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Default Mad Man

Mad Man


by Steve Sailer on December 03, 2009


"The sharply contrasting careers of two Slavic-American artists who both died in 1987, the droll commercial illustrator Andy Warhol and the titanic sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski, illustrate much about how culture has changed over the last century.


For over 40 years, Warhol (1928-1987) has been famously famous for
saying, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Warhol’s own renown, however, is undying. Last week, for example, saw
the opening of a musical with the onomatopoeic title POP! about
Warhol’s shooting by an irate feminist in 1968.

In contrast, Szukalski (1893-1987) spent much of his life on the edge
of poverty. Yet, Szukalski actually was suddenly famous in his native
Poland in the late 1930s. Then, much of his life’s work was blown to
smithereens during WWII.

The great screenwriter Ben Hecht, who had met him in Chicago in 1914,
wrote of him in the 1950s:

His works are vanished. He is without public, without critics, and
so complete is the world’s ignorance of him that he may as well have
never existed.

Yet, Szukalski toiled on, endlessly creating statues and drawings, a
living legend to a handful of friends, including the very young
Leonardo DiCaprio in 1980s Burbank.

Szukalski’s politics weren’t helpful. In Chicago in 1914, to which his
blacksmith father had brought him a half decade earlier, he was
training 20 Polish boys in the manual of arms, “So when the time comes
they will be ready to go back and fight for the freedom of Poland.”
Polish nationalism, however, was not exactly the most career-promoting
ideological obsession for a 20th-century artist. To the right is his
plate, Ahuman and Human commemorating the Soviet massacre of the young
leaders of Poland at Katyn in 1940, shows an ape in a Soviet Red Army
uniform shooting a Pole in the back of the head. To the left is
Yaltantal, presumably a reference to how the fate of Poland was
determined at the Yalta conference without the Poles having a say.

Moreover, his aesthetics were out of fashion in the middle of the 20th
century, when abstraction ruled and his genius for representation was
disdained.

And while the art world talked a good game about demanding “disturbing
outsider” art, Szukalski works are mostly too grotesque to furnish a
corporate lobby. Szukalski’s endless invention, tortured subjects, and
Pre-Columbian tastes give the unsettling impression that this is what
the leading artists of the Aztec Empire would be creating today if the
Conquistadors had been defeated.

Finally, late in his life, the postmodern era rejected artistic
heroism for Warholian irony. The sculptor liked to say, “I put Rodin
in one pocket, Michelangelo in the other, and walk towards the sun.”
His 75-year-long career pushed the 19th-century Romantic and early
20th-century Avant-Garde conceptions of the artist as a mad genius
creating disturbing works to hilarious new extremes at a time when the
art world was coming instead to idolize clever businessmen like
Warhol.

As C. van Carter pointed out to me, Szukalski’s fan Jim Woodring wrote
in “The Neglected Genius of Stanislav Szukalski”:

Among his most strongly held (and extensively documented) theories
was the notion that a race of malevolent Yeti have been interbreeding
with humans since time out of mind, and that the hybrid offspring are
bringing about the end of civilization. As proof of this, he pointed
to the Russians.

Szukalsi dared the world that his stupendous talent would make it
forgive his megalomania, obstreperousness, obsession with vicious
apes, general craziness, and exquisitely bad manners, the way it had
forgiven Beethoven, Wagner, and so many other artistic heroes.

It didn’t.

Warhol, in contrast, invented a more consumer-friendly role for the
artist in a culture tiring of greatness. Andy pointed out, “Art is
what you can get away with.” He glibly churned out pictures of things
people didn’t mind looking at, such as Marilyn Monroe and popular
consumer packaged goods, while offering critics enough of a toehold to
concoct rationalizations of why this was still Art.

Paul Johnson dyspeptically observed in Art: A New History: “He was not
so much an artist, for his chief talent was for publicity, as a
comment on twentieth-century art, and as such a valuable person, in a
way.” But lots of people liked the fact that he was making a joke out
of Art-with-a-Capital-A.

Although he cultivated an image as a halfwit too dumb to get the joke
(here’s a video clip from Basquiat in which Andy, played by David
Bowie, loses an argument over whether the suburb of Saddle River is in
New Jersey or New York), he got away with virtually everything he
tried. If he who dies with the most toys wins, then the shopaholic
Warhol, whose countless possessions required a 1988 Sotheby’s auction
lasting ten days to dispose of his purchases to his fans, won.

Szukalski was a product of a more monumental age. Hecht recounted his
1914 introduction to Szukalski’s works:

I had never seen any statues like them, nor have I yet after
thirty-nine years. They were like a new and violent people who had
invaded the earth. They seemed to be

without skins, and their sinews writhed like imprisoned serpents.
… Secrets animated all the statues, and I was bewildered looking at
them those first fifteen minutes.

After Poland’s catastrophe, Szukalski wound up in Burbank making maps
for an aerospace company. Some leaders of the underground comix scene,
such as R. Crumb, Glenn Bray, and George DiCaprio, rediscovered
Szukalski in his extreme old age.

(Looking at some of Szukalski gorilla drawings might help explain
their interest in him.) They managed to get the nonagenarian in to see
powerful museum curators, whom Szukalski, within the first minute,
would unfailingly and unforgivably insult. The DiCaprios, father and
son, wrote of their difficult friend in “Insulting Picasso,” their
introduction to the book Struggle: The Art of Szukalski:

A flood of political disaster, a capricious tide of artistic dogma
almost overwhelmed his creations and submerged them in a sea of dark
obscurity. … He was a Polish mystic and a Promethean artist whose
message, in borrowed typeface from a dead language, would mean: “Help
Yourself to the Sacred fire.” It is prankish that he is still so
unknown.

Szukalski is perhaps the most memorable character in Hecht’s exuberant
1954 autobiography, A Child of the Century. In the company of his
friend Wallace Smith, a journalist who illustrated his articles with
his own drawings, Hecht first met Szukalski in 1914 in the Fine Arts
Building on Michigan Avenue:

“Excuse me for not standing,” Szukalski said. His voice was
purring and nasal and Polish-accented. “I fainted in the street an
hour ago. Now I feel better.”

“Are you sick?” I asked.

“No, … I am hungry. I have not eaten for several days.” …

“My friend Wallace [Smith] is an artist,” I said. Stanley looked
at him. His eyes were still dizzied with hunger but he managed to get
a sneer into them.

“Everybody who can draw better with the right hand than the left
is an artist today,” Stanley said. His face grew paler. It looked up
mockingly at me. “You are very lucky to know an artist,” he continued.
“I do not know one—anywhere in the whole world.”

Almost 70 years later, the teenage Woodring visited Szukalski in his
over-stuffed two-room apartment in Burbank. Szukalski hadn’t much
changed:

During my first meeting with him, he had me continually off-
balance. “What is your nationality?” he asked me moments after we
settled down on chairs in the dank aquarium of his living room.

“Dutch, mostly,” I said.

“The Dutch are the world’s leading proponents and producers of
child pornography,” he replied.

Hecht wrote:

Szukalski, in his own soul, was a country called Poland. I do not
understand the process by which an egomaniac such as Szukalski can
transform himself into the colors of a flag. But such he was—patriot,
chauvinist and lover of Poland, blind with the homesickness of a fish
for water. No other history, problems or people existed for him than
those of Poland.

In his later years, he wrote a book entitled Behold!!! The Protong, in
which he argued that all human culture is descended from Easter
Island, and Polish is the closest to the proto-tongue.

Back in 1914, the insulted Wallace Smith had been dumbstruck by the
first Szukalski statue he had beheld: “His own face had lost its
mockery. I became aware that Wallace was looking at his own talents
turned into genius, his own fanatic draftsmanship made alive by art.”

When Smith asked the sculptor where he had learned his anatomy,
Szukalski replied that once he had gone to meet his beloved blacksmith
father, only to find:

“He had been killed by an automobile. I drive the crowd away and I
pick up my father’s body. I carry it on my shoulder for a long time.
We go to the county morgue. I tell them this is my father and I ask
them this thing which they did allow. My father is given to me and I
dissect his body. I study him carefully. You ask me where I learn
anatomy?”
Szukalski looked at us with pride.

“My father taught me,” he said.

(Here’s Szukalski’s bronze, My Blacksmith Father, pre-dissection.)

Two weeks later, Hecht and Smith brought Count Monteglas, the art
critic for William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago Examiner, to the loft to
discover the unknown Szukalski:

“Very interesting,” Monteglas finally said and raised his cane. He
poked Aesop’s torso gingerly with the tip of his cane. “Very strong.
Very well done. And there, too, great feeling.” Count Monteglas poked
Aesop’s shoulder with his debonair stick.

“Excuse me,” said Szukalski, purring and nasal, “but people do not
look at my statues with cane. They look with eyes.”

He stepped swiftly up to the critic, snatched the cane from his
hand, broke it across his own knee and flung the parts out of the
door. This done, he collared Count Monteglas and shoved him violently
forward.

“Outside, please!” he said.

Here’s his Judas from 1912, when he was 19.

Woodring notes that in the 1980s:

One time I arranged to bring him to meet with the curator of a major
Los Angeles museum. The man’s office was hung with works by Picasso,
Matisse, and Kandinsky; Szukalski immediately launched into a sneering
tirade against these masters. The curator simply left the room and a
secretary showed us out.

Here’s his California Man.

Once, in his Burbank exile, about 70 people showed up to see a slide
show of his work:

Szukalski was ecstatic. He loved to hold forth and he felt
affectionate toward his every audience. He mounted the podium and
within four minutes had alienated or offended everyone in the place.
In his opening remarks he praised Reagan to the heavens and dumped all
over Picasso (he pronounced it “Pick-ass-oh”); he denigrated art
collectors, Russians, FDR, California, America and professional
sports, and wound up with a stern denunciation of “homos.”

Note that Szukalski’s infinite love of Poland did not extend to
traditional Polish artistic motifs. Over time, his work took on a
bizarrely Pre-Columbian cast, as if he were the Michelangelo of the
Mayans. Here, for example, is his model for the Rooster of Gaul.
Woodring explains the artist’s conception:

During his last years Szukalski’s major project was a gigantic and
complex structure that he wished the U.S. to give to France to
reciprocate for the Statue of Liberty. He called it the Rooster of
Gaul. … “Look,” he said, indicating a weary and anguished woman being
ravaged by a roiling mass of stylized and inscribed tentacles. “That
is the woman who symbolizes France. She is being crushed and ensnared
by all the ‘-isms’ of modern Europe. There is Fascism, and there is
Communism ... and there is Ventriloquism.”

We, of course, live in the Age of Warhol, not Szukalski. We all are
deathly afraid of not getting the joke.

And yet, if Szukalski had only lived two years longer, to 1989, his
mania for Polish liberty would have been vindicated. “The freedom of
Poland” turned out to be the single most effective cure for what ailed
the world in the second half of the 20th century."

http://www.takimag.com/article/mad_man/
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