In Conversation with Wojciech Fangor

Stefan Szydłowski: It would be best to begin at the beginning.
Wojciech Fangor: As long as I can remember, I have had a profound need to paint. It was my decisive way of discovering the world and cleansing it of demons and fears. Gradually I began to savour the very process of painting and to experience not only visual sensations but olfactory ones as well. Crayons, pencils, watercolours and, above all, oil paints have an aroma. Touch, hearing – all the senses take part. Painting is an activity in which emotion, intellect and the senses work together in harmony. Of course, as a child one does not know this. One yields to inner desires and resists external pressures. I was formed in the fire of contrasting external and internal forces.
S. Sz.: Tell me first, then, about the external forces: what influenced you, and how did your attitude as a young artist take shape?
W. F.: From 1934 to 1944 I studied art with Kozłowski, Pruszkowski and Kowarski. It was a study of craft and a direct encounter with the masters’ practice and ideology. It offered an experience of their personalities, maturity and achievements. Prusz and Kowar’s artistic positions were rooted in the distant past – a past that had nothing to do with the seething present or even with the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century.
S. Sz.: Would you say something more about your teachers, their attitudes and interests?
W. F.: I was twelve when I met Kozłowski. He was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, recommended to my mother by Pruszkowski. We quickly became friends, and he became my teacher, elder brother, companion and friend. We rode bicycles together to paint outdoors. Between 1936 and 1938 we travelled together to Italy, Bulgaria and Istanbul. He had a major influence on the formation of my ethical and aesthetic values. Later Pruszkowski became involved in my artistic education. He showed satisfaction, and sometimes delight, at my efforts in painting, which gave me wings. At times he would take up a brush and demonstrate on the canvas that it would be better a certain way. He valued my ear for colour. During critiques he mentioned Velázquez, Titian, Hals and Teniers, but he did not succumb to museum-style imitation of the Old Masters. He liked virtuoso brushwork, grace, beauty and dexterity. He cared about a general culture of feeling and encouraged me to read French literature, with its eloquence and humour: Rabelais, France, Romain Rolland, Flaubert, Balzac and J. J. Rousseau. He possessed great personal charm and was musical, sociable and even flirtatious. During the occupation I remained in contact with him from the autumn of 1940 until his death in 1942. The story of his arrest was told by the niece with whom he lived. The Gestapo came at night and arrested a family for possessing a radio. Then, using the list of tenants, they took away seven people whose names were preceded by titles such as engineer, professor or doctor. They drove them to the ghetto and killed them with a shot to the back of the head. They then ordered Jews to bury the bodies and drove away. A female engineer survived; people in the ghetto cared for her and, after a long period of treatment, she recounted what had happened. Meanwhile, Pruszkowski’s friends thought he had been arrested and was being held somewhere. They made enquiries at the Gestapo, where they were told he had been shot while trying to escape. That was an obvious lie. Felicjan Kowarski had a completely different personality. He taught me technical methods: how to prepare a scaled pencil design for a painting on tracing paper, and how to transfer it using a grid. From him I learnt about underpainting, plafonds, designs, cartoons, perforating, pouncing, making an egg binder for tempera, grinding pigment in a mortar, and the technique of painting in tempera – so different from oils. He explained these things clearly and matter-of-factly. Yet when he critiqued my work, I understood the words without grasping the meaning of what he said; I could sense instead whether he was pleased or surprised, or, conversely, reluctant or disappointed. I had the impression that he valued my abilities and mental acuity, as demonstrated by his offer of an assistantship at the Academy of Fine Arts after the war. I politely declined because I did not feel equal to it. I felt I possessed neither teaching nor organisational talent, and I had no experience of working with groups of people. Kowarski was a mysterious man, closed within his own world and somewhat gloomy. He liked the atmosphere of Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe and Przybyszewski; he could not stand Żeromski. He was emotionally attached to Russian culture, enjoyed playing poker and admiring old, spreading trees and dramatic sunsets in nature. But he was gradually discovering Impressionism and Pointillism – the optical vibration of the surface. He timidly brightened his palette. We cannot know where these changes might have led, because shortly before his death he saw a reproduction of a Matisse somewhere and exclaimed with great emotion: ‘In his still life, the background is pure vermilion, straight from the tube.’ I sensed in him admiration for Matisse’s courage and an openness to the direct, immediate radiance of colour – colour as a phenomenon without history, without a past. He had high blood pressure and died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage. To conclude this strand, my education did not take place at a school or academy, among students on one side and a professor on the other. It was not institutional. It was instead a relationship between pupil and master; a highly personal one, because we shared a life, shared work and a shared wartime danger.

S. Sz.: When and how did you manage to look at the world independently?
W. F.: It was only in 1947–48 that I discovered that, as a painter, I was living in the middle of the twentieth century; that art is a response to what exists and happens here and now, not a recollection of some good old days. I was certainly influenced by the new ideology, philosophy, Western Modernism, reading Van Gogh’s letters and the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini and Eugène Delacroix – people who responded spontaneously to what surrounded them and what was happening in their time. I would cycle between Wilanów and Jeziorna and paint outdoors whatever revealed itself at that moment through colour and simplified shape, which allowed colour to act more independently and, through its affinity with the geometry of the canvas surface, bound everything together into a unified, direct construction. By the end of the 1940s, my museum-inspired aesthetic longings had faded. I felt that in art one could not try to equal anyone else, that one had to submit to one’s own capacities, one’s own time, experiences and feelings. We live today, now, and the impulses that arise from current experience, from life, are what matter. Longing for the good old days is a sentimental, sterile weakness. I became interested in Existentialism and Marxism. That was how people thought at the time; it seemed to open one’s eyes and shake off superstitions, habits and prejudices.
S. Sz.: Was the exhibition at the Club of Young Artists and Scientists a summation for you, or the opening of a new search?
W. F.: In 1949 I selected a dozen or so paintings and showed them in an exhibition at the Artists’ and Scientists’ Club on Saxon Square. No one noticed the exhibition: neither artists nor critics. It was a Modernist anachronism amid the awakening ideology of Socialist Realist art.
S. Sz.: Janusz Bogucki did take notice of the exhibition. He emphasised your skilful use of folk art.
W. F.: The paintings from that period are said to be Cubist in tendency and to draw on the power of colour in folk painting. At the time, I knew virtually nothing about Cubism. Like most people then, my knowledge of art history ended with Impressionism. During the war I used the pre-war edition of Tatarkiewicz’s History of Art , in which the treatment of Cubism was quite enigmatic and amounted, I think, to just three sentences. I only saw reproductions of works by Strzemiński and Kobro in the press when contemporary art was discussed in the late 1940s. Until 1949, various things were published and discussed, producing what later proved to be an illusory sense of freedom of expression. As for folk culture, earlier visual experiences and fascinations made themselves felt. Before the war we went to Zakopane for a month every year. My mother knew Witkacy, who portrayed me, and many other artists from the milieu of the time, including Brzega. I saw various folk objects in their homes, and the whole of pre-war Zakopane was more authentic – it all disappeared with the post-war development of Cepelia and made-to-order folklore. The pre-war Ład and Arkady made an impression on me. It seems that stayed with me.

S. Sz.: Your painting of the late 1940s, led by the portrait of your mother, brings Picasso’s painting to mind.
W. F.: In 1937 I went with my parents to the World’s Fair in Paris. It was there, in the Spanish Pavilion, that I saw a Picasso for the first time in my life: it was Guernica. Picasso did not make a great impression on me then. Despite the black and white, I found the painting overly decorative and even slightly grotesque. I was more impressed by the mercury fountain housed in a glass case; it was extraordinary. I also remember the Italian Pavilion, where there were paintings by Morandi, still lifes. One painting contained something white, and I remember explaining to my father, who knew nothing about painting, that the white colour in the painting was not in fact painted with white paint, but that the effect had been achieved with several other colours. My next opportunity to see not only Picasso but also Matisse and Léger came with the Exhibition of Modern Painting organised by the National Museum in Warsaw in 1947. Stanisław Zamecznik designed the exhibition. I was fascinated by a portrait Picasso showed there, a head painted so ordinarily. It opened my eyes: I understood that one did not have to labour excessively. Until then I had been taught that whitening, tempera underpainting, glazing and so forth were necessary, and suddenly here was something ordinary, overwhelming in its simplicity and force. Associations have the quality of being faster than seeing and thinking. Geometrisation is characteristic of Picasso; when I painted my mother’s portrait, wanting to avoid anecdote and anecdotal physiology, I sought simplifications that led me to geometry and the direct action of colour. The point is not to subordinate a colour functionally when applying it – pink to flesh, for example; a simplified, geometrised form causes the same pink to begin acting in an entirely different way and interacting with other colours.

S. Sz.: So you decided to engage with the present.
W. F.: I had to live and earn money. I put my personal successes and preferences away in a cupboard and painted several realist pictures on commissioned themes. I won prizes and works were purchased, and that was the end of it. I began collaborating with architects and poster designers. I did better in that field. I had a regular income and closer contact with the artistic community. In 1953 I became a lecturer in the Graphic Arts Faculty at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
S. Sz.: Were you not attracted by an organisational career in the Association of Polish Artists, or by political activity?
W. F.: I have never belonged to any group or organisation – Scouts, clubs or parties – and I did not serve in the army. I have no herd, tribal or aggressive instincts, and so forth. I have neither a thirst for power nor organisational skills. I do, however, have a strong instinct for self-preservation, which sometimes saved my life, and lucky accidents have helped me many times. They play a major role in everyone’s life, except that some are fortunate and others unfortunate. The latter generally do not recur.
S. Sz.: You have a particular attitude towards chance.
W. F.: Chance likes to be perverse and ambiguous. Sometimes a fortunate accident ends in disaster; at other times the reverse occurs – something fatal and dangerous ends happily. In 1943, as I was being led away to be shot, I accidentally found myself in the middle of a street battle between Germans and a Home Army unit. During a moment of confusion, one of the Germans escorting me pushed me and shouted, ‘Run!’ I ran and survived. On another occasion, in 1944, after being caught by chance in Rabka, I was transported east with hundreds of people in goods wagons. After arriving in Tarnów, on the way to a forced-labour camp, the German escorting me said, ‘Run!’ But this time I did not try to escape; my intuition told me that he wanted to demonstrate what a good guard he was. The final outcome of an accident often depends on the sum of minor, individually rather harmless incidents following quickly one after another. That happens in war, but also in peacetime, on the roads for instance. War intensifies the number and terror of accidents. I greeted 1945 and the end of the war with relief and hope; I believed the new order would be better and wiser. But life is the resultant of accidents, the resultant of contradictions. The victory of the Soviet Union liberated us from the Germans, shifted Poland several hundred kilometres westwards, opened up broad access to the Baltic and reduced class divisions and the colonial presence in the east. At the same time, however, it made democracy and the free market impossible, imposed a utopian totalitarian ideology and created hysteria about the threat of war. The war deprived Poland of many different nationalities that had inhabited our lands for centuries and created their cultural wealth: Belarusians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Germans, Slovaks and, above all, Jews – a people of great economic, intellectual and artistic talent, with the sense of humour necessary for life. Are things better this way? Is it better that everyone speaks the same language? Is it better that there is only one religion and one kind of temple? Is it better that only one history, one set of myths, superstitions and values remains? Does such uniformity and absence of diversity not threaten us with self-satisfaction, self-admiration and, ultimately, the euphoria of one state, one nation, one leader? Our hope for internal and external security lies in integration with Europe. As Europeans, we will have the national, cultural and political diversity so necessary for a free and tolerant life. We will be able to argue and compete internally rather than seek and provoke enemies outside. Diversity and democracy secure peace and enable the internal disputes and competition needed for life, while also protecting against national, religious, ideological and political homogenisation. They protect us from seeking conflict beyond our borders.

S. Sz.: Besides your teachers, your collaboration and friendship with Jerzy Sołtan and Stanisław Zamecznik had a major influence on the formation of your artistic position.
W. F.: I met Jerzy Sołtan and Oskar Hansen in 1950. Sołtan invited me to collaborate on the design of a restaurant beneath the stands at Służewiec Racecourse. The design was never realised. Next came work on the design of the Warszawianka sports centre, and this was how my permanent collaboration began with the experimental studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw run by Jerzy Sołtan. Working with Sołtan, Hansen and, above all, Stanisław Zamecznik awakened my interest in space as a medium and material for expressing artistic content. A very important moment for me, one I have mentioned many times, came when Stanisław Zamecznik and I reached the conviction that an artistic work based on real space, movement and time, yet detached from architecture’s utilitarian demands, could and should be created. I very much wanted to do something in this direction, and initially thought that the proper route would be to search for architectural structures, multiplying and complicating them. Zamecznik discouraged me from this, however, urging me to paint intensively and assuring me: ‘Paint, and it will emerge from painting.’ As it turned out, he was right: the result of my painterly explorations, and at the same time of my experience in graphic design and working with architects, was an accidental discovery I made in 1957 which defined my artistic position and the fundamental problems of my painting for at least the next twenty years.

S. Sz.: Did you have the impression that art had ended, that something entirely new was beginning?
W. F: In 1958, did I believe that art was coming to an end? I believed it was the end of one form of art and the beginning of a new one. The end of visual art in the form of the painting as object, a painting which, beyond its internal content, possesses the characteristics of a portable commodity dependent on supply and demand. The end of a self-contained, emphatically authored art whose value depended on the artist’s fame, which was itself based on publicity. That was how it seemed to me in 1958. The new art was to be designed for co-creation and reception by an anonymous public. An art whose immateriality would deprive it of the characteristics of a commodity, or whose materiality would be embedded in universally accessible public space. Perhaps the conditions of life under a socialist system resembling a closed camp – in which consumer goods could not be exchanged, and in which there was no individual capital or commerce – favoured the creation of an idea for a new form of art open to co-creation, which automatically entails anonymity. A non-objective, immaterial and open art. An art requiring no publicity, whose vitality would be conditioned by the public’s freely felt need. It would play a role similar to that of municipal public parks. It turned out, however, that the socialist system was a utopia at odds with human nature, and that the conviction that we are all alike and have identical needs in our reception of art is an equal utopia. Individual works with culturally and aesthetically diverse messages therefore have a reason to exist. In my case, these are works that penetrate, or delve into, questions of real and virtual spaces; relations between internal and external, phenomenal and symbolic, natural and cultural spaces. Amid all this, I produce a little merchandise for my own satisfaction and that of my customers.
S. Sz.: From 1958 onwards, new paintings began to emerge as a result of painterly and theoretical revaluations.
W. F: The edgeless paintings arose during the period when I was collaborating with architects. At the time, I was fascinated not only by architecture’s function, its practical necessities or its aesthetic and historical heritage, but by the mysterious medium in which it came into being: three-dimensional space, which could be shaped and penetrated. Stanisław Zamecznik, an architect by training but an artist by vocation and longing – independent, exploratory and insatiable – was the person in my artistic life with whom I discussed spatial peculiarities while we collaborated on specific commissions for pavilions or exhibition designs. In 1956, while preparing the background for a painting that I intended to continue linearly, I suddenly saw that the background, which consisted of an edgeless transition from black to white, acted magically, irritating the perception of the space extending in front of the canvas. I painted further works based on the interpenetration of simple shapes reduced to a minimum. I introduced primary colours which, like black, merged continuously into white. At the end of 1957, not knowing whether or what I was painting, I was offered an exhibition in the premises of Po prostu (formerly the Artists’ and Scientists’ Club, and before the war the Institute for the Promotion of Art) on Saxon Square. This was an opportunity to test our spatial longings in an arrangement of elements which, monochromatic and reduced to a minimum of shapes and contrasts, would create an environment enriched by the disruptive illusion of space pulsating outwards from the surfaces of the paintings. Zamecznik borrowed stands from Zachęta, on which we placed the elements organising the space of the entire room. This was how A Study of Space – the first environment – came into being.
S. Sz.: Could you explain the theory of Positive Illusory Space?
W. F.: Certain conditions should be met in order to evoke Positive Illusory Space:
1. Avoiding the revelation of the painting’s surface – its texture, brushstrokes, thickness of paint and so forth; 2. Simplicity and minimalism of shapes penetrating from the edges or corners of the painting’s rectangle;
3. Simplicity of the canvas shape: a square rather than an elongated rectangle, which has two contrasting axes – vertical and horizontal. Shapes with acute angles limit the possibility of edgeless effects. Hence rounded shapes such as waves, ellipses and circles.
S. Sz.: How might one trace descriptively the formal means and the content arising from them in the paintings of 1957–75?
W. F.: In the first period, 1957–61, paintings measuring between 90 and 120 centimetres predominated, in white, black and a transitional zone produced by mixing those colours. They consisted of:
1. The shape, size, proportion and border of the rectangular canvas, and its sharp edge between the painting’s boundary and the rest of reality, played an important role in relation to what was happening on the painting’s surface.
2. The canvas surface was white, with a specific scale and proportions. Expressively, it was associated with the plane of a wall.
3. On this ‘wall’ and along its borders, events unfolded involving black shapes that intruded upon it: they either stood out from the white with a sharp edge, merged with it without an edge, or attached themselves to the edges of the painting linearly or at a point.
Several examples:
These arrangements bent the surface and entered into a play with it, disrupting its flatness and changing its spatial values by means of the illusion of light and shade.
Arrangements that give black shapes greater independence and a dominant role in relation to the white space. The canvases in this series are square.
In this period, 1957–61, black-and-white paintings predominated, but primary colours also appeared: yellow, red and blue. In simple relationships between colour and white. The proportions of the canvases are also rectangular and differentiate vertical and horizontal.
These paintings did not treat white as an equal partner. Instead, they imposed a different quality by selecting a single wavelength from the spectrum of one colour, rather than, as with white and black, all light or its absence. This uniqueness and independence of colour also produced greater spatial independence from the painting’s surface. This independence from the painting’s surface increased with the greater independence found in a circle, ellipse or wave, whose curves contrasted with the rectangular arrangement of the painting’s edges. This was how the circles and waves began, and how waves developed into arrangements of direct and inverse symmetry: solid monochrome circles, and circles with concentric rings in which the resultant colours produced by mixing appeared as additional rings.
At first, this kind of painting was always based on the ground of a white square and a white centre of the circle. Later, coloured backgrounds and centres began to appear.
From 1960 onwards, I painted works in which the dispersed colours of shapes were covered with swarms of dots that, in an even rhythm, seemed to bring the canvas surface forward before the dispersed events breaking through the narrow gaps between the dots. In cross-section it can be shown as follows:

1. The painting and its surface;
2. The illusory undulation of the painting’s space;
3. A screen of dots forming a second surface;

4. Space penetrating through the screen.

I pursued this type of action using dots and horizontal or vertical stripes. These systems enriched and differentiated impressions of illusory space, which either adhered to or left the painting’s surface and moved towards the viewer.
In paintings whose principal actors were circles or waves, I used symmetry: direct or inverse symmetry. It seems to me that symmetry in this kind of art, whose content is connected with evoking the illusion of positive space, stiffens and immobilises the painting’s real surface, thereby creating more contrasting conditions for the fulfilment of dynamic illusions. It provides a good springboard for spatial illusions. Symmetry occurs in the arrangement of shapes, but also in the arrangement of the colours used.
In the 1980s and 1990s, in paintings whose subject was the tension between cultural information and the visual action of the television screen, I used the interpenetration of a photographic documentary image with visual interference arising from electronic-optical technology. Later I painted banal subjects from nature and contrasted them with obscuring geometric forms such as flat circles, triangles, rectangles, dots, stripes or grids. These obstacles revealed the contrast between the illusion of the depicted object and the concrete reality of the actual obstacle in a geometric form, painted or materially obscuring the image.
S. Sz.: Did you feel any affinity between the Positive Illusory Space paintings and the work of Noland and Rothko?
W. F.: After arriving in the United States in 1962, I saw a Noland circle for the first time in the home of Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post. It was a concentric coloured circle in the hard-edge convention then fashionable in the United States, painted on a rough, unprimed canvas. My second surprise was Mark Rothko – minimalism of shape and colour, soft transitions across a texturally vibrating surface. I was surprised to discover that I was not the only ‘softie’. Time acts independently of us, while our actions are conditioned by time. Yet Kazimir Malevich will forever remain the precursor of minimalism in shape and colour.
S. Sz.: Why did you leave Poland in 1961?
W. F.: I wanted to leave immediately after the war. I was disgusted by Europe, its stupidities, fanaticisms and crimes. America seemed the most promising, so I went to the American information service, where I was told that immigration to the United States was governed by a quota system and the Polish quota was six thousand a year; if I registered that day, therefore, I had a chance of receiving a visa in ten years. At the time, ten years was an eternity to me. I returned home and told myself: one has to live here, where one is, and now. Despite my successes in artistic and propaganda work, I was denied a passport without being given a reason. Eventually I became completely disillusioned with the political and economic system. The failure of the apparent liberation identified with Władysław Gomułka, the stupidity of censorship, the stupidity of cultural officials and constant warnings about war created a sense of confinement. Admittedly, confinement offered a sense of security: housing, food, health care and work were guaranteed. Even social relations with the guards and minders were good. But when one is confined, one thinks about how to get out – and, importantly, how to support oneself once outside. Two people played an important role here: my sister, who lived in Austria, and the American dealer Beatrice Perry. After arriving in Vienna, I was able to make contact with Perry, and after a few months I received a four-month fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the United States, during which I visited universities in the eastern and north-central states. I also received a contract with The Gres Gallery. Through this stay I personally met several outstanding artists and art critics: Albers, Yayoi Kusama, Botero, Noland, Morris Louis, Clement Greenberg, William Rubin, Alfred Barr, Dorothy Miller, William Seitz of MoMA and Messer of The Guggenheim Museum. In August I returned to Austria, and in October I moved to Paris with my wife Magdalena. In Paris I rented a good studio and painted a great deal. Yet no French gallery took an interest in what I was doing, not even Denise René, which was interested in similar artistic positions. I had an exhibition at Galerie Lambert and, in 1964, at Museum Schloss Mosbroich in Leverkusen. In Paris I met several South American artists and a Polish woman, Lutka Pink. I was in contact with artists from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Chile.

In 1964 I received a Ford Foundation fellowship to West Berlin, where, as a fellow from Poland, I attracted interest; I had an exhibition at Springer Galerie and at last there were some purchases.
In the autumn of 1965 I went to England as a visiting lecturer at the Bath Academy of Art. That same year I had a large and important exhibition at The Grabowski Gallery in London. In 1966 I received immigration papers for the United States and settled near New York. Throughout my five years in Western Europe, with brief interruptions, I was able to paint, producing several hundred paintings that ended up partly in the United States, partly in England and partly in Germany. After two and a half years of work in France, not a single painting of mine remained there. In the United States I became professor of painting at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, rented a huge studio and, finally settled, worked a great deal. In New York I began working with Galerie Chalette, run by Artur Lejwa. I remained with the gallery for five years, holding annual exhibitions there as well as making several appearances in the north-eastern states. An important event was an exhibition at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and its subsequent presentations in Texas and California. My works of the 1960s and 1970s had admirers, but also enemies; that is true everywhere and always.

S. Sz.: How did you find your place on the American art scene at the time?

W. F.: No one then used a soft, edgeless transition. It was not practised, and forms or patterns in geometric abstractions were always defined by edges. Op Art, Minimal Art, geometric abstraction – all these movements, even illusionistic Op Art, used a sharp and concrete definition of shape, even when rhythmic multiplication produced an immaterial effect suspended in space. After my several exhibitions at Galerie Chalette in the 1960s, I won high praise from Josef Albers, who declared that these edgeless transitions were an important contribution to the painting’s new formal structure. At that time, however, Nouvelle Figuration was a powerful movement in Europe, and Pop Art in the United States and England. Both were interested in contemporary anecdote, absurdity and the mass production of consumer goods: the subjects and objects of contemporary material reality, rather than a new way of seeing the world and its indeterminacy, transience and spatiotemporal relativity. Several artists recognised the potential of a new form of indeterminacy, relativity and illusionism, and in the 1960s and 1970s began using this method in their constructions: Vasarely, Anuszkiewicz and Celentano in the United States; Sedgley and Stefan Knapp in England; and several well-known artists in Poland. More important than establishing precedence and sequence, however, is the fact that within a very short time the new way of articulating form on canvas proved to be not so much a novelty as a visual language that brought with it connections to a new understanding of the physical structure of elementary particles, and to a new revision of the common sense so deeply rooted in the human mind and the age-old belief in the immutability of existing principles of logic and observation. Today it is no longer so certain that the observer and the object of observation are separated by the sharp, inviolable edge of objectivity. It seems that the process of observation changes the phenomenon observed and, reciprocally, changes the observer. It is a kind of feedback with an indeterminate flow of values.

S. Sz.: We have discussed various aspects of art: cognitive, informative and decorative. Anecdote should also be considered in this context; it is always present, since art is always about something. The problem, I believe, lies in the manner and quality of the treatment. The question is what we are dealing with – a symbol, a metaphor, a banality or a decorative little story.

W. F.: We can distinguish at least three senses of the concept of ‘content’ in a painting. What is content? The first is the most fundamental, rooted in the time when the work is created and expressed exclusively in visual terms – that is, manifested through the structure of the whole, contrasts of colours and shapes, and the artist’s personality. This is content that can be felt through a visual, sensory, phenomenal impression, rather than rationally and verbally. Such content can move one to tears, and this emotion can be explained only by the power of the creator’s talent.

The second kind of content is a description of the work’s formal and thematic components: its size, shape and technique, for example, and the identification of forms and shapes and their mutual relations. The description and enumeration of depicted objects modelled on natural objects, symbols from the world of signs, or geometry. This is a description of the work’s subject and the means used to present it, of connections with tradition or with contemporary examples of similar solutions in the work of other artists. Content of this kind is factual and can be verbalised. One may also attempt to characterise another way of reading a painting’s content. This involves speculating about what the artist had in mind, what they wanted to express and show, and how what they wanted relates to what exists. To what extent did the artist succeed in communicating to the viewer information whose existence the viewer suspects, or even invents entirely? A vast field for anecdotal and literary displays by art critics and commentators opens here. This type of content is reinforced by the fact that the artist’s work is co-created by its commentators. It is the favourite type of content among all writers and readers of art.

In every work of art, which by definition conveys information, one can dig down to these various kinds of content. The first may be the most primitive, embedded in the deepest atavistic layers of the human psyche. It acts upon the viewer synchronically, ahistorically and aculturally. The second content can be analysed, compared and described; it lends itself to a rational, scientific approach. The third content is co-creative, literary, illustrative, subjective, and closely connected with its time and prevailing culture.

Thus my 1950 painting Figures can be considered in three ways. First, its visual content – the structure of shapes, colours, composition of accents and so forth – is overshadowed by powerful historical connections, by the illustration of a preconceived thematic thesis that could have acted much more forcefully had it been a documentary photograph of an incident noticed by chance. Second, the painting is correctly constructed to show two contrasting social classes in a typical way. One is cosmopolitan and does not work, but takes care to cultivate a fashionable Western image. The other is working-class, its appearance dictated by physical labour. The latter has a more timeless, and therefore more natural, character. The former, conversely, is more artificial, situated within a specific culture and time. Third, unlimited interpretative and co-creative possibilities open up before the next kind of content. I like to define content in a painting in a way that can be received primarily through the communication of a purely visual structure. Of course, such content can be associated with feelings such as sadness, joy, aggression, pleasure or disgust, and so forth. It is content that expresses feelings, but also sensory illusions and doubts. Descriptive, anecdotal content is automatically linked to subject matter and has a more superficial character in visual art, because it is diluted and contaminated by other forms of expression such as science, literature, illustration and ideology.

Visual means are widely used to communicate all kinds of information. I shall list a few here:
1. Artistic objects intended to convey aesthetic emotion, or to open the way for new structures and modes of communication.

2. Posters and billboards used for advertising, agitation and ideological, commercial, political or religious propaganda, and so forth.
3. Collaboration with other art forms: music, literature, architecture, urban design, theatre, film, ballet and so forth.

To this we must add the role of the visual arts as a means of decorating, embellishing and communicating power or wealth; as a tradable store of economic value, an investment, and so forth. Perhaps the spacetime in which I lived, its convulsions and the nature of my abilities led me to practise various forms of visual art. These different kinds of information being conveyed usually employ the current structures of visual language. Perhaps not the very newest, since these have not yet been widely absorbed and understood. The language of tomorrow does not exist; the language of today is the newest, now being forged; the language of yesterday is widely applied, accessible and used. Sometimes, because of strange ideological prejudices, people reach for the language of the day before yesterday. The intended content is then deformed by the interfering historical content of an anachronistic language.
S. Sz.: Unlike many artists and thinkers, you were not intoxicated by new technologies, although they interested you aesthetically.

W. F.: They provided, and continue to provide, material that may be an excellent subject or space for artistic exploration. It is worth examining the functions and aesthetics of architectural, industrial and military structures, from medieval buildings, armour and siege engines to the contemporary architecture of houses, bridges, machines, ships, tanks, aircraft and computers. The T-34, for example, is a beautiful and highly successful war machine of the late 1930s. It is also a symbol and memory of the most important turning points in my life. The year 1945 brought liberation from the insane ideology of Nazi Germany, from the terror of war and the promise of enslavement and annihilation. But liberation proved to be commensurate with history: full of contradictions and dangers. It brought hope, but also fear of the new system arriving behind the tanks. I devoted the installation presented in one of Atlas Sztuki’s rooms to the complexity of these personal experiences, in whose shadow we still remain.

Błędów–Warsaw, 2009