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Tadeusz Kantor directing "The Dead Class", Kraków, 20 January 1988. Photo: Włodzimierz Wasyluk
Stage
director, creator of happenings, painter, set designer, writer, art
theoretician, actor in his own productions and lecturer at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Kraków. Born in 1915 in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, in the
province of Tarnów; died in 1990 in Kraków.
Table of contents: Kantor in the Theatre Kantor in Visual Arts Important awards and distinctions
Kantor in the Theatre
Kantor was inspired by Constructivism, Dada, Informel art and
Surrealism. He was attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and
studied under Karol Frycz, an outstanding set designer of the inter-war
period. Kantor staged his first productions - Jean Cocteau's
Orpheus,
Juliusz Słowacki's Balladyna and
Stanisław Wyspiański's Powrót Odysa / The Return of Odysseus with an underground theatre company that gave performances in private homes.
Immediately after the war he worked as a set designer, mostly for the
Helena Modrzejewska Old Theatre
in Kraków. Kantor continued to design for the stage on a regular basis
throughout the 1960s, primarily working on abstract sets. A trip to
Paris in 1947 inspired him to better define his own individual approach
to painting, and a year later he founded the Grupa Krakowska / Cracow
Group and participated in the Great Exhibition of Modern Art / Wielka
Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej in Kraków. But when Polish government
authorities began to promote Socialist Realism as "official" art, Kantor
disappeared from the art scene altogether. It wasn't until 1955 that he
finally exhibited the paintings he had been creating since 1949.
1955 was an crucial year for Kantor for several reasons. It was the
year that he inspired a group of visual artists, art critics and art
theoreticians to help him create the Cricot 2 Theatre, which would
become an incubator for his creativity. Cricot 2's first premiere was
Mątwa / The Cuttlefish by
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
(1956), a production in which Kantor cleverly juxtaposed the work's
sublime rhetoric against a host of found objects and the banal
environment of a café. The production included many elements that were
to become characteristic of Kantor's theatrical style, such as sets that
suggest silent films and actors who move and act like mannequins.
Cricot 2's second production was
Cyrk / Circus,
based on a play written by the company's own Kazimierz Mikulski, also a
painter. It utilised a technique known as "emballage", which was also
typical of Kantor's theatrical work at the time. In
Circus,
emballage took the form of black bags wrapped tightly around the actors.
Such packaging was designed to strip actors and objects of any
recognisable form, turning them into indistinguishable substance.
Kantor's emballage period was followed by "Informel Theatre" (1960-62), a
sort of automated spectacle that relied entirely on coincidence and the
movement of matter. The actors in Kantor's Informel Theatre production
of Witkiewicz's
W małym dworku / Country House (1961) were treated like objects, entirely stripped of their individuality.
However, Informel Theatre failed to fully satisfy Kantor. The form was
insufficiently integrated in an internal sense and too many of its parts
were open to reduction. Kantor therefore replaced the concept of
Informel Theatre with that of "Zero Theatre" (1962-1964), which was
completely devoid of any action or events. This idea was most fully
embodied in Cricot 2's production of
Wariat i zakonnica / The Madman and the Nun, also by Witkiewicz, which Kantor staged in 1963.
In the evolution of his staging and aesthetics, Kantor had pushed the
limits of any traditional concept of theatre. In 1965 he created
Poland's first happenings -
Cricotage and
Linia podziału / Dividing Line - which were followed two years later by the famous
List / The Letter and
Panoramiczny Happening morski / Panoramic Sea Happening. Happenings, as Kantor himself wrote, were a product of his previous experiences in the theatre and as a painter.
Up to this point, I have tried to overcome the stage, but now I have
abandoned the stage outright; that is, I've abandoned a place whose
relationship with the audience is always well-defined. In searching for a
new place, I theoretically had all the reality of life at my disposal,
he wrote.
(After: Jan Kłossowicz, Tadeusz Kantor)
Kantor's later disillusionment with happenings as a creative medium eventually led him back to the theatre. In 1972 he staged
Nadobnisie i koczkodany / Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes,
based on a play by Witkiewicz, in which elements of a happening were
absorbed into the theatrical structure. Three years later, in
Umarła Klasa / The Dead Class,
Kantor moved into yet another artistic phase with what he dubbed the
"Theatre of Death". It is in this phase that Kantor created what are
considered to be his most outstanding and best-known works. These
include
Wielopole, Wielopole (1980),
Niech sczezną artyści / Let the Artists Vanish (1985) and
Nigdy już tu nie powrócę / I Shall Never Return Here (1988), as well as the posthumously-produced
Dziś są moje urodziny / Today Is My Birthday
(1991) in which the primary motifs are death, transcendence, memory and
the history inscribed in memory. The productions that made up the
"Theatre of Death" drew on a theme running throughout Kantor's entire
oeuvre, namely, his fascination with what he called "Reality of a Lower
Order",
which continuously demands that I examine and
express issues through base materials, the basest possible, materials
that are poor, deprived of dignity and prestige, defenceless and often
downright contemptible.
(Tadeusz Kantor, after: Jan Kłossowicz, Tadeusz Kantor)
To say of Kantor that he is among Poland's most outstanding artists of
the second half of the twentieth century is to say very little. Kantor
is to Polish art what Joseph Beuys was to German art and what Andy
Warhol was to American art. He created a unique strain of theatre and
was an active participant in the revolutions of the neo-avant-garde; he
was a highly original theoretician, an innovator strongly grounded in
tradition, an anti-painterly painter, a happener-heretic and an ironic
conceptualist. These are only a few of his many incarnations. Apart from
that, Kantor was a tireless animator of artistic life in post-war
Poland; one could even say he was one of its chief motivating forces.
His greatness derives not so much from his oeuvre as from Kantor himself
in his entirety, as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that consists of his art,
his theory and his life.
(Jaroslaw Suchan, curator of the exhibition Tadeusz Kantor. Niemożliwe / Tadeusz Kantor - Impossible)
Kantor in Visual Arts
Throughout the world, Tadeusz Kantor is best known as an outstanding
and highly original figure of 20th century theatre, as well as the
creator of his own theatre group and of productions imbued with a poetry
derived from the artist's own complex private/public Galician origin.
In Poland he played a number of roles, primarily within the Cracow
artistic community with which Kantor was emotionally and artistically
connected, if not fused. He was one of the most important figures on the
Cracow art scene, acting as an integrator.
Immediately after
World War II, Kantor was amongst those who created the Young Visual
Artists' Group (1945); later, following the "thaw" of the mid-1950s, he
once again demonstrated his penchant for organisation by helping to
reactivate the pre-war Group (1957). He provided the impulse for the
creation of the Krzysztofory Gallery, one of the first post-war
galleries in Poland to exhibit contemporary art, and was involved in
organising the 1st Modern Art Exhibition (Kraków, 1948). He played a
dominating and commanding role in his community until he died, just
before the premiere of his last theatrical production. It was titled,
both ironically and symbolically,
Dziś są moje urodziny / Today Is My Birthday.
Kantor studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków from 1934 to 1939,
his professors included painter and set designer Karol Frycz. Kantor
himself would later return to teach from time to time at his alma mater
(1948-49, 1967-69). Throughout his life he strove to combine a variety
of activities: he was a lively animator of artistic life, an art
theoretician and practitioner, a painter (and passionate promoter of
Tashism) and one of the first artists in Poland to create happenings.
But above all he was a man of the theatre, a playwright, director, set
designer and actor.
Kantor's life in the theatre began early,
when, during the German occupation, he created an underground
experimental theatre in Kraków. This theatre managed to integrate the
artistic community of the city and it found a worthy successor in the
Cricot 2 Theatre, formed in 1956. "Cricot 2" was a reference to the
pre-war Cricot avant-garde visual arts theatre founded by Józef Jarema, a
painter and member of the Paris Committee who emigrated during the war
and remained abroad. Cricot 2's theatrical productions remain Kantor's
greatest achievement. His early productions, based on the plays of
Stanisław Wyspiański and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (
Wariat i zakonnica / The Madman and the Nun (1963) and
Nadobnisie i koczkodany / Dandies and Frumps
(1972)) are held in high esteem and helped to popularise these plays,
which are generally considered to be difficult. However, Kantor only
gained international recognition with his later productions, many of
which were inspired by the prose of Bruno Schulz. Remarkably, Kantor
made reference to his own biography through these plays, reaching into
the private archive of his memory (a theatrical form known as the
Theatre of Death, which includes productions such as
Umarła klasa / The Dead Class (1975),
Gdzie są niegdysiejsze śniegi? / Where are Yesterday's Snows? (1979),
Wielopole, Wielopole (1980),
Niech sczezną artyści / Let the Artists Vanish (1985),
Nigdy tu już nie powrócę / I Shall Never Return Here (1988) and
Dziś są moje urodziny / Today is My Birthday
(1991)). Regardless of whether he drew on a pre-existing work of
literature or chose to develop the stage-play himself, Kantor designed
complete and integrated productions for which he took total
responsibility.
He often participated directly in his
productions, acting as "master of ceremonies", attentively observing the
action and intervening when necessary. The shows, often thought to be
the vision of a single artist, were replete with references to a complex
and multi-cultural Polish history and iconography. They brought Kantor
widespread recognition and transformed him into the godfather of a style
of theatre that combines the visual perception of form with the need to
convey a deep, personal, emotional message. Many of his productions
have been inscribed in the annals of theatrical history.
Carrying on Kantor's legacy, Cricot 2 Theatre Centres have been created
in Kraków and Florence. In addition to studying Kantor's theatre, the
latter also documents the artist's other activities and examines the
reception and perception of his work.
On Kantor's other,
non-theatrical output, including his achievements as a painter,
assessments vary. His vision of art was derived primarily from his
search for a means of artistic expression worthy of the challenges of
his era. Kantor expressed this idea as early as 1945, when he joined
Mieczysław Porębski
in publishing a manifesto on "exponential realism". In it, Kantor
encouraged artists to take risks in the name of creative freedom,
underlined the importance of experimentation and emphasised the need for
the artist to remain independent from ideological and political
pressures (he himself followed these guidelines by vanishing from public
cultural life throughout the Socialist Realist period).
Kantor
strove to live by his principles in his own way; he absorbed any and
all novelties, skilfully assimilating those which were useful to him
while transforming and modifying them if necessary. For much of his
career as a painter, Kantor acted simply as a medium, processing the
artistic waves that reached Poland from Western Europe (he visited Paris
in 1947). As a result, his painting was not entirely original. For a
short time immediately after the war he painted figurative works filled
with grotesquely simplified figures. The dreary atmosphere of these
images was emphasised through their use of dark colours and rough
textures (
Kompozycja / Composition (1944-45)). This was followed
by a period during which he produced dynamic metaphorical compositions
characterised by an economical use of cool colours. These works
resembled those of Maria Jarema and Jonasz Stern, who were painting
similar things at approximately the same time (
Ponad-Ruchy / Supra-Movements (1948)).
During the second half of the 1950s, Kantor's work consisted mainly of
energetically painted Tashist canvasses, as mentioned above. These
images are visually mesmerizing in their own way, filled with vibrating
spots of paint, lines and colours. But at the same time they convey the
impression that the artist treats painting in a "utilitarian" manner (
Oahu,
1957), although in his own writings, Kantor described these works as
"secretions" of his inner self. Their originality did not go unnoticed
by foreign critics, including those in France, which was home to the
most significant critical milieu at the time. Towards the end of the
1950s Kantor exhibited his paintings in a number of Western cities,
including Paris, with some measure of success.
Later, the
artist turned his attention toward creating numerous assemblages and
"emballages"- half-spatial compositions in which pre-used, oftentimes
destroyed objects like envelopes, bags and umbrellas were applied to the
canvas, transforming the paintings into reliefs (
Mr. V Prado - Infantka / Mr. V Prado - The Infanta, 1965 and
Emballage,
1967). Figures keep reappearing in these paintings, but they are
deformed, sketchily drawn or "hidden" under umbrellas in dynamic and
symbolic gestures of self-defence (
Ambalaz - Przedmioty, postacie / Emballage - Objects, Figures,
1967). Thus the umbrella, this lowly object that Kantor held in such
high esteem ("a manifestation of a reality of lower status", he once
called it), while unable to fulfil its original function, unexpectedly
regains its utility in the world of art.
Kantor's many painting
series from the 1970s and 80s show clear links to his theatrical
activities, which he was pursuing simultaneously. For example, while
working on
Umarła klasa / The Dead Class, which premiered in
1975, Kantor created a series of paintings of the same title. Later the
artist would devote himself primarily to the theatre, resuming painting
only in the last years of his life. These late works depict a solitary
human figure, shown - in the style of new figural art - making a single
"stage" gesture. Characterised by cool colours, these images draw
heavily upon the artist's own personal experiences (see the series
Dalej już nic / Nothing Beyond This (1987-88)).
Alongside his other work, Kantor also organised of a series of
paratheatrical actions that would anticipate much of the polyphonic art
of the 1960s and '70s. Among these were his environments (the
anti-exhibition titled "Wystawa Popularna" / "Popular Exhibition" at
Krzysztofory Gallery in Kraków (1963)) and numerous happenings (
Linia podziału / Dividing Line, Krzysztofory Gallery (1966);
Panoramiczny happening morski / Panoramic Seaside Happening,
Plener Koszaliński w Osiekach / The Koszalin Plein-Air Meeting in Osieki (1967);
List / The Letter, Foksal Gallery, Warsaw (1968) and
Lekcja anatomii wg Rembrandta / An Anatomy Lesson According to Rembrandt,
Nuremberg Kunsthalle (1968) and Foksal Gallery (1969)). Kantor also
went through a period of fascination with Conceptualism (see
Wielkie krzesło / The Great Chair designed for the 1970 Wrocław Symposium).
A wealth of literature has been devoted to Kantor as an artist. Noteworthy titles include Wiesław Borowski's
Tadeusz Kantor (1982), Mieczysław Porębski's
Deska / Wooden Board (1997) and a volume of studies by various authors titled
W cieniu krzesła / In the Shadow of the Chair (1997), as well as documentation of the painter's collaboration with Warsaw's Foksal Gallery (1999).
Important awards and distinctions:
- 1976 - Honorary award for Umarła klasa / The Dead Class at the 17th Festival of Polish Contemporary Drama in Wrocław
- 1976 - Boy-Żelenski Prize for Umarła klasa / The Dead Class
- 1977 - Norwid Critics' Award for Umarła klasa / The Dead Class
- 1978 - Best Production Award for Umarła klasa / The Dead Class, Caracas
-
1978 - Rembrandt Award bestowed by an international jury of the Goethe
Foundation in Basel for real contributions to shaping the art of our age
- 1980 - OBIE Award (USA) for a 1979 production of Umarła klasa / The Dead Class
- 1981 - Award of the Minister of Culture and Art 1st class in the realm of theatre for his work as a set designer
- 1982 - Diploma of the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the propagation of Polish culture abroad
- 1986 - Targa Europea Award, granted to outstanding representatives of culture and science in Europe, Italy
- 1986 - New York Critic's Award for best production on Broadway (for directing and ensemble acting)
- 1989 - Commander of the Order of Art and Literature, France
-
1990 - Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, awarded
for having a significant impact on contemporary art in Europe and for
contributions to enlivening cultural life in the Federal Republic of
Germany
Author: Małgorzata Kitowska-Łysiak, Art History
Institute of the Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Art Theory
and the History of Artistic Doctrines, 2002. Updated by: Hilary Heuler,
August 2010
María Gabriela Díaz
