Warsaw, retrospectively

I've written in an earlier post on this blog of the Polish artist Barbara Falkowska. She has been on my mind again recently for two reasons. First was the arrival in the post of a new retrospective catalogue of her work--a beautifully put-together publication. Second, was the preparation I've had to do, along with animator Orla McHardy,
for an interview for an award to make a film of my poem, "The Polish Language," which is dedicated to Barbara. In that interview, I told the story of meeting Barbara twenty four years ago in Maine and how in the years since, we have kept in touch, and how the poem came to be written because of my contact with Polish culture that began with that friendship (and with Barbara's niece, Basia, an extraordinary individual--but that is another story).
So here is something I wrote in Boston in 1994 about my visit to Poland four years earlier. The photo of the lady and cabbages above was taken in an indoor market. (We got the award by the way, and the film will be premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2009. )

Warsaw
(1990)


I went to Warsaw to visit the Polish artist Barbara Falkowska and her family. Barbara spins, dyes and weaves wool, linen and raffia into large tapestries, which she calls gobelins. They are richly coloured and textured fibre paintings, marvellous things. I had had the good fortune of studying with her a few years before, and I became close to both Barbara and her niece Basia. When the airfares from the U.S. to Eastern Europe dropped in the early 90’s, I jumped at the chance to visit my friends.

At the time I arrived in Poland, the Communist government had just conceded its power to Solidarity, so Warsaw had not yet been brightened by the United Colours of Benetton and other festive regalia provided by free enterprise. Everything had that legendary totalitarian grey pallor. Store windows enticed customers with nothing more than a few dusty jars of pickles, a couple of wrinkled onions. Aside from the rebuilt Old City that catered to tourists, the better part of Warsaw was made up of rows and rows of concrete, high-rise housing blocks, stretching for miles across the flat plain that hugs the Vistula River.

When I arrived at the building that housed Barbara’s home and studio, I found it to be like all the others: grey, concrete, shabby. I remember that I looked up to the tenth floor, which I knew to be Barbara’s level, and saw one balcony upon which vines had been trained to grow, forming a kind of arbour. I knew it would be hers. I also remember the remarkable interior of Barbara’s small home, which was also her studio. She had filled it with lovely things: hand-made glassware and table linens, forged iron decorations, paintings and sculptures, all made by her friends in Poland and abroad. This place was filled with a kind of erotic energy for life in the midst of the starkest aesthetic landscape I could imagine. It spoke volumes about what art really is, at least to me. And at that time and place art was not yet much of a commodity as it now is in Poland. The need to make art and the need to live seemed very closely connected among Barbara and her friends. And the fact that they kept making art through the bleakest years of the worst regimes was in itself subversive; she and her friends had been harassed for years by the security police. I guess on this visit to Warsaw I got a clear vision of what art can be, is: life-giving, erotic, subversive, indomitable.

That same day, as the sun began to set, Barbara took me to her little studio on the second floor of the flat. She began to hand some of her recent works about the studio for me to look at. The one I remember most was a big tapestry, about ten by twelve feet, which she called “Screen”. It was made of very dark chocolate brown wools and linens with a central, globe-like image that was carved out on one edge by flecks of cornflower blue wool. The abstracted image reminded me a little of those astronaut photos of the earth seen from space, licked on one side by sunlight. I asked her to talk about this work, and she said that it was about her relationship to herself. Then she said, “I feel the greatest gift would if I could be completely myself.” I remember puzzling over those words; I felt as if she had said something important, something I needed to understand, but really comprehending it was not in my reach at that time...


Early in my second year of graduate school (in painting), I read a letter in which Matisse wrote the following. It recalled to me Barbara’s puzzling words. I’ve had it tacked up on my studio wall.

There are many things that I would like to understand about myself.
but after half a century of hard work and reflection, the wall remains.
Nature, or rather, my nature remains mysterious; at least I have put a little
order in my chaos by following the small light that guides me and responds
energetically to my frequent S.O.S’s. I am not intelligent.