Józef Gosławski

Biography

In the spring of 1958 the National Bank of Poland was announcing the results of a competition for new 2, 5 and 10 złoty coins. First prize went to Józef Gosławski for a ten-złoty coin with Mieszko I and Dobrawa; it was decided to issue it as a silver commemorative 100-złoty coin for the millennium of the Polish state. For the coin with the cockerels he received second prize, and four more of his designs were commended. The five złoty with the fisherman and the ten with Copernicus went into circulation.

He was born on 24 April 1908 in Polanówka, in the Lublin region, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Antoni, was a blacksmith. His childhood was spent in the neighbouring Wąwolnica, with his brothers and sisters; his younger brother Stanisław also became a sculptor. In 1923, after finishing primary school, Gosławski took the entrance examination for the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków but was not accepted because of his age. He spent a month at a teacher training seminary in Lublin, gave it up and went to the Building Crafts School in Kazimierz Dolny. He took odd jobs with a Warsaw merchant and in a woodcarving workshop in Nałęczów. From 1927 he studied at the State School of Decorative Arts and Artistic Industry in Kraków, lived in a hostel run by the Jesuits and worked in a furniture factory.

The turning point came in 1929. He finished two years of the course, took part in the first group exhibition of sculpture and briefly drew close to the circle of Stanisław Szukalski. Gosławski never became a member of the Horned Heart Tribe, but Szukalski’s ideas stayed with him and served him more than once. In 1932 he finished the sculpture department, entered the Academy under Xawery Dunikowski and after the first semester was expelled for failing to pay his fees. That same year, at an international caricature exhibition in Vienna, two of his sculpted caricatures were singled out: “Piłsudski and Kasztanka” and “Dunikowski”. In 1933 his first solo exhibition was held at the Palace of Art in Kraków. Dunikowski offered him a return to the Academy right at the opening, but Gosławski declined and went to Warsaw, to the studio of Tadeusz Breyer.

With a scholarship he went to Rome and in 1937 received a diploma from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Angelo Zanelli. In Italy he was vice-chairman of Kapitol, a society of Polish artists, travelled around the country and studied antiquity and the Renaissance. The portraits of the Sicilian, Maria Maro and Robert, all from 1937, in the view of scholars bear the mark of this study. His first plaques also date from Rome.

In July 1939 he returned to Warsaw: from 1 September he was due to become curator of the Royal Castle. He never took up the post. Almost everything he had made before the war, including the Italian works, was lost in transit to Poland in August 1939. It was said that part of it ended up in the Castello del Catajo in Italy, but his family looked into this in 2010 and found no confirmation.

He spent the years of the occupation in Wąwolnica; he could not serve in the army because of astigmatism, but worked with the underground. He earned his living by making artistic objects, taught his younger brother and turned to small forms. It was then that the medals “Year 1939”, “Bolesław the Brave” and “Majdanek” appeared, mostly about the martyrdom of the Polish people. In 1943, during a search by the SS, one of these medals was hidden just in time.

After the war Gosławski began, on his own initiative, to restore the house “Under St Nicholas” in Kazimierz Dolny; later the work was supervised by the Ministry of Culture. In 1947 he took over the chair of metal sculpture and medallic art in Poznań. Soon after the war he received a commission for sgraffito and figures of saints for the archcathedral in Lublin. His medals commemorated both soldiers and victims of Nazi crimes: “Westerplatte”, “Lenino”, “Monte Cassino”, “Radogoszcz Accuses”, “Never War”. He was the first to move away from the classical round composition of the medal, and he paid close attention to lettering. In Polish medal-making he remained the link between the generation of Konstanty Laszczka and Józef Aumiller and the later medallists.

In the early 1950s, as Socialist Realism, the official Soviet-style doctrine in the arts, was tightened, he was dismissed from the Poznań school; he himself linked this to his prewar contacts. The family lived in poverty, and his studio was cramped. Even so, it was in this decade that his main monumental works appeared: the allegorical group “Music” for the MDM housing district in Warsaw (1952, for which he received the Silver Cross of Merit), the monument “Never War” to the victims of the camp at Żabikowo near Poznań (1956) and the monument to Adam Mickiewicz in Gorzów Wielkopolski (1956). He made the model of the Chopin monument at Żelazowa Wola in 1955. Gosławski twice headed the Poznań branch of the Association of Polish Artists, and from 1956 he lived in Warsaw, in Saska Kępa. In 1958 he travelled to the USSR, and in 1960 a solo exhibition of his work was held in Budapest. In 1961 he became chairman of the sculpture section of the association’s board, and in 1962 he received the Minister of National Defence prize, third class, for a series of war medals.

He died suddenly in Warsaw on 23 January 1963 and was buried in the Powązki Cemetery. The Chopin monument at Żelazowa Wola was unveiled in 1969.