Towards a Better Future

Criticism is an ugly profession that paralyses, extinguishes and destroys the noblest human qualities. 

Jules Champfleury, Realism. Letter to Madame Sand

History necessarily binds events and people into bundles. Art history does likewise, although it is reluctant to admit it. Comparing art—which is still regarded as the quintessence of human uniqueness—is treated as a procedure both necessary and awkward, born of compulsion, abbreviation, haste and simplification. It is easier to apply to old art, to artists for whom, after several hundred years, it makes no difference whether they belong to the naturalistic current of the Gothic or the realist current of the proto-Renaissance.  It is harder with artists who lived only a few decades ago, of whom there remains a memory of certain traits that do not fit the system¹. Juxtaposing and exhibiting living artists together² encourages comparison, choices and taking sides, all of which forces one to abandon anonymity and relinquish the omniscient narrator's armchair. If, despite what hangs on the walls, we manage to remember that this is an exhibition with the word “portrait” in its title, let us try to look at both Laura Pawela and Krzysztof Skarbek as one looks at a portrait: searching for familiar features, trying to recognise in them someone—something—that we seem to have known for a long time. Let us try to remember whom they resemble.

Krzysztof Skarbek's pictures have decidedly unfashionable features, owing to their invariably distinct subject. The subject, the narrative offered in two ways—first pictorially and then in the title—was obligatory in the sweet old days before the avant-gardes turned art inside out. People then believed in a preordained hierarchy of subjects, beginning with religious and proceeding through mythological, historical, battle and genre scenes to portraits³. The age that believed most strongly in such a hierarchy was dominated by history painting. The Enlightenment greatly dimmed the still earlier, Baroque faith in religious pictures, without itself believing strongly enough that reason could be painted in the costume of myth; the nineteenth century was thus left facing the necessity of painting history. Among Skarbek's works we find several religious pictures and many that, in a catalogue, would fall somewhere between genre and history painting. We must therefore seek a pendant to his work in the broadly understood nineteenth century. The idea of pairing him with Romantic painters of nebulous spectres such as Grottger—or melancholic fantasists with a fondness for crowds such as Malczewski—must be rejected at once. Spectres are scarce in Skarbek's pictures, and fantasy is limited: everything is taken straight from life. He paints real, even banal things, such as means of communication. Most often urban transport (cars, trams), sometimes interpersonal communication (computers, kisses). The fact that our everyday experience of communication differs somewhat from his pictures is due to a certain defect of vision frequently encountered among nineteenth-century poets: Skarbek is a seer with piercing sight⁴. This acute sight accounts for the somewhat altered colours, as well as for the fact that Skarbek invariably paints his stories as they ought to be, rather than as we know them. Jan Matejko suffered from the same defect of vision⁵. 

The evident similarity between Skarbek and Matejko arises from the fact that, in both cases, painting is the most convenient and best method of showing history, and it is entirely irrelevant whether that history has already happened, will happen or could never have happened at all. The overwhelming need to paint their own histories unites them, while Skarbek is as much a fantasist as Matejko. The staffage of Skarbek's pictures, filled with the technical products of civilisation, encourages us to place them within what appears to be so contemporary a sphere as science fiction⁶. Looking at Skarbek's pictures, let us recall Mieczysław Porębski's conclusions about Jan Matejko: “Matejko was not a history painter adhering in nineteenth-century fashion to the facts; he was a maker of myths, operating in an atemporal, ‘metahistorical’ present nonetheless filled with relics of the past. Hence the not phantasmal but positively phantasmagorical⁷ sharpness of the details he painted into the picture, their aggressive presence in the foreground, and their interpretation not as historical but as allegorical (I am thinking here of Courbet's real allegory, composed of meaningful details)⁸.” Sharpness of detail, foreground presence and, above all, that metahistorical “present” can be found in almost every picture by Skarbek. Both artists have the scrupulous historian's irritating habit of bending reality to fit their vision. We believe Matejko that the Prussian Homage of 1525 took place against the Cloth Hall as rebuilt several decades later by Padovano. We believe that the commander Heinrich von Plauen is fleeing towards the right-hand corner of the picture, although he was not at Grunwald⁹. We believe that Rejtan is protesting at the 1773 Sejm against the Targowica Confederation. Why should we not believe Skarbek that an Eiffel tower-rocket levitates over a jungle-covered Wrocław, that cars fly¹⁰ and people carry horses? In both, the painterly force of the vision matters. Speaking about his pictures, Skarbek emphasises his references to myth and archetype: “we can also discern here new myths and symbols of our times. Among today's object-symbols invested with mythological meanings are the car, television, the computer and the mobile phone.” According to Porębski, “Matejko was precisely such a creator-renderer of myth, possessing an extraordinary force and reach of influence, as scarcely needs emphasising (…)”. A force that proved stronger than historical truth, as Porębski observes, adding: “which does not, after all, mean that myths lie. What is proper to them—at least as I should like to understand it—is a certain peculiar third logical value: one that may follow truthfully from any premises, even premises that evidently falsify reality, but which, when itself properly interpreted, may truthfully imply—as myths do—truths of a somehow higher order.”¹¹.  The third logical value and truths of a higher order are not always entirely comprehensible, but they can be as compelling as myth and as exciting as Skarbek's pictures. Skarbek, like Matejko, is undoubtedly a Renderer of Myth¹². 

While we are discussing phantasms, just imagine how wonderful it would be if Skarbek could now be seated, as Matejko was in 1878, upon the throne of the Spirit King¹³.  If every year school trips were taken not only to see The Battle of Grunwald but also, for example, In Our City, Trams Are Also Used for Summer Sports¹⁴ or The World's Air Forces Scatter Flower Bombs, who knows—perhaps it would be possible to escape binary logic and break free of the embrace of the reality that increasingly surrounds us. Perhaps today's schoolchildren, their hearts fortified by Skarbek's phantasms— Cybergolot Will Take You Towards a Better Future, or even After Work We Sometimes Dance on Specially Tilted Cars—would realise his Arcadian visions during their lifetimes¹⁵. Krzysztof Skarbek deserves the throne of interrex of Polish art because of a singularity that extends far beyond Poland.

Skarbek's singularity arises directly from the cheerful nature of his pictures. One can count the painters of joyful pictures on the fingers of one hand. If a picture has been preserved in art history as joyful, cheerful and affirmative, it has usually been a still life or landscape, and very rarely a narrative picture showing a story. Hundreds of pages have been written about the joy of Chardin's or Cézanne's fruit. If we leave aside fruity paradises and bloodless mythological pictures (such as the birth of Venus), what remains—Chełmoński's Indian Summer? There are astonishingly few cheerful pictures that tell a story. It is harder still to name artists who, like Skarbek, repeatedly painted optimistic visions. Perhaps Poussin, although his classical Arcadia has dark secrets; perhaps Watteau with his simulated fêtes galantes; perhaps Boucher, bordering on kitsch, and his imitator Renoir. Skarbek might be closest to Zygmunt Waliszewski, with his feasts in Renaissance settings painted with similarly wild colour¹⁶. For twenty years, Skarbek has accomplished something almost impossible: painting with a palette not dominated by irony in its five rhetorical shades. Perhaps this also explains the limited recognition of his painting; happiness is so boring, after all.

Skarbek is exceptional because he sings the praises of an earthly paradise that is right here, within arm's reach—perhaps the reach of an arm fitted with a “device for catching television sets”. In doing so, he has avoided both infantilism and kitsch. In the second half of the twentieth century, the iconography of paradisus terrestris underwent a process that might be called the Californication of paradise. One difference between Pawela and Skarbek is that Pawela paints the simulacra that the ingenious inhabitants of this sole earthly paradise tinker with in their silicon garages and use to keep us at a distance, to catch us in the net¹⁷, while Skarbek paints Vitamins for You, and one can believe that happy convertibles will soon be speeding past signs reading: Wrocław 28 km (this is Matejko's metahistorical “present”). 

For that matter, perhaps such pictures could only have been painted in 1986. His first exhibition was held at the University of Wrocław in February 1986 and organised by Waldemar “Major” Frydrych, leader of the Orange Alternative. When one browses the titles of newspapers that devoted attention to Skarbek's pictures—Wieczór Wrocławia, Życie Częstochowy, Życie Radomskie, Gazeta Dolnośląska—one has the impression that he and his sunny vision were trapped like an insect in amber. And now, with things as they are, we look at his pictures like an amber trinket that appears increasingly out of place. Skarbek's absence is all the more surprising because, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Polish art has been experiencing another wave of return to painting, no smaller than that of the second half of the 1980s. Perhaps Skarbek will no longer break through the new, political banality in the way the Orange Alternative did.

During his studies, Skarbek felt quite painfully the Academy's hostility towards combining painting with narrative. The idea of correspondance des arts, still alive during the first avant-garde and rooted in Horace's ut pictura poesis (to which Pawela also succumbs), was replaced in the second half of the twentieth century by the idea of pure painting, shunning every kind of narrative. Jarosław Krawczyk perceptively observed that “the force bursting apart the compositions of Matejko's works (…) arises from the very ‘essence of historicity’, from historiography's inseparable dream of an Ideal Chronicle that would contain a complete description of a given event or group of events.”¹⁸  Before many of Skarbek's pictures, one can sense the operation of a similar “bursting force”.¹⁹ And this is due not only to composition amplified by wild colour, but also to a densely entangled narrative, supplemented by titles as long and convoluted as medieval phylacteries.

In seeking points of comparison between Skarbek and Pawela, it is worth looking for pictures in which Skarbek adopts the personal tone, or more precisely the first-person singular, that is so important to her. There are surprisingly few. If such a picture had to be quickly transformed into a “screen” from the realskarbek series, it could be the 1988 picture I Have a Pink Polar Bear on My Roof and on Winter Evenings I Cook Soup for It²⁰. Juxtaposing the titles of Skarbek's pictures with the titles and texts of Pawela's works brings us rather too close to our own condition, although it certainly underscores the differences emphatically: Skarbek (1988)—On Late Summer Afternoons We Like to Kiss Quickly; Pawela (logo0059)—In General I Have No Time or Sex; Skarbek (1985, about twenty-six years old)—When the Work in the Fields Is Finished, My Girlfriend and I Will Drink Hot Tea; Pawela (logo 0050)—I Turn Twenty-Six Today, No Illusions, No Work, No Concessions. The fact that these differences can be distilled from text, that one need not look at all, and that this is not about pictoriality—or at least not only about pictoriality—is another sign that a route followed by something we experience as our reality runs through both Skarbek and Pawela; and that, over the last twenty years, this route has made a broad detour around the colourful possibilities, the “quite good cars” and “sunny surfing” spread beneath its feet, and for some reason trudges straight towards the place where there is “still an empty account and no money” (logo 0062). We should only remember that it trudges on our own legs. Skarbek and Pawela merely sketch its—our—choices.  

While casting Krzysztof Skarbek as Jan Matejko was obvious from the outset, a figure suited to Laura Pawela took a long time to appear. Judging from her pictures, faithful records of the screens surrounding us, and from the lightly bitter certainty that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, which radiates from Will the Critic Buy Me?—in which she puts herself on display bound like a joint of meat—Laura Pawela can be cast in the role of the Witness. A witness is someone convinced that what they see is a truth to which they must testify. Someone who instinctively believes that rules, principles, procedures and programmes exist and can be faithfully copied. Someone unsullied by the universal virtual sin of solipsism. The gift of faith in eyewitness experience, in the literalness of one's own report from the world, allows the Witness to focus attention on things through which our gaze passes as if through a glass screen, things we do not see. Only a witness's account can draw our attention to them²¹. 

The Witness is the custodian of realism. An exhibition with the word “portrait” in its title must, for that reason alone, be an exhibition about realism. Realism—the revenant word, staked through the heart and fiercely exorcised from art for hundreds of years—continually returns to life²². Of the two artists exhibiting, Laura Pawela is the more orthodox, or perhaps more worldly, realist²³. The (un)questionable realism of Skarbek's world(s) must be qualified somehow: magical—euphoric—futuristic—personal. Pawela's realism is as hard as the rules of the market and as flat as a liquid-crystal display. The relationship between Pawela's and Skarbek's pictures is the relationship between a monitor and the virtual reality unfolding upon its surface.

The most obvious counterpart for Pawela would, of course, be Gustave Courbet, builder of the famous pavilion at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, with the words Le Réalisme above its entrance, which housed his forty-three pictures rejected by the jury. Pawela's pictures can be viewed as Courbet's The Stone Breakers painted from a “first-person perspective”, according to the rules of first-person computer games. Spending hours pounding a computer keyboard is work as hard as breaking stones. It often causes a truly stone-breaker's frustration²⁴. Reviewing the Reality LP exhibition at the Okna Gallery in Ujazdowski Castle, Monika Barańska writes: “Pawela uses the language of her generation; it is no accident that her art is particularly popular among the computer generation.” This generation, pounding away for hours every day in the multi-storey quarries inexplicably called skyscrapers, would in all likelihood recognise the ethos of its profession in Linda Nochlin's passage on The Stone Breakers: “The nature of their labour suggests no analogies, for breaking stones has always been the lot of those lowest in the social hierarchy (…), an activity devoid of any thought of redemption through its relationship to the ennobling effects of work (…) The stone breaker has always been the symbol, the embodiment of unrewarded and meaningless manual labour, work somewhere at the very bottom. It is difficult to recall any earlier traditional representation of this human zero”²⁵. It is equally difficult to find earlier pictures showing “computer-interface message windows”. As with Courbet's realism, the power of such painting—attracting some and irritating others—appeals to a subject that had not previously existed because of its banality. In Laura Pawela's case, we can probably repeat what Porębski recorded in 1849 after Delacroix first encountered Courbet's pictures: “Have you ever seen anything comparable, anything equally powerful, equally independent of anyone?”²⁶ All the “document edges, scroll bars, messages and pixels” painted by Pawela fit effortlessly within Courbet's definition of the art of painting, which “consists solely in the representation of visible and tangible objects”²⁷, while Laura's sentence “I painted questions about the real world” could be appended to the passage in Courbet's manifesto in which he wishes “to translate the customs, ideas and appearance of my epoch”²⁸. Let us return once more to Mieczysław Porębski, who writes that Courbet painted “in a manner devoid of all idealisation, all picturesqueness, all sentimentality—which does not mean emotion. For that is concealed in the very materiality of his paint, in the rough impatience of its texture (…)”²⁹. Pawela's pictures are likewise. Despite every attempt to erase the texture, the materiality of paint remains clearly visible. It is a pleasure, more characteristic of a print exhibition, to trace carefully how the shapes of seemingly identical pictograms familiar from a computer screen change… How the forms of the question marks differ from picture to picture. How the computer sliders in the corners of the pictures change colour. 

All the “personal” messages painted by Pawela—No time for being, My mind—also create a very interesting analogy with Courbet's work.  They fit perfectly into the most mysterious category of Courbet's pictures: real allegory.   

Unfortunately, despite all the parallels listed above, Laura Pawela cannot be compared with Courbet for one reason³⁰. Everything suggests that Courbet was a painter, whereas Pawela says: “(…) I am not a painter, I am not interested in the problems of painting, they do not concern me (…); neither colour, nor texture, nor composition offers sufficient stimulation for me. Reality is another matter: it stimulates my imagination and drives my thoughts.” 

This complicates matters because, beginning precisely with the texture, colour and composition of Pawela's pictures, several further affinities could be identified, forming a surprisingly broad spectrum of purely painterly, visual similarities. Some of Reallaura's green pictures (Beautiful? Logo 0042), made from scattered pixels, are not far removed from Ryszard Winiarski's pictures painted according to the calculus of probability, however distant they may be within the classifications of art history. The computer pictures (especially those without text) are not far removed from the achievements of artists in the sterile, abstract current of concrete art, such as Dieter Helis or Magnus Petersson.

Before returning to the fundamental question—what is the essence of Pawela's work?—it should be emphasised once again that Pawela deserves her laurels. She is already an important figure in Polish art, and there is much to suggest that she will remain one for a long time. Like that of many artists in the second half of the twentieth century who attracted public attention, her importance rests not so much on a volcanic, Matejko-like eruption of concepts and narratives as on the apt use of technology as metaphor³¹.  

If neither colour, texture nor even composition is the essence of her work, what remains is content—content necessarily reduced to text.

Let us seek an equivalent for work consisting of continual notes. Something that is a stream of messages, presumably flowing from somewhere in the mythical stream of consciousness of the lyrical subject reallaura. Reallaura is the author of a diary, an author who pays homage to Reality.

Given the fairly modest achievements of Polish diary-writing, the only suitable alter ego can be Maria Dąbrowska. If, for a moment, we adopt Skarbek's manner—cheerfully, without an excess of irony—the pairing will cease to appear so arbitrary. As time passes, Maria Dąbrowska enters literary history ever more clearly chiefly as the author of the Diaries, written from 31 July 1914 to 8 May 1965³². For the time being, Laura Pawela has likewise secured a place for herself in contemporary Polish art through a diary. It is worth hoping (though difficult to believe) that it will eventually fill as many volumes as Dąbrowska's. The earliest entries in Dąbrowska's Diaries from the First World War are often not much longer and possess much of reallaura's aura³³. Maria Dąbrowska's final entry, from Saturday, 8 May 1965, eleven days before her death, already sounds like a quotation from reallaura: “Insipid—can there be a more pejorative word? Well, in our life, apparently so abundant, there is too much of the insipid element. The same is true of the diary, in fact [?]”

Finally, so as not to lose the pleasure of the omniscient narrator, let us try, despite what can be seen in this exhibition, to find common features in the two of them: Skarbek and Pawela. We shall need a quotation from a classic quoting a classic:

 “To satisfy the desire for dehumanisation, there is no need to alter the innate nature of things. It is enough to reverse the value of the model and create an art in which the minor events of life appear in the foreground and on a monumental scale. 

Here we find the connecting link between two apparently different methods of modern art: the surrealism of metaphor and what may be called infrarealism. Both satisfy the need to avoid and overlook reality. Instead of ascending to poetic heights, art descends below the level that defines natural perspective. If realism can be overcome, it is only by placing too great an emphasis upon it and examining the microstructure of life with a lens in one's hand—as we observe in Proust, Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Joyce. (…)

The procedure consists simply in allowing marginal matters, which normally attract no attention, to play the leading role in the drama of life³⁴.” The procedure described by Ortega y Gasset, as quoted by Mario Praz, is close to the principles of diary-writing. It is the source code for the reallaura programme.

If only we agree that Skarbek's personal realism is somewhat surreal, that his need to tell joyful stories grows from the same upward movement—above, sur—that propelled Breton's manifesto, then it is here that we shall find the shared features of Krzysztof Skarbek's and Laura Pawela's portrait. Ortega y Gasset leaves the most important point unstated. It is not a matter of “avoiding and overlooking reality”. That is not the purpose of the leaps above and genuflections over the “microstructure of life”. Regardless of direction—above or below—looking from an unusual perspective produces what Ernst Cassirer called art: an “intensification of reality”.  

¹ Let us say: with artists of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Later art is of interest almost exclusively to people who make their living from it.

² At best, it ends with one of those “juxtaposed” feeling deeply offended.

³ Nudes, studies of models and still lifes (including computer still lifes) were treated merely as exercises.

⁴In poetry, the keen-sighted seer appears in company worthy of the surreal atmosphere of Skarbek's pictures: 

“As a keen-sighted seer or as a rhinoceros,
For keenly he sees and pierces with his horn”   Juliusz Słowacki, Beniowski, Canto Three

⁵ Jarosław Krawczyk described Matejko's best-known self-portrait, painted at the request of Korwin Milewski, as follows: “The long-haired old man, looking at the viewer (…) appears to be more than a painter: he is Norwid's chronicler-seer, looking ‘deep into the epochs’.” Quoted in J. Krawczyk, Matejko and History, Warsaw 1990, p. 42.

⁶ This techno-futurological perspective offers the first opportunity to juxtapose Skarbek's work with Laura Pawela's. Skarbek's pictures could successfully illustrate Stanisław Lem's vision of advanced imitology in Summa Technologiae. From this perspective, Pawela's painted screens decidedly belong to the beginnings of phantomatics. From the point of view of some cybernetic artificial intelligences (AI) that will exterminate the remnants of humanity, painted computer screens—if by some miracle they survived—would serve as prehistoric cave paintings.

⁷ A little earlier in the same article, Porębski observed: “Stefania Zahorska wrote as early as the 1930s that the great canvases directed by Matejko were populated by phantoms; now, following Professor Janion's recently published ‘phantasmatic’ studies, the term acquires a tempting freshness.” See M. Porębski, Was Matejko a Painter?, in Around Matejko: Proceedings of the Conference ‘Matejko and Central European Painting’, ed. P. Krakowski and J. Purchla, Kraków 1994, p. 22.

⁸ Ibid., p. 22.

⁹ Referring to this figure, Jarosław Krawczyk points to the presence in Matejko's pictures of “explanatory figures” painted in order, “in accordance with the rules of Matejko's theory”, to show “the entirety of the historical fact”. In the case of von Plauen, who successfully defended Malbork, his presence on the canvas “automatically transforms the vision of the most magnificent victory into a history of a lost opportunity”. Quoted in J. Krawczyk, Matejko and History, Warsaw 1990, p. 133. With Skarbek, the reverse most often occurs: lost opportunities turn into magnificent victories, but the nonchalance towards reality is similar. Instead of “explanatory figures”, there are explanatory titles.

¹⁰ The recurrent motif of a figure flying on a car appears to be an amusing trace of Skarbek's fascination with the painting of Bosch and Bruegel, where, as we know, people flew in crowds and on anything that came to hand.

¹¹ Porębski, op. cit., pp. 22–23.

¹² Similarities also appear in the reception of Matejko's and Skarbek's work. As Waldemar Okoń writes, one of the “fundamental propositions of criticism was the conviction that Matejko was a ‘fiery spirit’.” Nineteenth-century critics “obsessively returned to Matejko's ‘fiery’ work, to the eruption of his genius, to the volcanic quality of his works.” See W. Okoń, Nineteenth-Century Modes of Receiving Matejko's Work, in Around Matejko. ⁷ A little earlier in the same article, Porębski observed: “Stefania Zahorska wrote as early as the 1930s that the great canvases directed by Matejko were populated by phantoms; now, following Professor Janion's recently published ‘phantasmatic’ studies, the term acquires a tempting freshness.” See M. Porębski, Was Matejko a Painter?, in Around Matejko: Proceedings of the Conference ‘Matejko and Central European Painting’, ed. P. Krakowski and J. Purchla, Kraków 1994, p. 123. Almost a century later, another Matejko—Stanisław—compiled a vocabulary of concepts important to Skarbek's work and listed colour: “the vibration of strong colours is an energetic force”; writing later about Skarbek's “unbridled sense of humour”, he mentioned that “this humour ‘brings the healthy fire of reflection to all rigid habits’.” It is worth recalling all the real torches, fire-eaters and fire-breathers who appeared in Skarbek's artistic actions and performances (including Dialogue of Cold and Hot Pictures from 1997). There is no doubt that, through both his “wildly energetic” painting and his self-creation, Skarbek too is perceived as a “masculine fiery spirit”.

¹³ The phrase “Spirit King” was uttered by Matejko himself during a somewhat “megalomaniacal” speech, as Henryk M. Słoczyński describes it, delivered after he received a consecrated sceptre at Wawel Castle as a sign of his dominion over art. See Henryk M. Słoczyński, Matejko, Wrocław 2000, p. 143.

¹⁴ Although in summer it would be before the right-hand part of the diptych, entitled In Our City, Trams Are Also Used for Winter Sports.

¹⁵ There is, of course, a purely educational problem. It would probably be necessary to establish some national Commission for Education and the Renewal of Feeling to decide which of Skarbek's pictures should fortify future generations. Some of them would make it difficult to reach a national compromise on ideological correctness. Two Hijacked Aeroplanes Bound for Warm Countries might be overlooked, but there would probably be no agreement over On Late Summer Afternoons We Like to Kiss Quickly, although, appearances notwithstanding, this phantasm is exceptionally utopian.

¹⁶ From Waliszewski's feasts it is only a short step to the Georgian feasts of Niko Pirosmanishvili. What Tadeusz Dobrowolski wrote about Waliszewski's work and personality is not far removed from Skarbek's: “he was therefore threatened by eclecticism, which he fortunately managed to avoid thanks to his strongly defined personality, inclined towards euphoric states and towards expressive, even frenetic, creativity, which connected it with Romanticism.” Quoted in T. Dobrowolski, Polish Painting 1764–1964, Wrocław–Warsaw–Kraków 1968, p. 442.

¹⁷ In culture, this process acquired the learned name of creolisation. See G. Sztabiński, History, Contemporarism, Creolization, Art Inquiry, vol. IV (XIII), pp. 72–76.

¹⁸ J. Krawczyk, Matejko and History, p. 49.

¹⁹ This also explains Skarbek's numerous artistic activities beyond painting.

²⁰ If we pause for a moment over colour, we know from elsewhere that reallaura “would like a pink display” (logo0033). And there we are: Skarbek already has one (a bear, admittedly, not a mobile), while Pawela would like one but does not have it.

²¹ In the role of Witness, I should most like to see Pawela on Good Friday in place of Saint Veronica. A woman holding out her small mobile phone (with a camera, of course) towards the passing condemned man would be a scene worthy of a Skarbek picture (if he decided to paint sorrowful religious pictures). Click, and we have a vera icon on the display. Transforming Pawela's reallaura pictures into a vera icon allows us to emphasise a feature of the witness's position that is irrelevant from an aesthetic point of view. In other words, it highlights certain limitations carried by realism understood solely as reporting. The true vera icon arose (as I should prefer to believe) not because, as an imprint of truth, it had to arise according to an inhuman—divine—plan of salvation, but from human com-passion, from empathy. No screen, not even the most perfect mirror, can wipe a face, reach somebody in need or help another person. This remains a challenge for the technologies of interpersonal communication (including the media). Here, too, lies the limitation of realism, which can quickly change from an aesthetic position into pragmatic, everyday Realpolitik.

²² If we restrict ourselves to the realisms that passed through twentieth-century art and literary history, leaving philosophical entanglements aside, we would have to list critical realism, socialist realism, fantastic realism, capitalist realism, magical realism and the specifically Polish currents of symbolising realism and radical realism. 

²³ This realism brings her closer to the apparently artistically remote Katarzyna Kozyra, who continues realism (or rather naturalism). Kozyra makes no secret of her dislike of intellectual formulas: “I have not formulated my art conceptually; I have not devised any ideology for it. Something simply sits at the back of my mind and incites me to do this or that.” The catalogue of similarities between nineteenth-century realism and Kozyra's work is no shorter than in Pawela's case. The perfect realist, Gustave Flaubert, advised: “Human beings are to be treated like mastodons and crocodiles; why be amazed by the horns of the former and excited by the jaws of the latter? Show them, stuff them, preserve them—that is all; but judge and appraise them—never!” Judging from Bathhouses and Pyramid of Animals, both showing and stuffing are techniques Kozyra frequently practises.

²⁴ rellaura (logo0061): “Fuck this, I'm not going to sit at the computer all the time.”

²⁵ L. Nochlin, Realism, Warsaw 1974, p. 151.

²⁶ Quoted in M. Porębski, An Outline of the History of Art, Warsaw 1988, vol. III, p. 155. Unfortunately, under the date given by Porębski there is no mention of Courbet in the Polish edition of Delacroix's diaries. It is, however, worth quoting his later opinion from 1853: “(…) I went to see Courbet's pictures. I was astonished by the sweep and power of the principal picture; but what a picture! What a subject! The vulgarity of the forms is insignificant; the vulgarity and barrenness of the thought are repellent; (…).” The picture that so shocked Delacroix was The Bathers; Laura Pawela appears to encounter similar objections, and Windows XP interfaces may today seem as “barren and vulgar” as, a hundred and fifty years ago, the “fat bourgeoise seen from behind and completely naked, apart from a scrap of carelessly painted cloth covering the lower part of her buttocks, who emerges from a shallow puddle in which one could not even wet one's feet.” Quoted in E. Delacroix, Diaries: Part One (1822–1853), Gdańsk 2003, p. 369.

²⁷ Courbet in His Own Eyes and in the Eyes of His Friends, ed. P. Courthion, Warsaw 1963, p. 340. Such literally, flatly, “straight-on” painted “visible and tangible objects” have appeared in recent years, among other places, in pictures by Pola Dwurnik, who paints banknotes as if alive; Kamil Kuskowski, who cuts canvases to the shape and colour of football supporters' scarves; and Robert Maciejuk, who paints almost heraldic series of aviation signs and corporate symbols.

²⁸ M. Porębski, An Outline of the History of Art, p. 155. 

²⁹ M. Porębski, op. cit., pp. 155–156.

³⁰ Even so, I personally believe that one day a picture-paraphrase (by Pawela? Skarbek?) will be made referring to Courbet's 1854 picture Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, or more precisely to the allegorical title given it by the critic Edmond About, Fortune Bowing before Genius. Though I shall not attempt to determine what its title should be: Good Morning, Mr Skarbek? Good Morning, Ms Pawela?

³¹ Apt from an artistic point of view, which most often means inconsistent with the intended use. Pawela, with her computer pictures and reallaura on mobile-phone displays, resembles Warhol consistently using screen-printing for everything.

³² As recently as 1962, Z. Libera asserted without hesitation: “In Maria Dąbrowska's literary output, Nights and Days occupies the foremost place. The great epic work (…) entered the national consciousness (…).” It now seems slowly to be leaving that consciousness. One may lament this, but it does not alter the fact. Perhaps the only epic possible today is reallaura's Nights and Days. When one browses yellowed studies, one continually encounters phrases that could easily be applied to Pawela's work. Stanisław Kołaczkowski drew attention to the novelty initiated by Dąbrowska—a return to the postulate of practical wisdom and its “alliance with life”. When we follow reallaura's daily dilemmas, we have the same impression of an “alliance” that frees her from concern for composition. Kołaczkowski contrasted Nights and Days with “the novels of the immediately preceding period, which sinned by bringing their artistic means, their constructivism and metaphorism excessively to the fore; in the image we saw more of the technique of representation than of the things that were to be represented”. Quoted in Z. Libera, The Enduring Values of Maria Dąbrowska's “Nights and Days”, Przegląd Humanistyczny, IV, 1962, no. 6 (33), p. 11. One has the impression that, through her intimate mobile-phone diary-writing, Pawela restores what, according to L. Piwiński, Dąbrowska restored to prose: the “vocem humanam”. See L. Piwński, Rocznik Literacki, 1933, pp. 61–62. When we read that “Dąbrowska presents, in an extraordinarily vivid and artistically subtle manner, a characteristic social process that took place in Poland at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. (…) We find in it the phenomenon that, in the language of sociology, is known as the genealogy of the Polish intelligentsia.” And then we read in reallaura: still an empty account and no money (logo 0062), is it worth making art over there? (logo 0057); we spend less and less time together, Bartek is always at work (logo 0063), it is impossible to shake the feeling that we are following parallel processes, only now we are following the artistically subtle process of the end of the Polish intelligentsia. Quoted in Z. Libera, The Enduring Values of Maria Dąbrowska's “Nights and Days”, Przegląd Humanistyczny, IV, 1962, no. 6 (33), p. 3.

³³ 25 January 1917: “(…) I have frostbitten my feet. (…) I have a great deal of work. Life is monotonous—but good and pleasant, like a pleasant song sung continually on a single note. I think more and more often that I want to have a child. Marian wants it very much too, and, by God, we are doing what we can.”

³⁴ Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanisation of Art, quoted in Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts, Warsaw 1981, p. 242.