-Fangor, makes an impression of solid dependability in the charcoal sketch Dwa akty [Magda] (Two Acts, Magda, 1991). The drawing depicts her in two robust, standing, side-by-side views with a cropped head that emphasizes the weight and strength of her torso and legs. After joining Fangor in Vienna in 1961, she stayed with him for the rest of his life, and often posed for him in many moods, styles, and domestic settings.
In 2005 a tranche of early drawings was recovered, which led to the creation of this later painted collage work. In compositions such as Akt (1950-2005) and Pedicure 2 (1990-2005), Fangor dramatically and joyously reposits his own beginnings. What is unique about this series of works is their synthesis of abstraction and his life-drawings. Abstraction becomes a filter, a framing screen, or a vibrant responsive field in which the figure is immersed. Fangor noted these works were:

“Images based on the interpenetration of two temporalities, the past as a black and white figurative drawing, and the present time being superimposed on them, as flat colored stains that in a random way partially cover the drawings creating a contrasting unity of temporal and visual opposites.”

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Fangor’s youth was ruptured by the outbreak of the war. His privileged life, filled with painting in villa gardens, travels to Italy and Paris, and admiration for Van Gogh’s art, came to an abrupt end. In 1942 the Gestapo murdered Tadeusz Pruszkowski, one of Fangor’s much cherished private art professors. This incident left a deep scar, a trauma that Fangor reportedly ‘healed’ from by creating the figurative painting Execution (1946). It depicts a firing squad aiming its gun barrels at the viewer in a jarring post-impressionist manner and odd pastel palette. Although he was privileged, Fangor’s war years also still involved fleeing, a brief imprisonment, escaping and surviving and, in 1944, the ethical dilemma of not taking part in the doomed Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupiers. Afterwards, the fraught late 1940s, and very early 1950s, were a time of material scarcity and hardship in all of Europe, still in ruins, and traumatized. Moreover, in postwar Poland, Stalinism and its murderous purges took root, and even after the Khrushchev Thaw in the early 1960s, the country remained more culturally isolated. In 1948, a show trial sentenced Fangor’s own industrialist father to death, a sentence later commuted to life. Regardless, throughout his twenties and thirties, Fangor worked as a young artist successfully climbing the socialist ranks. This was despite the oppressive cultural climate. Between 1953 and 1961, for instance, Fangor designed more than a hundred posters for films and other events (mostly figurative, realistic), working alongside Henryk Tomaszewski and Jan Lenica, among others. Ironically, Fangor’s government connections secured his father’s early release, after which relations between father and son softened. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fangor’s just-in-time international breakthrough came via exhibitions and sojourns in various Western European capitals and New York. Then came his migration to the US as his optical ‘illusive space’ abstraction fully flowered under the patronage of just a few key dealers and curators. This period represents his best known, and most exhibited and researched phase, and accounts for more than 800 works in his oeuvre. A 1970 solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum crowned this period. In subsequent years, interest in the now middle-aged retired art professor Fangor tapered off. But even so, he never stopped producing and in a greater stylistic multiplicity than ever before. It was only in 1999 that Fangor made his nationally celebrated return to a now post-Cold War, and once again democratic, Poland. Troublesome art that does not quite fit into received narratives, and art made in moments of transition and uncertainty when sociopolitical conditions were difficult, speaks potently to our present moment. Thus, a contemporary reading of Fangor’s eclecticism in the wake of postmodernism might allow for multiple contradictory readings across his eventful oeuvre. We can now recognize, for example, the value of work that doesn’t follow a Modernist agenda of world-changing. The whimsical, fleeting, and playful all hold valuable ethical insights. Fangor’s nudes are bursting with such creative, anarchistic energies.

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In the classical tradition, nudes can embody the dignity of humanity, virtue, and truth. A nude has nothing to hide. A nude can marry form and content. Depicting people has always been a political act, reflecting social relations, ideology, and the complexities of human psychology. It encompasses the personal, the erotic, the joys and burdens of our physical existence—the whole messy, fleshy, conflict-filled business of being human. Little wonder, then, that the human figure is a favorite subject for lovers, dreamers, reformers, feminists, outsiders, the marginalized. And for these same reasons, painting has found renewed liveliness in contemporary art when once thought dead. Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fangor’s own youthful stylistic shifts reveal his struggle to find meaning through figuration. Case in point, and unusual even within Fangor’s diverse oeuvre, is the ambitious allegorical composition Metaphysics and Dialectics / Rhetoric and Dialectics (1949). Mysterious, balanced, and gorgeously toned, this almost life-sized oil on canvas work is little known. Haptically speaking, it is as breathtaking as its meaning is enigmatic, or at least charged by ambivalence. The painting dates from the same year as Fangor’s first solo exhibition, which the public largely ignored. It is unknown whether the work was part of that first exhibition. The painting depicts two nude female figures against a background divided into three brushy color fields. One of the two women subjects stands clear-eyed, with an outstretched arm holding a lush red apple. The other is sitting on a chair next to her, hunched and possibly shame- or grief-stricken. Fangor’s first wife, Krystyna Fangor (nee Machnicka), may have been the model, because in 1949 his studio was in his house in Klarysew, where the couple lived together with their son, Roman. The address of the work doesn’t seem personal or familial. Instead, a traditional Judeo-Christian interpretation of the imagery suggests itself as a starting point. Not religious, Fangor’s sympathies seem to be with ‘Eve’ and her red apple. The work’s extended title, the neo-classical rendering of the symbolic nudes, and the political circumstances at the time of its making, however, complicate any easy interpretation. The ‘dialectics’ referred to in the title, for instance, probably evokes the new omnipresence of Marxist ideology, but paired with ‘metaphysics’ and ‘rhetoric’ it is not clear who is who. Fangor’s work doesn’t seem to respond along strict party lines. The standing Eve-like figure seems knowing and oppositional, captivating. Perhaps Fangor is speaking in riddles to maintain the appearance of conformity to the revolutionary politics of the day. Is the ‘rhetoric’, for example, a reference to debates concerning art, or is he subtly criticizing the visual propaganda he would also soon be hired to produce himself? Then there is the problem of the unhappy companion. The distraught woman seems to express a dialectic opposite to the ripe, fertile, desirable offering of knowledge. We might better understand this figure by considering the context. In 1949 the devastation of the Second World War, the specter of the Holocaust, moral morass, and political turmoil were everywhere. Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno would question the very tenets of Enlightenment thought. Given this personal and cultural-political backdrop, the neoclassicism of the painting is also remarkable for its referentiality. As in Fangor’s many Cubist-inspired works, the influence of Pablo Picasso is evident on the young artist’s development and temperament. Picasso himself had a neoclassical turn (an appeal to the calm and solidity of archaic harmony) after the horror of the First World War (1914-1918). Here, a generation later, Fangor seems to follow suit, certainly the turbulence around him and in his own life might have evoked a similar need. It is notable that Picasso, then a communist, was initially popular in Poland and Eastern Europe before Social Realism became the dominant art style. For example, in 1948 the internationally known artist attended the World Congress of Intellectuals in Wrocław, where he also visited Auschwitz concentration camp. It was on this visit that Picasso first flew in a plane, remarking on the ‘Cubist’ fields below, and also drew his iconic peace dove with an olive branch. In 1948 Fangor still had his whole life ahead of him and had yet to exhibit. Expressing an almost illicit youthful optimism, despite everything in a letter dated May 9 to his then wife, he wrote: “My head is full of thoughts, it is full of images, creative emotion and you […] You will accompany me in love and at work. I dream of painting you. I have a million concepts, desires, ideas.” Fangor would accept the metaphorical apple that he himself would create through his art.

Acknowledgments: This text builds on references including the catalog from the recent Fangor retrospective at the National Museum in Gdańsk Fangor—Beyond the Painting (2023) with texts and research by Wojciech Zmorzyński, and the important monographs Wojciech Fangor Color and Space, edited by Magdalena Dabrowski (Skira Editore, 2018) and Stefan Szydłowski’s Wojciech Fangor—Space as Play, which accompanied the survey exhibition at the National Museum in Krakow (2012–2013). The author is also indebted to telephone conversations with Marta Gnyp from Gnyp Gallery, Berlin and Antwerp, and also Jane Whitford. Marta Gynp’s late interview with the artist is a crucial source on the artist’s early years and his politics: see Fangor in an interview with Marta Gnyp at martagnyp.com/publications/wojciech-fangor. As too is the artist’s unpublished autobiography and the Fangor Foundation archive from which the artist’s quotes here were sourced. The translations from Polish to English are courtesy Marta Gnyp. See also the Fangor Foundation’s extensive website: fangorfoundation.org