Professor Stanisław Fijałkowski on Jerzy Nowosielski

J.M.: How do you assess Jerzy Nowosielski’s work from today’s perspective?

S.F.: He was a truly great painter; artists of his calibre are born very rarely. Jerzy Nowosielski did not seek acclaim. His art is a particular way of practising metaphysics; at heart, it is a religious vision of the world and human existence, a means of arriving at the truth about humanity’s place in the cosmos. I was always interested in Jerzy Nowosielski’s work and, in my own way, continually tried to do the same thing — that is, to practise a secular metaphysics. I believe that art is the outcome of symbolic actions, and this conviction was something we shared.

J.M.: How did you meet?

S.F.: We met in the early 1950s, several years before 1956, when the Nowosielskis moved into a painting studio on the eighth floor of the apartment block at 27 Zachodnia Street in Łódź, next door to my studio, just through the wall. At the time, I lived with my family on the other side of the same street, at number 12, so the proximity of my home and studio encouraged frequent meetings. Our acquaintance grew close and we soon became friends. We also met as teachers at the same school, although Jurek did not remain at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Łódź for long, and the institution itself was not a particularly welcoming place for him.

J.M.: The Nowosielskis lived in Łódź from 1950 to 1962. They arrived with high hopes and left for Kraków after twelve years. What were the reasons?

S.F.: In the 1940s and 1950s, Łódź was the most attractive Polish city for artists. More was happening here than anywhere else because the city had not been destroyed during the war. Łódź had excellent theatres, concerts and exhibitions. The artistic community, however, was divided, fragmented and full of contradictions in many respects, and consequently rather indistinct.

Many artists, especially young ones, lived in poverty and took on all manner of work simply to get by. Zosia and Jurek Nowosielski, as indeed I did, designed sets for puppet theatres.

I have already mentioned that Jerzy Nowosielski was associated with the Łódź art school only briefly, where he held a teaching position, because he had not completed a university degree. We should remember that, in the 1950s, the upheavals of war had left many people with complicated personal circumstances. In Nowosielski’s case, the lack of a diploma posed a problem for those then running the Łódź school. I should add that the students in Łódź valued him highly, and he himself liked the city. Fortunately, the Academy in Kraków invited him to join it, awarded him a diploma and appointed him head of a painting studio. More than a decade later, he became a professor. The Kraków milieu proved more cohesive and was able to appreciate Nowosielski’s greatness.

J.M.: How did your relationship develop after Jerzy Nowosielski left Łódź?

S.F.: Very well. We saw each other quite often. When recalling Jerzy Nowosielski’s years in Łódź, one must also mention Teresa Tyszkiewiczowa. This extraordinary and outstanding artist worked in the spirit of non-geometric abstraction, or gesture painting. She played an important role in shaping the Łódź school, where she taught textile art. She also ran something resembling an artistic salon in her home, inviting us to discuss art and listen to avant-garde music. Jurek and Teresa were friends. Teresa valued his work and his searching mind, and they understood one another well. Teresa Tyszkiewiczowa’s salon was an important meeting place for a small circle of friends and a forum for exchanging views. Politics was often discussed there; in our debates, we developed positions on significant events then taking place in the country.

J.M.: Let us return to Jerzy Nowosielski’s work. What interested you about it?

S.F.: The spirituality of Nowosielski’s art. It contained something absent from art associated with Catholic spirituality. Jurek was a Greek Catholic from the Lemko region. In my view, the spirituality of the Eastern Church offered a highly compelling complement to European spirituality, and to Polish spirituality in particular. I found it fascinating to observe how certain formalised canons of icon aesthetics and theology could be contained within painting that was not the painting of icons or sacred images, but secular painting. In every landscape, every portrait and every nude, one can see a spiritual world, and this is immensely important in Nowosielski’s art. In this respect, Jerzy Nowosielski is a unique and singular painter. Jurek was focused on his own work, and what he did was highly compelling.

J.M.: How was Jerzy Nowosielski’s art received by the Łódź community?

S.F.: I do not think Nowosielski was understood by a substantial part of the Łódź painting community. Fortunately, outside the school there was the Museum of Art, which at the time played a major role in creating the necessary tension within the artistic milieu, although Nowosielski’s relationship with the museum was not particularly visible. In remembering that period, one must bear in mind the very clear division between those who placed their trust in reason and those guided to a greater extent by intuition. The latter group was smaller, and many matters — including the relationship between the Łódź milieu and Jerzy Nowosielski — consequently unfolded as they did. The highly active and uncompromising Władysław Strzemiński had no interest at all in Nowosielski’s art, just as he had none in Teresa Tyszkiewiczowa’s work, towards which his attitude was distinctly unfavourable. It always seemed to me that the aim should be to combine reason and intuition. For that reason, I watched Nowosielski’s and Tyszkiewiczowa’s work with great interest.

J.M.: What kind of person was Jerzy Nowosielski?

S.F.: He was a man of faith, conscious of human imperfection and the sinful nature of humanity. That is rare among artists. Nowosielski was both sinful and holy. I also remember him as a witty man. Once, we were away on a plein-air with students. Like all young people, the students enjoyed themselves in the evenings and made a great deal of noise. Late one evening we went down to them and Jurek said to the cheerful group: “Please behave decently!” One of the students burst out laughing and blurted: “What is decency?” “I am merely asking for acoustic decency,” Jerzy Nowosielski replied.

Łódź, May 2015