Nieopisana kolonia artystów

• Authors: LEC TOMASZ

Title variants

EN

Undescribed colony of artists

• Languages of publication: PL EN

Abstracts

EN

It was in the Old Town in Warsaw where I took my first conscious steps. Those were the times when children were raised in backyards. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, entering the Old Town from neighbouring streets required some courage and cautiousness from a child. At that time, I lived in the New Town Market Square and I and my friends used to walk along Stara St. down to the moat, so that we could climb the bailey from the side of the newly reconstructed defensive walls, from where one could sneak through a “freshly designed” alleyway in the medieval constructions straight to the Market Square in the Old Town. The Old Town district was rebuilt as a housing estate, and although it had a number of cultural institutions, it was dominated by shops and services. A stamp dealer in the Market Square itself, where stamps from the now non-existent world of the Austrian Empire were also sold, was particularly interesting. Opposite, in a surviving Gothic gate that led to the Pod Krokodylem restaurant and café, there was also the entrance to a small cake shop, one that it was really hard to find in the city which was dominated by private cake shops deprived of the proper ingredients and with cobbled together equipment. Every stylistic detail was taken care of here, and so were the cold cabinets, and the prices were not loaded with the café margin. They mostly sold cakes for two zlotys each, with only the so-called W-Z cakes being more expensive. Their name was a direct reference to a new east-west route dug under the adjacent Castle Square, the so-called W-Z. The Old Town had a few grocery shops, a specialist fishmonger with a porcelain tile tank for live fish, a traditional butcher’s, a Gallux clothes shop, a flower shop and a perfectly-designed shop selling folk crafts as well as a porcelain and crystal shop for the few foreign tourists of that time – strangely enough, the district did not have its own kindergarten or school. So the Old Town kids went to a range of different schools nearby, built an integrated team in their backyards, and were regarded as dangerous in the battles that children get into. The children came from different families, and only an experiment in real society could have produced such a mixture. Flat allocations in the Old and New Town areas were carried out by ministries. Particular storeys in a single staircase were inhabited by employees of the ministries of Education, Agriculture, Culture, Foreign Affairs, etc., but the key to this puzzle was the allocation of flats for the workers from the Ministry of Public Security, who occupied the premises in a double role, as they also monitored their neighbours. It was completely untrue that the workers, the builders of the Old Town, were given flats there. Maybe there was someone there as an example; anyhow, I do not remember any child saying they are from a working class family. I walked down the route from the New Town Market Square to the Castle Square with my father, in safety and many times over. It was in 1958-1966. On most occasions, the first person we met was Artur Nacht, who lived one floor below. He was a professor in the Academy of Fine Arts, a painter and a member of the so-called Paris Committee, who survived the Holocaust thanks to documents in the name of Stefan Samborski. There were times when Nacht was just returning from his “night outings” when we were leaving home. His Portrait of a Jew in a Hat, a work painted in Jankiel Adler’s studio in Berlin in 1925 under the influence of Modigliani, is still with me in my study in the Old Town. We had the closest relations with the Lengren family who lived nearby. Before they were allocated a study and a flat in Brzozowa Street, in a granary that partly survived the war and was adapted for housing purposes in the final stage of the rebuilding (as late as the 1960s), they and their two children were cramped in a room with a kitchen in the narrow part of Freta Street. Zbigniew Lengren was a young and promising illustrator who became well-known thanks to his strange adventures of peculiar-looking Professor Filutek, published for several decades in the popular weekly “Przekrój”. In the broad part of Freta Street, in the zone under by the current UNESCO World Heritage List inscription, there was a milk bar which back then actually produced only meat-free food, but that was often covered with pork greaves. A catering facility with a beamed wooden ceiling and walls covered with Dutch style tiles, white and blue, was arranged on the ground floor of a building that was burnt down during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Despite being painted over the enamel, the hundreds of tiles presented the Polish fauna in a perfect way. In these surroundings, at tables made of Carrara marble, local people used to eat pancakes with cottage cheese – the speciality of the house until this day. Until recently, I used to see the same aluminium pans at the back of the bar that I had seen when the place was established. The bar was particularly popular on days when the district had no gas supply, which happened very often in those days. On ordinary days, the place was visited by disabled soldiers from the New and Old Town (the bar was wheelchair- accessible), as well as lonely writers and artists. People who are forgotten today such as Alfred Degal, the author of the Konkwistadorzy z Bonifraterskiej (Conquistadors from Bonifraterska Street) report, or Włodzimierz Boruński, who benefited from the fame of his cousin Julian Tuwim (poet) and who suddenly became recognisable thanks to a role in Zaduszki, a 1961 Tadeusz Konwicki movie. Few people remember that a similar bar also operated for a short while in Piwna Street. It had the same forged sign with a tilted jug. Like in the other parts of the city, life in the Old Town started at dawn with the milkmen. Of course, no backyards or staircases were locked. Attempts at locking staircases and installing Bakelite doorbell buttons with tenants’ names failed. So the milkmen had free access to the customers’ doors. Milk was not pasteurised and needed to be boiled quickly to prevent it from turning sour. In the first stage of the reconstruction, the kitchens were equipped with stoves in which the right half was filled with refractory bricks and was suitable for coal firing, while the left one had two or four gas burners to be used in the future. The stoves were so heavy that they can still be found in many cellars, or perhaps one was not allowed to take them away due to strategic security? In his 1955 watercolour panorama, the painter Jerzy Pawłowski preserved a unique moment when the entire Old Town is covered in smoke from the chimneys as everyone cooks dinner, with the Palace of Culture looming in the distance. In the same year, homes started to be equipped with light four-burner gas stoves based on Bauhaus designs which were produced by the Sanar company in Dessau. The characteristic and larger attic flats were in fact studies designed for painters, but the ways of their allocation were quite contorted – I knew an attic flat in Nowomiejska Street which was occupied by translator and limerick writer Tadeusz Polanowski with his wife and two daughters. I remember a study in the attic which was occupied by painter Barbara Jonscher, then the most famous Polish artist in the West, and the study of Andrzej Strumiłło (still in use), both in the area of Kamienne Schodki Street. The Artymowskis lived in Piwna Street. Roman Artymowski, a painter and an Academy of Fine Arts professor, was a visionary abstractionist, whereas his wife Zofia made a great contribution to the reconstruction of the Old and in particular the New Town as the creator of a number of mosaics and frescoes on the façades of the buildings. She used to send my father anonymous postcards with witty comments. The last one, sent from the place where the Euphrates meets the Tigris (where the Biblical paradise was placed, as tradition has it), on the day my father died, had the wrong address, with Nowy Świat Square instead of New Town Square (because she also used to send her postcards to Nowy Świat Street, to the editors of the “Świat” weekly). Thanks to working in Iraq, the Artymowskis became the owners of a green Jaguar – it was a sensation in the Old Town as it was the first car of its kind in Warsaw. No data protection law was in force at that time, so artists’ addresses were quoted in catalogues of collective exhibitions. It is surprising how many of them lived in the Old Town. From Władysław Popielarczyk, a forgotten painter but still honoured with a commemorative plaque in the Old Town, to Alina Szapocznikow, who used to live on the Market Square itself and is today probably the most famous Polish artist in the world. Taking into account writers, actors, dancers and composers, it was a huge colony of artists, unrecognised and undescribed. I have mentioned only some of them here, those that I knew best. And what a constellation it was when one takes into account the whole company that gathered in the café of the Polish Writers’ Union in the northern “headland” of the UNESCO World Heritage List zone, already situated in Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. Jan Knothe, an architect, co-designer of the W-Z Route and an excellent graphic artist, lived just one house away. His valuable drawing advice helped me to pass the entrance exam to the Faculty of Architecture, Warsaw University of Technology. I am not old enough to remember Stalinism, but I do remember a wave of artists’ departures after the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 or the lingering smell of tear gas thrown against students in the Barbican arch during martial law. The Polish Writers’ Union café was closed down. In the times of capitalism, following 1989, the community living in the Old Town changed, and many 40-square-metre flats were bought and transformed into hotel apartments. The small homeowners association in Piekarska Street at the corner of Piwna Street, where my study is currently located, has increasing numbers of plaques commemorating deceased neighbours: Michalina Wisłocka, the authoress of Sztuka kochania, Tadeusz Łomnicki, a legendary Polish actor, and Bronisław Geremek. Certainly, there would not be enough walls to honour everyone. In December 2016, as I am writing these words, those still holding their posts and working include the 101-year-old actress Danuta Szaflarska and 92-year-old sculptor Zbigniew Maleszewski*. Oh yes, and me, 61-year-old Tomasz Lec.

Keywords

PL

kolonia artystów; Stare Miasto w Warszawie; Starówka warszawska; życie Starówki; mieszkańcy Starego Miasta; artyści ze Starego Miasta

• Publisher: Narodowy Instytut Dziedzictwa
• Journal: Ochrona Zabytków
• Year: 2017
• Issue: Dodatek Specjalny. Dziedzictwo w Polsce.
• Pages: 150-155

Dates

published

2017

Contributors

author

LEC TOMASZ

• architekt, varsavianista
• architect, Varsavianist

Identifiers

ISSN

0029-8247