The Game of Resistance
Wojciech Fangor

 

“I am an individual who probably never deeply believed in any single organized ideology. I didn’t believe much in God that I was threaten with as a child, because I was much more afraid of my father. I always feared enslavement through superstition, faith, and belonging. Of course, I had periods when I believed in Saint Nicholas (until I was 5). I believed for much longer in the extraordinary nature of the Polish nation, its virtues, abilities, achievements, and the wickedness of all its neighbors. The war period strengthened my belief that humanity is mentally sick, crazy, and fundamentally evil. This belief, combined with my mental problems resulting from the traumatic experiences (during the war), led me to despair and to attempts to relinquish my faith in humanity, in the triumph of good over evil. It seemed to me that there had to be some idea that could create a community of people of good will. Beyond nationality, beyond race, beyond religion. Hence my postwar leftist sympathies.

These sympathies were, of course, constantly tested. Contradictions were revealed. Communism versus the Russian Empire. Classlessness versus the incitement of class conflict. The scientific rationality of Marxism versus wild hatred and terror. Acting in the interests of disadvantaged classes while simultaneously building an exclusive bureaucratic class. Protection of cultural goods versus simultaneous destruction of the class that created and maintained them. Lack of trust in the creators of art and science. And, of course, general hypocrisy, deception, and concealing the true image of oneself.

The period between 1949 and 1953 was a time of great contradictions for me. The desire for moral and psychological reconstruction after the catastrophe of war, the search for a vehicle that would socially unite people and provide a chance for joint action in this reconstruction – and at the same time a feeling of loneliness and helplessness. Liberation from the fear of my father because of his imprisonment, and simultaneously an awareness of the enormous injustice and harm done to him.

My father’s sentence and imprisonment opened up the only opportunity for me to find myself in a psychological position of strength against him. I am free, I have the opportunity to act. The trial and the (death) sentence were a theatrical representation of revolutionary terror. Neither the trial nor the sentence had any criminal or legal basis. It was a trial to intimidate the bourgeois class. I was therefore convinced that just as there were no legal reasons for his imprisonment, there would be no legal possibility of his release. Numerous legal applications for a review of the trial, filed every year, were systematically rejected. Since he had not been legally convicted, he could not be legally released.

I was 27 years old then, a completely unknown young painter. My individual and individualistic exhibition at the Jewish Theater at Saski Square in 1949 went completely unnoticed. At the same time, a great discussion erupted in the press that the working masses and their Marxist leadership were impatiently awaiting realistic, understandable, propagandistic socialist art.

I knew that my academic education and my talent could offer a proposal for socialist realism based on the classicism and romanticism of the first half of the 19th century. This style, originating in the Renaissance, was widely replicated in churches for centuries. Church art, in turn, was the only art form with which the masses of workers and peasants had contact.

I painted several paintings of this kind on current topics. I received awards. I became famous, noticed, and respected by the artistic community, and through that community, noticed and recognized by the government-party bureaucracy.

Within a few months, I was befriended by luminaries of the artistic and bureaucratic worlds… After a few paintings that made a mark in the artistic community and among higher-ranking government officials—but obviously didn’t reach the masses of workers and peasants—I switched to poster graphics and exhibitions design. In this field, I also found recognition among my colleagues and powerful officials. This was already in 1954 and 1955. I had discussed my father’s fate several times with (Minister) Motyka and (party secretary) Staszewski. Finally, Motyka arranged an audience with (Prime Minister) Cyrankiewicz. I explained to the Prime Minister that my father had been sentenced to death which was later changed into life imprisonment, without any other real basis, as part of a terror campaign to intimidate the bourgeoisie. That the sentence of 1949 had served its purpose, and that keeping him in prison made no sense. Cyrankiewicz agreed with me, and within a week, my father was released from prison without any trial or search.

It was a great psychological triumph for me. For the first time in my life, I felt stronger than my father, I stopped being afraid of him, and in my inner conviction, my entire brief involvement in propaganda art had not stimulated the working class or the peasantry but instead had freed my father from prison and me from the feeling of fear of him.”

Memories of Wojciech Fangor, not dated.

With thanks to Fangor Foundation and Wojciech Fangor Archives at Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw.

Promotional partner: Polish Institute Brussels