Józef Czapski

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Józef Czapski (1943)

Józef Czapski (born April 3, 1896 in Prague , † January 12, 1993 in Paris ) was a Polish author and painter who succeeded Fauvism and Paul Cézanne .

His engagement served to solve war crimes, but also artistic ideas and his own painting. He gave lectures on art and literature in the Gryazovets camp and in Starobelsk near Kharkov while he was a Soviet prisoner of war. His essay on Marcel Proust Lectures on Proust was dictated there in the winter of 1940/41 and has been available in German since 2006.

Life

Czapski grew up in Przyluki (Poland) as the son of the Polish aristocratic family Hutten-Czapski. From 1909 he lived in Saint Petersburg , where he graduated from high school and began studying law.

In October 1917 he was assigned to a Polish regiment , which he left after a few months out of pacifist convictions to return to Petrograd. Czapski had already enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1918 , but his studies were interrupted by a mission in which he was looking for Polish officers who had disappeared in Russia.

In 1921 he became a student of Józef Pankiewicz at the Art Academy in Kraków . Together with fellow students like Peter Potworowski , he founded the “Paris Committee” (“Komitet Paryski”) in the twenties, which probably explains the group's name as “Kapisten” . The group turned against Polish painting traditions, but also rejected non-representational art . The models were the painting of Fauvism , Vincent van Gogh and Cézanne .

In 1924 the Kapists traveled to Paris and stayed there for six years instead of the six weeks that were planned. Czapski recovered from typhoid fever in London in 1926 and found time to read Proust's great novel In Search of Lost Time . In 1930 he traveled to Spain. The Kapists had a number of successful exhibitions in the late 20's and early 30's.

After the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in mid-September 1939, Czapski and his regiment were sent to the eastern front. He was taken prisoner by the Soviets at the end of September and was deported to the Starobelsk special camp. He was one of a total of 394 Polish officers who escaped the mass murders ordered by the Politburo in Moscow in the spring of 1940, in his case apparently because of an intervention by the Foreign Office in Berlin. In total, around 22,000 Polish officers, state officials and intellectuals fell victim to the massacres in Katyn , Kharkov , Kalinin and other places by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD . In the camp, despite the cold, hunger and illness, Czapski tried to keep himself mentally upright by keeping a diary and traced his paintings from memory. The inmates did not have to do any forced labor. Some prisoners organized readings on subjects from various fields of knowledge. Czapski spoke about Polish painting, Proust and Delacroix.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union and the Sikorski-Maiski Agreement , Czapski joined the Anders Army in Tozk in 1941 and was instructed to search for 15,000 missing officers who were then named. The following year, in an organizational capacity, he accompanied a department of the army across the Persian Corridor through Iran, Iraq to Palestine, Egypt and Italy.

In 1945 he settled down in Paris again, where he a. a. with Sperber and André Malraux became friends. In 1947 he was a co-founder of the Polish magazine " Kultura ". Exhibitions, book publications, lecture tours and awards followed. In 1990 he was awarded the Jan Cybis Prize . He died in Paris in 1993 at the age of 96 .

Exhibitions

  • 1929: Kapist exhibition in the Zack gallery in St. Germain-des-Prés
  • 1931: Kapist exhibition at the Moos Gallery in Geneva
  • 1932: Solo exhibition at the Maratier Gallery in Paris
  • From 1950: Exhibitions in Amiens, Brussels, Geneva, London, Rio de Janeiro and Toronto
  • 1985: Paris Biennale (10 images)
  • 1986: Archbishop's Museum Warsaw

Literary works

  • Wspomnienia Starobielskie , Rome 1945.
  • Inhuman Earth , Cologne and Berlin 1967.
  • Le Tumulte et le Specter , Paris 1981.
  • Proust - Lectures in the Grjasowez camp , translated by Barbara Heber-Schärer, Friedenauer Presse, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-932109-47-8
  • Sabine Mainberger, Neil Stewart (eds.): À la recherche de la recherche: les notes de Joseph Czapski sur Proust au camp de Griazowietz, 1940-1941: Józef Czapski's notes on Proust in the prison camp , Lausanne: Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 2016 , ISBN 978-2-88250-441-8

Movie

  • Andrzej Wolski, director: “Jozef Czapski - 1896–1993 Contemporary witness of a century.” Documentary with interviews. France, Poland, 2015. 59 min.
  • Cédric Tourbe , director: "Stalin's executioner. The Katyn massacre." France 2020, 90 min.

literature

  • Maria Czapska: Une Famille d'Europe Centrale. Paris 1972.
  • Maria Czapska: A Travers la Tourmente. L'Age d'Homme, 1980.
  • Lore Ditzen: Proust - Lectures in the Grjasowez camp. Berlin 2006. - Epilogue
  • Dufour-Kowalski: Joseph Czapski: un destin polonais: homage pour le centenaire de sa naissance. Avant-Propos de Jeanne Hersch, L'Age d'Homme. 1997.
  • J. Krawczyk: Jozef Czapski ou la vision picturale du monde et de ses transcendances. Poland 1983.
  • Manès Sparhawk: Inhuman Earth. Cologne and Berlin 1967. - Foreword
  • Jill Silberstein: Lumières de Joseph Czapski. Montricher 2003.
  • Murielle Werner-Gagnebin: Czapski, La Main et l'espace. Lausanne 1974.
  • Adam Zagajewski: Joseph Czapski - master of my ignorance. In: Sinn und Form No. 6, 2003.
  • Jeanne Hersch: Czapski, peintre des contrastes. In: Journal de Genève. January 14, 1993.
  • Wojciech Karpinski: Portrait de Czapski. L'Age d'Homme, 2003.
  • Frédéric Saillot: La Lettre Ouverte restée lettre morte. In: Revue d'histoire diplomatique. June 2004, pp. 28-43.
  • Eric Werner: Portrait d'Eric. Xenia, 2010.
  • Sabine Mainberger, Neil Stewart (dir.): À la recherche de la recherche: les notes de Joseph Czapski sur Proust au camp de Griazowietz, 1940–1941: Józef Czapski's notes on Proust in the Grjazovec prison camp, 1940–1941. Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc, Lausanne 2016, ISBN 978-2-88250-441-8 .
  • Eric Karpeles: Almost nothing: the 20th-century art and life of Józef Czapski. New York Review Books, New York 2018, ISBN 978-1-68137-284-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. United States Congress: Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances on the Katyn Forest Massacre: The Katyn Forest Massacre. 1952, Washington, DC
  2. Józef Czapski: Wspomnienia starobielskie. London 1944, pp. 87-88.
  3. Józef Czapski: Wspomnienia starobielskie. London 1944, pp. 3-7.
  4. Thomas Urban : Katyn 1940. History of a crime. CH Beck, Munich 2015, p. 50.
  5. Józef Czapski: Wspomnienia starobielskie. London 1944, p. 42.
  6. Josef Czapski: Inhuman Earth. With a foreword by Manès Sperber. Translated from the Polish by Willy Gromek. Cologne / Berlin 1967, pp. 61-66; English-language summary of his report in: The Katyn Forest Massacre T. 6, pp. 1704-1708.
  7. Czapski: Inhuman Earth , p. 5.