The Great Painters
Tadeusz Brzozowski
- painting alchemist and sorcerer
MASTER OF PAINTING TECHNIQUES
SCENOGRAPH
Tadeusz Brzozowski (1918-1987)
Few contemporary painters had such a perfect workshop - equal to the old masters. In his beautiful, mysterious paintings - among the thicket of lines, in the mazes of fleshy forms - emotions and meanings are encrypted. He is a child of surrealism, but owes as much to the Middle Ages, Austrian Galicia and Polish Sarmatian tradition. The artist combined the spirituality of a mystic with the fantasy of a comedian, a propensity for jokes and old-fashioned mischief with Franciscan piety. His paintings refer to the past in a perverse way - there is pathos and mockery, grotesque and tragedy of existence.
AVANT-GARDE CONSERVATIVE
AUTHOR OF POLYCHROME
ACTOR
Tadeusz Brzozowski
1918
1935
The graduation exam and the beginning of studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow despite his father's practical objections. Theatre became his true fascination. He took part in student open-air performances, he was an extra in J. Słowacki Theatre, and in the experimental Academic Puppet Theatre he got to know Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990), a familiarity with which has influenced his entire artistic biography.
1940-1942
learning at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Krakow (the institution had the official status of a vocational school, but became an underground Academy of Fine Arts). Tadeusz Brzozowski met here future members of the Krakow Group: Jerzy Nowosielski (1923-2011), Kazimierz Mikulski (1918-1998), Mieczysław Porębski (1921-2012), Jerzy Skarżyński (1924-2004) and Marek Rostworowski (1921-1996).
1943
Brzozowski played Grabec in "Balladin" in an underground theatre Tadeusz Kantor
1945
in October Tadeusz Brzozowski graduated in painting and obtained his diploma, starting as an assistant in the Department of Hand Drawing at the Faculty of Architecture at the AGH University of Science and Technology, and later at the University of Technology
1948
took part in the Modern Art Exhibition at the Palace of Art in Krakow
1952
Tadeusz Brzozowski married Barbara Gawdzik, a painter and graphic artist, with whom he created church polychromies: ornamental decoration in Głogówek, Nativity and the Last Supper in Godziszów, Miracle of Bread Propagation and the Last Supper in Mogilany and polychrome in Imielno
1954
moved with his family (with his son Wawrzyniec, and soon with his second son Joachim) to Zakopane - since then the winter capital of Poland has become a real little homeland of Tadeusz Brzozowski. He left the Academy of Fine Arts and started teaching at the famous "Kenar School", the Zakopane School of Fine Arts.
1957
he crossed the Iron Curtain for the first time and went to Italy
1959
The first trip to Paris, where Tadeusz Brzozowski joined the PHASES movement - the group gathered artists from the circle of surrealism and lyrical abstraction. In the same year he took part in the 5th Biennale in Sao Paulo
1962
Starting work at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznan, where he spent a week a month for 17 years. That year, he took part in the 21st Venice Biennale
1971
A 7-month stay in the United States
1974
a large retrospective exhibition of Tadeusz Brzozowski at the National Museum in Poznań
1979-1981
he ran the Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow
1981
in autumn, in Zakopane, in a villa in Antołówka, the "family gallery" of the Brzozowski family was created
1984
Tadeusz Brzozowski left for the USA in connection with the prestigious Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award
1987
in the spring, at the invitation of the Pallottines, he went to Rome for a month
1987
During his stay in Rome, on Holy Monday, 13 April, after a sudden fainting in the street, Tadeusz Brzozowski died of a heart attack in the Holy Spirit Hospital. His funeral at the New Cemetery in Zakopane became a great manifestation of the world of culture, but also a meeting "beyond divisions", also political, rare in the difficult 1980s. The goodness and wise distance of the deceased painter once again united the conflicted and painful artistic environment.