Józef Robakowski on Samuel Szczekacz

Jacek Michalak: Samuel Szczekacz is an artist who remains unknown to the wider public today. In recent years, two solo exhibitions in Berlin and Warsaw have brought his work back to attention. You showed five of his works in the group exhibition Eastern Front, during which you repeatedly stressed that Samuel Szczekacz was an important artist whose work must be discussed. Why do you believe this?

Józef Robakowski: As a very young man, Samuel Szczekacz — alongside Julian Lewin and Pinkus Szwarc — began studying with Władysław Strzemiński. Strzemiński offered these young art enthusiasts an exceptionally wide-ranging programme encompassing art history, drawing, painting, sculpture, printing, typography and architectural design. The young artists also worked with photomontage and rayographs. In 1933, Szczekacz was admitted to the Trade Union of Polish Visual Artists in Łódź. When Władysław Strzemiński organised exhibitions in Łódź, Kraków, Lviv and Warsaw between 1937 and 1939, he decided that these young artists would take part. This proves that he treated their still modest artistic achievements with great seriousness — as equal partners to his own work and to that of other experienced artists in the Łódź group.

J.M.: What, in your view, is most important in Samuel Szczekacz’s work?

J.R.: It would be difficult to imagine a better teacher for the young and knowledge-hungry Samuel Szczekacz than Władysław Strzemiński, who offered his pupil revolutionary solutions to new artistic ideas. In his own work, Szczekacz found value primarily in the Unist concept, analysing with extraordinary precision compositions based on a uniformly active field, in which he suppressed everything on the picture plane that would traditionally be understood as expression. Such expression still remained in Władysław Strzemiński’s Unist paintings in the form of subtly fluctuating colours. Szczekacz was uncompromising: he composed the picture as a pure, uniform field, free of chromatic tensions. In my view, no other Polish art of the period carried the uniform field to such a practical extreme as the work of Samuel Szczekacz. The great master in this respect was the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla. Looking at the art of the interwar period from today’s perspective, I consider Szczekacz a phenomenon. His analyses of the uniform field are remarkable; a beginning artist rarely achieves such radical results with full awareness. I believe that Lewin, Szwarc and above all Szczekacz creatively developed their outstanding teacher’s Unist concept through their laboratory-like artistic practice.

J.M.: The relatively short period of his artistic activity, Poland’s place on the map at the time, the outbreak of the Second World War and its aftermath — all this meant that Szczekacz had no chance to be discovered by the wider world.

J.R.: Yes. Szczekacz left for Belgium in 1938 and, after a short stay, travelled on to Palestine in 1939. Having completed his studies there, he earned his living as an architect, industrial designer, sculptor and typographer, abandoning painting. I believe his outstanding and forward-looking art was too radical for Palestine at the time and no one paid it any attention. The positive aspect of this history is that, because he left Poland in 1938, his body of work survived.

J.M.: Although the works dating from his collaboration with Władysław Strzemiński survived, they have been shown only a handful of times.

J.R.: In 1973, Szczekacz’s works were shown in the exhibition Constructivism in Poland at the Museum Folkwang in Essen. This was made possible by the openness to Eastern European art of the museum’s then director, Dieter Honisch, and his cooperation with Ryszard Stanisławski, director of the Museum of Art in Łódź. In the catalogue published for the exhibition, Szczekacz’s works stand out among those of the other artists; they are pioneering. Ryszard Stanisławski and Janusz Zagrodzki both recognised their value and ensured that they were properly represented in the exhibition and catalogue. Szczekacz’s works appeared again ten years later at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in Présences polonaises. L’art vivant autour du Musée de Lodz, an exhibition prepared by the Museum of Art to promote the Polish avant-garde. Years later, it is clear how extraordinary Szczekacz’s works are against the background of other works by artists creating visual texts. When we consider that this was an artist working in the 1930s, an artist whose potential was never fulfilled — Szczekacz created for only a few years — it proves unequivocally that he was an outstanding figure, indeed an artist of international stature.

Łódź, 8 October 2012

Józef Robakowski is an art historian and artist, one of the pioneers of multimedia art in Poland. He co-founded experimental art groups including Zero-61 and the Workshop of the Film Form. He is an academic teacher and curator, and the founder and owner of the Exchange Gallery in Łódź.