The Bizarre World of Bruno Schulz: Legs, Boredom and ‘Demonology’
Self-portrait of Bruno Schulz on cliché-verre, Abc10 via Wikimedia Commons, part of the National Museum of Kraków’s collection.
Imagine a typical Eastern European village at the beginning of the 20th century. Inescapable dirt, the smell of dung, horses and carts going by. And then imagine seeing a man with perfectly groomed hair, impeccably clothed, all artistic-looking and entirely out of place – you’d consider him a bit of an oddball, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s Bruno Schulz going by! But who was this literary and artistic enigma?
Schulz was born in 1892 in the little town of Drohobych, present-day Ukraine. Although he was born into a rich Jewish family, in 1911 his father’s illness ensured that his good fortune was not destined to last – his family faced one financial issue after another, and Schulz decided to move to Vienna, hoping to enter the Academy of Fine Arts there. The quest ended in vain, however, and Schulz was forced to return home in 1915.
But despite the lack of any official certificates, he managed to become an artist specialising in a niche technique called cliché-verre. In the artist’s words: “the method I use is painstaking. It is not an etching, but a so-called cliché-verre – glass plate. One draws with a needle on a layer of black gelatine covering the glass, and the resulting negative translucent drawing is thus treated like a photographic negative, i.e., it is copied in a photographic frame on light-sensitive paper, developed, fixed, and washed away – a procedure similar to that of photographic prints – the cost is considerable – the work too.”
And so, he produced 20 works on erotic themes, evocative of the art of Bosch, Goya, Otton Dix, and George Gosz, and attracted conflicting opinions among his viewers. Some appreciated them, some were repulsed – Maximilian Thullie, a local senator, even accused the artist of disseminating pornography. Despite this, Schulz continued to enjoy growing popularity, eventually starting to write his most famous work The Street of Crocodiles – a prose work brimming with rich and unique language, marked by various eccentric sequences of metaphors reminiscent of Kafka.
Entirely self-taught as an artist, we cannot help but admire the astonishing talent and vibrant personality of Schulz. As a graphic artist, his contemporaries labelled him a “demonologist”, his works evoking the art of Cranach, Dürer and Grünewald as they brim with strange certainty, delight in the improper, depict subjects more infernal than heavenly, and bring to light what we dare not say out loud. Witkacy, a renowned Polish painter and a contemporary of Schulz, accurately summarised perhaps the most recurring element in all of Schulz’s drawings – the feminine leg. He argues that “The means of oppression of men by women in [Schulz’s] work is the leg, that most terrible, apart from the face and certain other things, part of the female body. With their legs, Schulz torments, tramples, and drives into a grim, helpless frenzy the women of his scarred, humbled in their erotic torment, debased and in this debasement finding the highest painful pleasure – men of wretchedness. His prints are poems of leg cruelty. In spite of all the monstrosity of their faces, one has the impression that Schulz’s ladies wash their legs carefully with brushes twice a day and have no corns.”
‘Woman with a Whip (Beasts)’ by Bruno Schulz, Ablakok via Wikimedia Commons, part of the National Museum of Kraków’s collection.
We can see the charm of Schulz’s lyrical prose reflected in his sketches, both stemming from the artist’s extraordinary imagination and fuelled by his unusual fusion of identities and nationalities: he was a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, immersed in Jewish culture, but unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. And yet despite these cosmopolitan characteristics, Schulz drew inspiration from specific local and ethnic sources only, glancing inward and close to home rather than gazing at the broader world. Indeed, he avoided travel whenever he could, preferring to remain in his provincial town which had, over the years, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, Soviet Ukraine, and Nazi Germany. Yet, neither his writings nor his artworks ever explicitly depicted the world events that took place around him.
Schulz’s works baffled the critics, who eventually decided that they can only be assessed through the concept of “extravagance”. That means connotations of bizarreness, weirdness, and exaggeration, as well as erring, going beyond, and going astray.
In the provincial sleepy town of Drohobych, sunk in inertia and dreariness, this motherland of his own existence and imagination allowed Schulz to discover a model and prototypical figure of the human world. It is a world in which human behaviour is subjected to two age-old and at the same time very modern passive effects: boredom and expectation, a world in which human creativity and everyday activities wander beyond the boundaries and norms of culturally sanctioned scenarios of behavioural standards.