Antoni Rząsa (1919-1980)
Antoni Rząsa (1919-1980) graduated from and then taught at the Antoni Kenar Complex of Art Schools in Zakopane; sculptures in wood, mainly on the subject of religion; exhibitions…; collections…; wife… son… – this, more or less, would add up to a short biographical note of one of the most interesting Polish sculptors of the 20thcentury. Everything seems to be right, there is not much to add, and yet this apparently typical life history of a provincial art school teacher who only infrequently left his province, conceals a life far from banal.
He was born right after the First World War in a poor peasant family in Futoma, a small settlement in the region of Rzeszów, on the border of two cultures, where Rome had for ages meshed with Byzantium, and the strict saints from icons led a peaceful co-existence with the chubby divinities from the Catholic shrines; it’s significant, this early awareness of the existence of many religions and the fact that neither can claim the right to justified exclusivity. The world changed slowly here, life progressed in the rhythm dictated by the seasons of the year. “I carved since I was six. A kid does what makes him happy… First in bark; they were sheep, various animals and birds. Then I switched to wood…”
In 1938, thanks to a scholarship obtained with the help of a teacher, he found himself in the School of Wood Industry Zakopane, in Antoni Kenar’s class. He was nineteen at the time; his peers were already graduating. In the future it was to turn out that the School and the encounter with Kenar actually outlined his further life; for the time being, he spent only one year there, then war broke out. He returned to Futoma, he was an orderly in the guerrilla, he efficiently tilled the soil (“It turned out I had it in my blood, I could sow and plough…”). It seemed that was how life would be now, but fate decided otherwise: “In 1948 my brother graduated from high school and I wanted to leave home. And so I wrote for my diploma. And the Professor himself answered me, that he is establishing a school, that I should come, that he remembers me. There was no consent from my Family (…); the farewell from my relations was a silent one.” Thus, nearing thirty, Rząsa returned to the second grade of School. He graduated in 1952, at the age of 33, and straight away, by Kenar’s wish, he became a teacher there.
The Zakopane School [Zakopiańska Szkoła] (its official name was changed many times in its history) was not just any vocational school, but the best-known and the most interesting secondary art school in Poland. Without it and Antoni Kenar, there would almost certainly be no Rząsa-the-Artist. (Without Rząsa-the-Teacher the School would exist, but it would not have all its greatness).
It was established in 1876 as a school of craft, but after the reform of 1922 it took on more of the character of an art school. At the time, it specialized in “applied art”, and the works of its students were displayed in great European and American exhibitions of decorative art with significant success. Already in 1925 in the grand International Exhibition of Decorative Art in Paris it won the Grand Prix for wood engravings, the Grand Prix for the method of teaching and a gold medal for the sculptures, and in 1937, also in Paris, it was awarded a silver medal.
Such was the school Antoni Rząsa entered in 1938; at the same time, Antoni Kenar (1906-1959) began teaching sculpture there. He was a graduate of the Zakopane School and the Warsaw-based Fine Arts Academy, a brilliant sculptor and a born teacher. He was thirteen years Rząsa’s senior and also came from a village near Rzeszów. After the Warsaw Uprising he was sent to a labour camp in Germany and his first two post-war years were spent in France, mainly Pairs, then the unquestioned capital of art, where one could get familiar with its newest achievements. This was of importance, because precisely in 1948, when Kenar returned to Poland, the “iron curtain” fell for several years, cutting Polish artists off from any information. The Secondary School of Art Techniques (today bearing Kenar’s name), which he created on the fundament of the former School of Wood Industry, was for him an enclave of artistic liberty, where he was free to perform his very successful pedagogical experiments. The school was fundamentally anti-academic, focused on stirring the student’s own sensitivity and their spontaneity, thus in complete contradiction with the pedagogical doctrine then in effect. Many works of the students of that time are truly amazing: they are definitely closer to the then-world avant gardethan socialist realism.
“I left with great expectations” – Rząsa wrote – “but also with mixed feelings. I was already 29 years old, with so much to learn; I was lucky to be so thin, so no-one in the school took notice. We were accommodated at school in very harsh conditions. Days passed, and our situation only got worse: the room was dreadfully cold due to the lack of fuel; we knew the teachers received no salaries for their work. More and more boys had nothing to live on. Professor Kenar kept giving the boys non-repayable loans. Some of us burned the midnight oil making small sculptures or toys which the Professor sold for us in Warsaw. We supported each other, sharing every piece of bread.”
The first years after graduation were very hard for Rząsa; he still doubted his sculpting and pedagogical skills. Kenar advised him to start with folk art (“Look at the immense wisdom in the use of the material, how simple the composition, how with the use of scarce artistic means you can achieve hugeexpression”). Rząsa took the advice to heart, but only after several years of more and less successful attempts did he find his own way.
It was the time of Kenar’s deadly illness. “The first crosses where I completely strayed from the Catholic canon were when the Professor was ill and when I saw his suffering, and I couldn’t accept it (…) Taking Christ, I made man and life, and pain.” Over a dozen of the crosses were made, mainly in pearwood (“pearwood resembles flesh”). They weren’t big, about forty centimetres, synthetic in form, austere and highly expressive. Kenar died in 1959, and Rząsa sculpted his grave marker. It was the moment of breakthrough; he was forty years old by then.
Kenar’s grave marker: a thick, three-metre log with a hollowed-out cross, on which (or actually: in which) hangs the figure of Christ with raised arms (an attribute of rather “secular” torture) and a head dropped to the chest unnaturally low outraged Zakopane greatly for several months. Rząsa was discredited as a man of no faith and accused of iconoclasm and heresy. He did not give in, however, he persevered, he hardened, all against the devotees who tried to hurt the figure with stones; against the opinions of the Tatra Highlanders that his Christ “has the head of a butchered chicken, hands with no fingers and an ugly robe…”
Rząsa wrote in one of his letters: “Because of rainfalls, I didn’t want to stretch Jesus’s arms to the sides, but in line with the tree rings I put them up and entwined them over the head, and the fingers, for them not to outshout the whole, I made less of them. (…) During the war I saw many killed, so I knew how it all looked in a dead person. So I lowered that Christ’s head… (…) I took this Christ and made him human…”
With time, Kenar’s grave marker came to be considered as one of Rząsa’s greatest works.
Rząsa was gaining confidence in his work, he taught, and exhibited his work in Poland and abroad. 1961 brought his first individual exhibition, and in the same year he obtained a scholarship for a journey to Italy; he visited nearly the entire country in three months (apart from a school trip to Moscow, this was his only journey abroad). He started to be popular; people wrote about him, interviewed him, visited him in his workshop, and his works were gradually finding their well-deserved place in museums and churches. He married in the mid-60’s, then came his son Marcin (a future sculptor, too), but he still lived and worked in terrible conditions; he often fell ill and always lacked money (though truth be told, he was more than unwilling to sell any of his sculptures).
In 1973, being of very poor health, he ceased working at school; he sculpted little, as he found it a challenge to hold the tools in his hands. In 1974, with the support of the city authorities, who at the time felt a wish to become a patron of the arts, he purchased a begun house, actually a ruin. Two years later a gallery of his work was opened there, but the residential part came into being slowly and with great difficulties. Short of money, Rząsa, though now seriously ill, did all he could by himself. Finally in 1978 he and his family moved into a still unfinished building.
He died in 1980; in less than a year, after a serious chronic illness, his wife Halina passed away. They were both buried right by Antoni Kenar’s grave, where the famous crucified Christ stands.
Over the years, cycles of sculptures came to life: “Crosses”, “Christs”, “Fate of Man”, “Pietàs”… No wonder that Rząsa started to be considered a religious, Catholic sculptor. People saw in his works another, modernized version of the figures found in roadside shrines and little wooden countryside churches, meant to be worshipped and made to listen to the requests and imploring of the faithful. This was a huge simplification, if not altogether a falsification.
Rząsa was certainly not Catholic, but he was a deep believer. His faith could probably find its place somewhere within Christianity, but it was individual and private. After the tragicomic case of the grave marker for Antoni Kenar, when Rząsa was accused of every possible godlessness, the sculptor wrote to his friend, “As far as this profanation goes, I am a believer; my faith is merely my spiritual need. I will not call myself a Catholic, oh, no, I won’t. I don’t go to church, I don’t practice faith, but I sense a powerful world of spirit, in a constant fight with the world of matter. I do not fear hell, but I am afraid of going to church, so I don’t come to hate my faith. As for offending God, when my mother died suddenly, when my brother died leaving behind two small kids and with them an irresponsible, ruthless wife, my despair pushed me to argue with God, calling Him a merciless tyrant; I denounced, cursed, and derided Him. Kenar’s death affected me similarly, but I never raised my chisel to insult my God.”
His art is no sanctimonious ad maiorem Dei gloriam, and it is certainly not religious art in the traditional understanding. The majority of the apparently “holy” figures do not present Christ or Saint Mary, or they were created for other, non-religious reasons. He started work on the early cycle of Saint Anne with Mother and Child by chance, with a commissioned sculpture which Kenar did not manage to complete before his death: “I began to carve the first one, it went very well; then the second, third, and fourth… The way to each new composition was not a concept-content, but the diversity of the formal solutions. (…) The completion of this cycle, despite the mistakes, became a very important event on the path of my work. Seeking in one subject as many compositional and formal solutions as possible, I found the starting point of my artistic way.”
The Pietàs, often in very unclassical arrangements, are called: “Pietà of the September defeat”, “Pietà – mother of the guerrilla soldiers”, “Pietà of fighting Warsaw”, “Pietà of passing”… In an interview, Rząsa stated: “I haven’t made a single one of them as Saint Mary. The model for my Pietàs has always been the Polish woman”. (For the sake of accuracy, it must be mentioned that “Pietà of the Battle of Tobruk” is a paining African mother).
“Christ of Auschwitz” is not the Son of God dressed in the symbolic striped uniform; he is only a man, a crucified prisoner of a death camp, in a situation perhaps more tragic than that of the Saviour (“I believe that Christ died with the awareness that he is saving the world; and he, the man in the camp, died without knowing why…”)
The “Crosses”, created during Antoni Kenar’s illness, do not actually present Christ either: they are a figure of the suffering of a very close man, which Rząsa was helpless about; they are the expression of his helplessness. Crucifixion seems to be the most permanent motif, always repeated in Rząsa’s art. Exhausted, mutilated, suffering, and sometimes rebellious and threatening figures on the cross are simply us and our neighbours. Regardless of what we believe or not believe in, we are bonded by the symbol: “Among the believers and non-believers, Christ is nevertheless a symbol of good and wisdom to be found in people.” And also: “The man on the cross has learnt everything, good and evil; his face shows all the knowledge of it, all the knowledge he has acquired… I don’t know if the division into good and evil is real. They are inseparable: there’s an element of evil in everything…” The crucified Christ: not a religious symbol, but a universal, existential symbol of suffering.
In all of Rząsa’s art, there seems never to have been a triumphant Christ, triumphant God, or man…
Rząsa carved in wood and wood alone. And wood is a special matter – it is a living organism which, like a human being, has a story written in it, a story of its life: “When you see a tree which grows in poor conditions, in the winds, and others, then it is as twisted as a man who struggles with life, it is hard, it has grown so.
Say, linden: it is either as hard as birch or so soft that I can manage it with my fingernails, if it had grown in good conditions. People are the same – and there’s your bond.”
In Rząsa’s work you can sense huge respect for a piece of wood and the story that made its shape and properties as they are. “I do what the wood tells me to”, he said. “I have a piece of wood and I look until I have seen. The sculpture is strongly dependent on this wood.” He also explained that as far as it is possible, he tries to carve a figure in one block; he does not like to join pieces, as if he attempted not to disturb the harmony of existence more than it was necessary; he tried to contain his own creation in the limits of a form set by Nature. Rząsa’s sculptures are living trees, but in a different shape.
In his view of the world, Rząsa goes further than Saint Francis. Looking at his carvings and reading the words he said, one may get the impression that for him “little brothers” were not only animals, but trees as well; and maybe in fact anything that lives. There is something of the archaic, pagan feeling of a balanced coexistence with all of nature; of being solely a piece of the symbiotic organism of Earth-Gaia. Only of this can we be sure.
In an interview, he mentioned that as war broke out, a Polish officer left in their house in Futoma a beautifully published book titled “Who are we, where do we come from, and where do we go?” He said that the question had been with him ever since, as he had never found the answer. “For no-one has yet answered the question of what the sense of a man’s life is…”
Rząsa’s sculptures possess a Romanesque, or early-Gothic, ascetic stateliness, the wooden warmth of folk religious figures, a painful, exaggerated scowl of expressionist art, and even (in his early works) forms which bring to mind Henry Moore, but that means nothing at all. Why should we look for a place for his art on the convoluted map of the history of art; why weigh and measure how much realism, how much symbolism, how many conscious choices as opposed to instances of chance, how much oversophistication, how much naivety… Rząsa’s art is Rząsa’s art: his own. It does not answer to the criteria of artistic trends; it exists as if out of time and I think that it will last long, for it is filled with faith. He claimed he actually carved for himself, that it was his diary – but it was also his prayer.
Wawrzyniec Brzozowski
The website was created with the financial support of the Zakopane City Hall
Rok Antoniego Rząsy dofinansowano ze środków Ministra Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego pochodzących z Funduszu Promocji Kultury