Stanisław Szukalski: A (self-proclaimed) Genius
(Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Sygnatura: 1-K-5410-2, via Wikimedia Commons)
Stanisław Szukalski, born on the 13th of December 1893 in the town of Warta, considered himself an unparalleled genius, an entity so omniscient he was certain he outsmarted science, religion, and God himself. And though we might think “pfft, why should I get acquainted with Szukalski, I’ve already met enough unbearable smartasses at Cambridge”, I believe we have much to learn from yet another Polish master artist.
At the age of just six, Staś’s talents began to mesmerise those around him. The story goes that he was once sent to the headmaster’s office as punishment for whittling a pencil only for the man to discover that young Staś had carved a tiny, almost perfect figure from it. The local newspaper was called, and the new art prodigy was announced to the city of Warta.
Embarking on this artistic journey, Szukalski’s works began to be received with widespread admiration. His sculptures in particular were described as “bravely executed” with great technical skill as well as “anti-natural, bearing the stigma of Egyptian, East Asian or Mexican plasticity”, and some of them were even classed as imitations of Rodin’s works. In 1925, the artist won a prize for presenting his vision of Adam Mickiewicz – a monument depicting the poet feeding a giant eagle with the blood of his heart, the details alluding to the art of the Incas.
Although Szukalski moved to the United States as a teen, leaving his motherland behind, he always remained (extremely) patriotic. So patriotic, in fact, that in the 1930s this celebrated prodigy was offered his own museum by the nationalist Polish government, only for his work to be completely obliterated by the Siege of Warsaw in 1939. None of this mattered to him – neither the fact that his entire life’s work was lost, looted, or bombed, nor that he was nearly crushed to death by a gigantesque statue he had been working on as it collapsed onto him, imprisoning the artist under its rubble for three days. No, this only catalysed the birth of a Nietzschean obsession with being ‘the chosen one’, as Szukalski later took it upon himself to rewrite the entire history of civilisation, reconstruct the language of human communication, and redesign our future. He dedicated his life to the quest of uncovering what he considered to be the ultimate truth – he was certain, and no one could tell him otherwise, that he had really figured it all out.
Rediscovered in 1971 by Glenn Bray (very accidentally too, as Bray found out about Staś from a forgotten magazine), the uncovering of the self-proclaimed ‘mega-mind’ was not what we might have expected. He was not surrounded by devoted apprentices, had no connections with the artists of the day, and his surroundings certainly did not seem appropriate for ‘the chosen one’. Instead, he found himself in a depressingly soulless building, living in two stuffy rooms crowded with statues and various forms of clutter piled to the ceiling. Szukalski had no apprentices, no friends, and no followers. In reality, he lived in poverty and almost total obscurity.
Geniuses, however, often do not need cushy surroundings and are quite happy living in squalor, as any reader of Russian literature will know. Szukalski’s genius, the relentless creative force that spurted out of him, was enough to produce an incredible quantity of astonishing works whose numbers reach tens of thousands, from profoundly expressive sculptures to highly detailed pencil drawings.
If anything, this almost absurd existence was what led to all these mind-blowing (for him, at least), discoveries. He believed he had discovered the prototypical language (“Protong”) of ancient humanity by searching for common symbols in various cultures in whatever he could lay his hands on, whether that be magazines, books, or newsletters. Moreover, he even formulated an original anthropological science and substantiated it with forty-two large volumes of drawings and writings. And he designed monuments and buildings for our future world. All of this was completed with such mastery of draughtsmanship and originality that even Hitler himself once requested some work from him. Funnily enough, what he received was a caricature of himself as a dancing ballerina. I feel it a great pity that it has been lost.
During the last decades of his life, Szukalski yearned for the recognition and exposure he had known so briefly in Poland, which was now utterly denied to him. He could not understand why graffiti artists were elevated to the status of glorious masters while he remained isolated from fame. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of his friends’ (Bray and a few other keen Americans) attempts to give Staś some publicity, with art curators considering him too political, too opinionated, and too crazy. This label was recurrent, although that should not come as a surprise; among his most strongly held (and extensively documented) theories was the notion that a race of malevolent Yeti had been interbreeding with humans since the beginning of time, and the hybrid offspring were bringing about the end of our civilisation. I do wonder whether it was for the better that it took such a long time for him to be re-discovered, as the artist’s political tendencies generally were and are socially condemnable and morally questionable.
Yet the opinions of others mattered little to the artist himself. He continued to toil like a madman, producing one amazing work after another, confident that his artistic and intellectual supremacy would triumph over the cultural degeneracy of the public. His works were perfect – he never made any mistakes (according to him) because he knew exactly what his vision required. One can only wish for such self-confidence and self-belief.