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Accepted Contribution:
Contribution short abstract:
The camp art of Bronisław Czech (1908-1944), a Polish sportsman who was deported to KL Auschwitz and died there, forms a poignant, if paradoxical from an aesthetic and iconographic point of view, collection. The key to understanding it is to recognise the context in which they were created.
Contribution long abstract:
The artistic oeuvre of Bronisław Czech (1908-1944), an outstanding Polish ski racer, has so far not been the subject of separate, in-depth studies. The public attention has usually focused on his sporting successes, interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939 and his imprisonment since 1940 in the Nazi concentration camp KL Auschwitz. Mentions of his paintings on glass, created in the interwar period, appear in publications devoted to the history of painting on glass in the Tatra region in the 20th century. However, his works were treated as an additional occupation performed by the Czech at that time and were considered only an example of the revival of this branch of highland folk art in Podhale. Meanwhile, looking at Czech's work in the context of his biography, and especially his later fate during the war, sheds new light on the role of artistic creativity in his life. The paintings with folk scenes and Tatra landscapes, objects decorated with highland patterns and letters illustrated with watercolours, made in the Auschwitz concentration camp, are a moving trace of the work of prisoner who created to survive. Behind the folkloristic stylisation and cheerful iconography hides the nightmarish every day life of victim of Nazism. Some of the Czech's works, smuggled out of the camp, were also a form of visual communication with the world ‘behind the barbed wire’, which he missed so much and which he never saw again. 20th century painting on glass reveals yet another, non-obvious, poignantly serious face...
Unwriting or rewriting folk art in the contemporary?
Session 1