STARTING FROM SCRATCH
The end of the Second World War was the beginning of a completely new era. Artists ? regardless of the circumstances and political systems they lived and created in ? were faced with the necessity of reacting to wartime atrocities and the resulting trauma. The proliferation of death, inflicted on a scale previously unknown, massive destruction and the threat of nuclear annihilation became the background for the postwar period in art, which started between 1943 and 1945 then lasted until the end of the 1950s. For many artists, ?starting from scratch, as if painting never existed before? was the only solution.
One of the first examples of double-sided works in Wróblewski’s art are two canvas containing three paintings: an image of a man in a grey suit, cut into halves, became the verso sides for two abstractions, Geometrical Abstraction and Geometrical Abstraction in Grey. This is one of a few cases of Wróblewski’s double-sided works where he suggested the hierarchy of reading them, which was usually defined after his death. All three works come from 1948, and even though they were created when the artist was very young (around 20), they have little if anything to do with his student exercises, nudes or still lives painted under the influence of his professors. The coexistence of geometrical abstractions and the divided silhouette of a man suggest a cross-over to the abstract side, without letting go of the will to comment on issues of the condition of an individual in postwar reality.
Other abstract canvases from this period are based on an irregular plan and a limited color palette. In them one clearly sees the influence of Piet Mondrian, with whose work Wróblewski had become familiar when traveling in Holland in 1947. The young artist was not, however, just a new practitioner thoughtlessly trading old, local, masters for new, international ones. On the contrary: using Mondrian’s formal solutions but slightly departing from them, Wróblewski created an abstract language that was an expression of the impossibility of containing the ideal, autonomous and utopian world of geometry within the plane of a work of art. The experience of war had distorted this goal and made it absurd. Therefore, the artist decided towards a makeshift geometry, organised according to rough, even brutal rules.
Wróblewski considered his times to be revolutionary, and his work reflects this belief. In 1948 and 1949, the subject of his works is clearly optimistic, and their message universal, promising a brave new world. Works such as The Sun and Other Stars, Earth and Dark Sky recall astronomical visions or utopian cosmogonies. At the same time – as opposed to, for example, works of his contemporaries Tadeusz Kantor and Maria Jarema from this period – these images seem still: they lack dynamics, the celestial orbs seem heavy and suspended in nothingness.
The artist presented these paintings at the “1st Modern Art Exhibitions,” organised in the Art Palace in Kraków at the end of 1948. The exhibition was planned as a demonstration of modernity, with Wróblewski as its active co-organiser and one of its theoreticians. In the guidebook, written with blue-collar visitors to the exhibition in mind, he wrote he would like the paintings to hang in “club-rooms and factory halls, to lift the spirits of workers with their clarity, to help them through everyday work with their colours.” At the same time, during this exhibition he showed Painting about the Horrors of War, the only among his works presented there that would remain single-sided. In the exhibition guide, he completed the sentence quoted above with a remark that he would like society to “remember war and imperialism, the atomic bomb in the hands of the wrong people” through “images unpleasant as the stench of corpses”. Through this creation of a new language in line with the modern spirit of the new times (which is to say taking into consideration the reception of artworks by postwar Polish society), the artist seems to have created works full of contradictions, the vectors of which aim in many different directions at once.
