Halina Kenarowa

God’s Woodcutter

When we were saying our farewells to the sculptor Antoni Rząsa in the cemetery for people of merit, I could not utter from my clenched heart any words of prayer other than “praise be to God”, which is actually a greeting exchanged on the Polish road. After thirty years of treading one path together, I should say “stay with God, Antoni”. The funeral service in the little old church was celebrated by father Józef Gorzelany, the parish priest of Nowa Huta [in Cracow], the artist’s friend and patron. Representatives of the voivodeship authorities, the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, the Artists’ Association, and the Antoni Kenar School said their goodbyes over the grave.

I wrote down a conversation from several years back, our last one. He was already suffering greatly from asthma and he whispered to me of the teacher’s life that had been his share:

When I passed my graduation exam in 1952 and went straight away to help Professor Kenar in teaching

– I realized how little I knew. But because the Professor’s idea was to keep an equal status of artistic and spiritual development, I tried to work on both. Kenar believed that an ignorant and brute would never make a good artist. At that time I didn’t think I would become an artist; I wanted to do my teaching well. For the first two years I was the Professor’s assistant; he still didn’t give me any class to supervise. When in 1954 he went to Warsaw for his operation, he had no hope for recovery, so we had a talk and he asked me not to argue in School, not to push ahead of one another, because in the name of a team, one sometimes has to give in. The School was his life and creation, and he suggested that he would be happy to see Władek Hasior as the principal. Since 1954, I ran the 1stand 2ndgrade by myself. The Professor did not impose any projects on me, he gave me absolute freedom. When the first project had already begun, he came to the workroom only after three weeks to see what I was up to, and he praised me.

At the time, I did not at all understand his actions: he spoke to me honestly, discussed in detail his plans for each class, he thought out loud and I knew what he intended. And the next day he would summon all the art teachers to a workroom and wait for propositions. The discussions were heated and everyone had a different suggestion, but the Professor led them to finally reach the solution which he had come up with. When I asked him why he acted so “insincerely”, he explained that he wanted his colleagues, the teachers, to carry out the tasks voluntarily, because if they felt that that the plan was being forced upon them, nothing good would come out of it. He used the same tactics with the students.

Right after the Professor’s death, we gathered with the friends who had come for the funeral in the sculpture archive, where the Professor used to sit, to figure out new tasks. We started discussing what was to come. I shrugged helplessly, but Władek Hasior said (which hurt me at the time) that the School had to be different now, because other people would be forming it. He also made us realize that the students were demotivated and believed that everything would crash, so our job was to regain the young people’s trust by our own artistic development. We were to stand on our own feet and work very hard. I remember that we decided then with Władek and Grzegorz Pecuch that we would show our work to one another and correct each other and it worked with me and Władek. It was harder with Grzegorz, who did not accept criticism, as he thought we were teasing him. But he was so dedicated to the School, such a good administrator, so caring for the workrooms, tools, materials, renovations, that he was invaluable. Tadzio Brzozowski, whom we begged to take the post of the principal for two years, agreed, under the condition that he could not give the School all of his time. But he supported us with a good word, he organized discussions on art and he never interfered in our tasks, because, he claimed, as a painter he didn’t know much about sculpture. I felt resentment towards you that you had stopped dropping in to the school workrooms like you used you, but when during a conference you quoted the Professor’s words, hitherto unknown to us: “If my boys don’t rebel against me, nothing will come of them”, I understood that Władek was right, that we had to stand on our own feet, and that you just didn’t want to suggest anything to us. I knew how difficult it was for you, but I would never be disloyal to the Professor…

In 1961 we organized with Władek our first exhibitions in Warsaw. I – with Basia Zbrożyna in the MDM Gallery, and Władek in the Jewish Theatre. I remember that we rented one lorry for the transport of our sculptures. I felt anxious before that exhibition, but I had been encouraged by Professor Strynkiewicz, who had seen my sculptures in Zakopane. I had about twelve of them: the Christs and Saint Annes. I carved those Christs during Professor Kenar’s final illness, witnessing his suffering, and unable to cope with it. And that was the beginning of my own art: ruminations and telling of the human fate. Of course there was some rivalry between me and Władek and then the pair of us and other colleagues from Warsaw, but I think it was noble and good competition: we formed ourselves in the School and for it. I believed that we could also raise successors and the School would not collapse…

Z rozwlekłej, chropawo nieporadnej jego mowy wyłaniały się, jak z surowej rudy, treści dziwnie szlachetne, pełne chłopskiej mądrości i czułej intuicji, wiernej miłości do Nauczyciela i naiwnego natchnienia. Dzięki tym wartościom z własnych niedostatków zbudował swoją przejmującą sztukę,  istrza bowiem, wedle słów Berniniego- poznać po przezwyciężaniu ograniczeń.

From his lengthy, coarsely awkward speech, there emerged, as from an unprocessed ore, strangely noble content, full of peasant wisdom and tender intuition, a faithful love to the Teacher and a naïve inspiration. These values allowed him to create his moving art from his own deficiencies; as Bernini claimed, a true Master is the one who overcomes his own limitations.

He was too close to my heart for me to be able to speak objectively about him right after we said farewell to him. Every catalogue of his exhibitions contains official information: born in 1919 in Futoma, a village near Rzeszów, son of a small farmer. After the war and the guerrilla he sat at the school desk as a grown man, nearly thirty years old. In the years 1954-1974 he took part in over twenty exhibitions in Poland and abroad, and he obtained awards: from the Minister of National Defence, the Minister of Art and Culture, the Włodzimierz Pietrzak Award and the City of Zakopane Prize. He was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit and the Polonia Restituta Knight’s Cross. He left behind 150 sculptures inventoried by his wife and as many unregistered ones.

The number of cubic metres of wood that this thin, frail, ascetic man chopped with his axe! For twenty years he lived in a little room in the school dormitory, and another, smaller one (2.5×3 m) served as his workroom. After the classes in school I found him always in these tight quarters thick with a forest of sculptures, logs, pieces, shavings, and chips of wood, among which his little son Marcin played, as a Renaissance putto among the pre-Romanesque, and his wonderful wife Halina, an invaluable caregiver and friend, would read poetry out loud to them. Something of this atmosphere was conveyed in the films by Gordon, Dubowski, Dzieduszycki. Historians of art and critics remained rather cautiously silent or wrote of the humanist content and the folk form of Rząsa’a art. They were probably disconcerted by the highly religious iconography of his sculptures: they are incessant variants of several cycles: the Crucified, Pietàs, Saint Annes, the martyrs of Auschwitz. His obsession with expressing suffering was only once broken, in 1966, with a cycle of stout knights on horseback, located now in the Museum of the Polish Army in Warsaw.

Antoni Rząsa was a deeply religious sculptor, the first artist in post-war Poland who dared to touch and break the traditional church iconography, because into a symbol, hardened in the slightly sweet, purely traditional, 19th-century convention, he poured his own experience of the acute human pain.

Proof of this is the “scandal”, loud in the Podhale region, caused by his Crucifixion, placed in 1959 on the grave of Antoni Kenar in Zakopane, when an outraged congregation tried to take the “unorthodox” Christ off the cross. The excitement and protests lasted for a few months, until finally a favourable intervention of the church authorities soothed the critical outrage of the local people.

Twenty years later, “Father Kolbe” and six figures of “Pietàs” by the artist in a church in the Nowa Huta district in Cracow, or the sculpture offered to the Pope by the Polish government delegation, meaningfully prove to what extent the Church changed its attitude towards contemporary art. The breakthrough was not the work of a revolutionary or avant-garde artist, but one who was quiet, focused, naively inspired – as if Cimabue of the times of contempt and dilemma. One time only did he spend a few months in Italy: he observed there the world of Romanesque Christs, Gothic Ladies of Sorrows, the Rondanini Pietà, Magdalene by Donatello. Renaissance was alien to him; it took effort for him to rid his own art of ornament, as if he was fighting temptation. His friend Hasior influenced him to add to the wood chains and nails, the tools of the Passion from Polish roadside crosses. He purposefully used the simplest means of expression: wood dyed dark, the frontality of figures, the vertical, horizontal and slant, the contrast between the Byzantine-exotic, nameless faces and the abrupt movement of raised arms, between smooth surfaces and a suddenly realistic detail of veiny, work-worn hands, like in Stwosz or Dürer. The tighter the means, like self-imposed commandments, the higher the pressure of the expression: petrified pain, humble pain, melancholy-pain, distress-pain, heroic pain, and pain as protest, pain that makes the body a corpse and a wreck. The obsession brings to mind a drop of water falling incessantly in a single spot in a dark, mysterious cave. Some sculptures resemble stalactites, others – the tops of trees thrown about by the halnywind. Every one of them is a prayer and an offering, atonement and compensation.

God be with you, Brother Antoni, God’s Woodcutter.

Halina Micińska-Kenarowa  (1980 )

2017 © Galeria Antoniego Rząsy