Tadeusz Piechura Presents a Certain Problem

Tadeusz Piechura presents a certain problem. His works are bound to disappoint the many adherents of the electrical theory of art, according to which every encounter with true art ought to produce a sensation as acute as putting one’s finger into a socket. Unfortunately, Piechura’s works do not reveal such important messages of the last decade’s art as the fact that we are beings of a specific sex, susceptible to illness and disability, and that towards the end of life we most often decline in a terrifying fashion within healthcare and social-welfare facilities.

Tadeusz Piechura’s works say nothing about the oppressiveness of the contemporary world, especially intrusive advertising and insidious consumerism. They remain silent on matters as fundamental to art as globalisation and the war on terror. They cannot be included within the current of art reclaiming appropriated Memory, minority art, or even women’s art.

As if that were not enough, Piechura’s posters cannot be incorporated into the tradition of the exuberant Polish school of poster design, the only one recognised around the world thanks to its painterly gesture, typographic freedom and rejection of compositional rules. In his posters, typographic rigour plays a fundamental role; there is no painterliness, gesture or trace, while the simplicity of the composition makes the rules even more rigid (though not stilted). Piechura’s posters are rooted in a tradition derived from posters made in the 1920s and 1930s within the circles of the Bauhaus and Constructivism. Through Strzemiński and the traditions of the Łódź school (or simply Łódź tradition, since the entire city, with its street grid cutting greyness into rectangles, still looks like a Unist composition), the legacy of the avant-garde reached Piechura’s work. The perfect complement to viewing them is reading the work of Julian Przyboś, an ardent champion in the service of the pre-war avant-garde. Unfortunately, they missed one another in time. When Przyboś thundered at artists in 1957 on the occasion of an exhibition of contemporary art: ‘They talk of “emotions”, of “mood”, just as people declaimed in bourgeois salons half a century ago. Where is the lofty flame of modern art from thirty years ago, in which philistine pretensions to “mood” and to “stirring souls” were consumed?’¹, Tadeusz Piechura was still producing little (as a graphic designer). Simplicity, legibility and an economy of means leading to a sense of infinity – the finest qualities of the first avant-garde – are present in these works. Avant-garde art, having surged ahead of the crowd, always required the viewer to keep pace with it; it demanded effort. Today, when we know that the avant-garde drive forwards does not lead to universal happiness, when the century-old Futurist curse has been fulfilled and the viewer speeds along ‘like a racing car’, there is no reason and no time to make an effort. Yet Piechura’s work demands it. Przyboś wrote that ‘the eye is a wayfarer’, but it can be a bird. At this exhibition, the eye seems to have no choice. The intensity of the contrasts and the scale of the empty spaces in Piechura’s works exceed the wayfarer’s strength. Words written about an entirely different matter fit surprisingly well here: ‘Beyond the foreground the eye finds no support in successively unfolding forms. Straight from the foreground it does not crawl but flies into the plane of far depth. In a flash it descends to the very bottom of the distance, into a space that may be called immediate space’². 

Not so long ago, probably on Sunday, 5 August 1945, Stefan Kisielewski called for elite art, ‘art for individuals’, to be cultivated alongside the simpler, easier kind, ‘more closely connected with the interests of the masses’³. A visit to Tadeusz Piechura’s exhibition offers an excellent opportunity to do so. It may be a disservice, but one must point out that Piechura’s work is aristocratic in its restraint, which amid the democratic stew may irritate and bore at the same time. He is not a niche artist but an insular one – in the sense recalled by Czesław Miłosz. Islands are remote and inaccessible, although they attract the gaze. If we turn to Roland Barthes: ‘The New is not a fashion, it is a value, the basis of all criticism: our evaluation of the world no longer depends, at least not directly as it did for Nietzsche, on the opposition of noble to base, but of New to Old. […] there is only one way to escape alienation in present-day society: to flee forwards; every old language is immediately compromised, and every language ages as soon as it is repeated even once’⁴, it becomes easier to understand why Piechura’s works may irritate and bore. The exhibition contains works from the past thirty-odd years, with no great changes visible, no pursuit of the ‘new’. The essence of aristocracy is a gaze turned backwards, an obsession with continuity, genealogical catalogues whose layers of oil differ only in fine cracks. Piechura’s posters are highly indifferent to time.

The Nietzschean nobility invoked by Barthes perfectly suits the whites ironed like a stiff collar in Piechura’s posters, and the soberly cut letters. And repetition – does a single repetition already compromise and invalidate? This entire exhibition is based on repetitions; running throughout it is the poster for the 2048 Festival of Dialogue of Four Cultures, a typography-based poster with a thick, tyre-like yellow semicircle cutting through the black ground, which may be part of a C for culture or a D for dialogue. The poster in billboard format, the same one juxtaposed in twos, threes and fours. Arranged as a cross, a square and a band in every room – the same basic module. For professional vernissage Hunters of the New, it may prove a boring and irritating evening. They may sense the narrow Freudian collar within which they walk: ‘In an adult, novelty always constitutes the condition of enjoyment’⁵. In this repetition, the avant-garde character reveals itself once more. It is better to call it seriality, even serialism, because it differs substantially from the mechanical repetition of production lines in our brave new times. Barthes is right when he writes: ‘The bastard form of mass culture is disgraceful repetition: we repeat contents and ideological schemas, erase contradictions, and differentiate forms only superficially – in new books, television programmes, films and journalistic trivia, the same meaning persists’⁶. Piechura has repeated incessantly for years; all the works shown are arranged in rows, sequences and clusters. Yet his repetitions are closer to the rhomboids of Brâncuși’s Endless Column than to the multiplied banknotes in Warhol’s screenprints. Let us pause before the 1981 poster ABC Tadeusz Piechura ABC True False or False Truth. Let us spell it out: ‘I see A they say B they hear C, I see B they say A they hear C’. It may seem the same, but is that not what we saw in 1981? Is that not how they spoke then? These monotonous recitations contain something of the murmur of noises in Białoszewski, of the desire (avant-garde once more) to escape language, to exhaust it. This is by no means mechanical repetition. Let us pause once again at the module, that ancient Greek idea for taming the infinite, transformed into a prefabricated unit in the twentieth century. Piechura uses it without restraint; perhaps he suspects that there will be no more time or opportunity to repeat this modular mosaic in the space of the street. The modularity of the works opens a well at the bottom of which one may discern the Pythagorean harmony of all things, founded on Number. From a graphic point of view, the Pythagorean idea is an apotheosis of typography and geometric composition, and Piechura would probably have been admitted to the brotherhood with his works. They are based on appropriate tuning and proportion – symmetria – and this is also the source of their harmonious, often harmonic quality. The already-mentioned musicality of Piechura’s graphics is a classical musicality – wohltemperiert – well-tempered across successive scales between black and white. 

All these sequences and combinations from which the works are tuned lead, by something of a shortcut and in a visual, graphic fashion, towards a longing for mathesis universalis, for certain and reliable knowledge, and for craft. This may bring solace, although solace pales beside the Freudian pleasure of the New – but aristocracy ought, after all, to be pale. Piechura’s graphic works are often pale or grey-pale. One can imagine them hanging calmly for years in the corridors and stairwell recesses of Kafkaesque Edifices, but they would not win fifteen minutes of fame on a contemporary street. A series of four graphic works from 1985, Places of Particular Importance, in which faces and every detail permitting the site (Łódź, naturally) to be identified have been concealed by black, thoroughly criminal rectangles, could be treated as an integral part of The Trial.

The concept of reversal, drawn directly from between matrix and impression, belongs to the essence of graphic art. The reverse of Piechura’s prints and posters is often their perversity. Somewhat roguish, conjuring, surprising, different – reverse – from the aristocratic nobility of the means. It has accompanied Piechura since his diploma, at which he showed, among other things, a spherical die. What is the inscription West in the East East in the West, running in a circle on his poster of 2000, if not the literal perversity of reversal? Perhaps the author received a hint from Przyboś, who seventy-five years earlier called in his poem Perpetual Motion: ‘Turn the taps of west and east.’ When the two are placed together, the infinite revolutions of the poster’s perpetual motion make one forget Pop-Pan-American ramblings about the end of history. A tendency towards literalness is also visible in the cycle of four graphic works from 1985, Places of Particular Importance and Particular Danger, in which the ‘particularly dangerous places’ have simply been cut out. In 1971, the student Piechura decided to mark graphically, with arrows, the route between the departments of the Łódź art school scattered across the city. The red arrows pasted on walls and pointing in opposite directions complicated transport in Łódź to such an extent that the following day a historic close encounter occurred between the traffic police and young Polish graphic art. Tadeusz Piechura undoubtedly had (and perhaps still has) a talent for initiating the Citizens’ Militia into the mysteries of broadly understood artistic graphics. During the 1973 student festival, as part of a course entitled ‘selected visual issues’, he worked diligently all night to implement a fairly gloomy project (though, from today’s perspective, a prophetic one in relation to demographic indicators): he pasted an obituary notice in every gateway on Piotrkowska Street. An obituary notice without text is a simple, almost Suprematist graphic form. A Militia van driven by a former primary-school classmate encountered by chance followed slowly behind the young graphic artist. The next day, mirrors were to be pasted into the notices to complete the vanitas horror. The cut mirrors remain in the artist’s studio to this day, because spontaneous social interaction occurred before dawn and inscriptions began appearing in the empty obituary notices; among them, with rapidly mounting irritation, the Citizens’ Militia charged with keeping order during student revelry discovered the recurring initials MO and SB. Documentation of this forgotten episode in socially oriented art forms part of the exhibition. The strongest colour accent in the display is probably the cycle of five double-sided posters entitled Non-Red. Covered on the front with flat monochrome fields in primary colours, they bear the thick diagonal inscription ‘non-red’ on the reverse. The complete agreement of form with content might lead a viewer from the wider world to position these works somewhere between the slightly tautological Conceptualism and somewhat barren Minimalism. It is a perfect example demonstrating the purpose of a historical, as opposed to an aesthetic or philosophical, approach to contemporary art, especially art created in countries where it was necessary to speak ‘between the lines’. What Piechura wanted to say, he said ‘between the colours’. The posters were made as part of the Fart International Festival of Art Schools in 1971. They were printed using wooden German type left from before the war at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. According to the artist, the sight of bullet marks around the port and shipyard, the burnt-out railway station and Party committee building made it impossible to call this work, for example, Non-Green. The censorship office initially granted permission because the artist ‘forgot’ that the posters would be double-sided and submitted the colour-covered fronts for approval.

It is difficult to resist comparing this astonishingly ‘two-sided’ attitude of Tadeusz Piechura – on the one hand refining his ‘concentrated language of the poster’, and on the other embroiling graphic art in a social context – with Gombrowicz’s two-faced attitude towards form. Form is perhaps the most important category through which graphic art is apprehended. At the same time, form repeatedly returns in Gombrowicz’s aesthetics: ‘[…] the most drastic and incurable conflict is the one waged within us by our two fundamental impulses: one that desires form, shape, definition, and another that resists shape and wants no form. […] Reality is not something that can be enclosed entirely within form’⁷. Despite all the technical mastery characteristic of those who have long practised graphic art, Tadeusz Piechura fortunately still cannot be enclosed entirely within form. This is why the exhibition is not easy to receive.

If we stand before Piechura’s works bored and irritated at once, let us recall our universal longing as articulated by Zygmunt Bauman: ‘And so we dream of a simpler world – less ambiguous, capable of being taken in at a single glance and measured by a single standard. The longing for a “great simplification” is […] a widespread affliction of postmodern life.’ Tadeusz Piechura’s works provide an exceptional opportunity to ask ourselves whether, in this postmodern longing ‘to take everything in at a glance’, we are not drawing too close to the longings of the Citizens’ Militia.

1. J. Przyboś, Sztuka abstrakcyjna – jak z niej wyjść, Przegląd Kulturalny 1957, no. 45, p. 5.

2. J. Przyboś, Przestrzeń piechura i przestrzeń ptaka, [in:] Linia i gwar. Szkice, Kraków 1959, vol. I, p. 124.

3. Tygodnik Powszechny 1945, no. 20.

4. R. Barthes, Przyjemność tekstu, Warsaw 1997, p. 59.

5. S. Freud, Poza zasadą przyjemności, Warsaw 1975, p. 54.

6. R. Barthes, op. cit., p. 61.

7. W. Gombrowicz, Dziennik 1953–1956, Kraków 1986, pp. 146–147.

8. Z. Bauman, Dwa szkice o moralności ponowoczesnej, Warsaw 1994, p. 38.