Stanisłav Szukalski

Stanisłav Szukalski (13 December 1893 – 19 May 1987) was a Polish sculptor and painter who became a part of the Chicago Renaissance.[1] Szukalski's art exhibits influence from ancient cultures such as Egyptian, Slavic, and Aztec combined with elements of art nouveau, from the various currents of early 20th century European modernism - cubism, expressionism, futurism and pre-Columbian art. During the 1920s, he was hailed as Poland's "greatest living artist". The style of his art was called "Bent Classicism".[2]

Stanislav Szukalski was a 20th-century modernist artist who was involved in sculpture, painting, sketching, and theoretical sciences. He lived both in America and Poland, feeling like a citizen of the world and, at the same time, a patriot without a homeland. He lost most of his work in Warsaw during World War II. He never recovered economically, artificially, or emotionally from this event. He was characterized among others as an anti-conformist and propagandist of the Slavs in the United States. His vision was to create Polish national art with its own identity and restore the standards and aesthetics of what is great art.

His masterpiece: Struggle

In 1917, he created the Struggle, one of its most famous works. It’s a hand about five times as big as normal. From the fingers come the heads of eagles. The four fingers attack the thumb, symbolizing the struggle between quality and quantity of ordinary people against brilliant people. Fingers symbolize quantity and thumb quality. 

Thumbs are interpreted as the creators of civilizations and fingers as the attack. The thumb also symbolizes the person, the artist himself, who opposes society. Stanislav Szukalski has said that “without the thumbs, we would not make tools and without tools, we would not make civilizations.”

This project encompasses the course of his life. It was destroyed in Poland during World War II, but it reappeared in the ’90s. It seems to have been stolen in the war and stayed for decades in a private collection. Both his professional career and his subsequent life have been marked by struggle and loss.

There is a Netflix documentary titled: Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski Which is well worth watching as it shows how Szukalski’s art evolved and how he teetered between genius and insanity.

The following website has more images of his work: https://www.wikiart.org/en/stanislaw-szukalski 

The above extracts were taken from the following websites: 

https://www.thecollector.com/stanislav-szukalski-genius-polish-art/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Szukalski 

Thanks to Paul Cacioli for this article