Zdzisław Beksiński

Biography

Before moving to Warsaw in 1977, Beksiński burned a selection of his works in the backyard of his house and left no record of them. He later explained that some were too personal and others did not satisfy him.

He was born on 24 February 1929 in Sanok, in southern Poland. His family had lived there for generations: his great-grandfather founded a boiler works that grew into a factory making railway wagons and buses, his grandfather was the town architect, and his father was a surveyor and engineer in the municipal offices. During the German occupation Zdzisław attended a commercial school and, at the same time, clandestine classes, and he studied the piano. When an unexploded shell that boys were playing with went off, he lost part of the thumb and index finger of his left hand. In 1947 he passed his school-leaving examinations. He was accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts, but on his father’s advice he chose architecture and studied in Kraków until 1952, graduating as an engineer-architect. Nobody ever gave him systematic training in painting or drawing.

Under the compulsory job assignment of the time he stayed on to work in Kraków, then in Rzeszów, and in 1955 he returned to Sanok, where for several years he worked as a construction inspector. He disliked the job. From 1955 he belonged to the local branch of the Polish Photographic Society, and in 1957–1960 he was part of an informal group of photographers with Jerzy Lewczyński and Bronisław Schlabs, close to Otto Steinert’s “subjective photography”. He photographed figures that were contorted, bound with string or cropped by the frame; his wife was often the model. Abstract sculptures of metal, wire and sheet metal date from the same time: reliefs and masks, some of which are now in Wrocław. Drawings followed, first semi-abstract, then openly figurative and harsh in subject; in communist Poland they were shown only to a small circle.

From 1959 until the early 1970s he worked as a stylist in the design department of the Sanok bus factory, which his great-grandfather had founded. He designed the look of several prototype buses and minibuses, as well as company marks and a logo with a stork. The projects never went into production: the Warsaw commission that assessed road transport did not approve them. He himself remembered the job as a source of modest income on a half-time salary. In 1960 he turned down a scholarship from the Guggenheim Museum.

Around 1964 Beksiński began painting in oil on hardboard that he prepared himself. According to accounts, in the mid-1960s he received advice from the Sanok painter Tadeusz Turkowski. He broke sharply with the avant-garde and turned to figurative, visionary painting. His first exhibition, of about thirty “fantastic” pictures, organised in Warsaw in 1964 by the critic Janusz Bogucki, was a success: the public bought everything. The avant-garde critics regarded him as a renegade. He worked to classical music and said he wanted to paint as if he were photographing dreams. He gave his works no titles, claimed he did not know their meaning himself, and considered these works, grim by general opinion, rather optimistic and in places amusing.

In 1977 the town authorities decided to demolish the family house on Jagiellońska Street, and the Beksińskis left for Warsaw, to a flat on Sonaty Street. From the 1980s his exhibitions in France, Belgium, Germany and Japan were organised by the Paris collector Piotr Dmochowski. From 1989 to 1996 Beksiński’s own gallery operated in Paris, and in the early 1990s there was a permanent display in Osaka; about seventy of his paintings remained in Japan.

Beksiński divided his work into two manners: the “Baroque”, in which content dominates, and the “Gothic”, in which form does. In the 1990s he moved increasingly away from fantasy towards form, and from the second half of the decade he took up the computer, digital photography and photo manipulation, which he pursued to the end of his life.

In 2001 Beksiński bequeathed his legacy to the Historical Museum in Sanok, having already given it about three hundred works.

He was murdered in his Warsaw flat on the night of 22 February 2005, a few days before his seventy-sixth birthday. The killer was a nineteen-year-old, Robert Kupiec; in November 2006 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and his sixteen-year-old cousin, who had helped him, to five years. The artist was buried on 8 March 2005 in the family tomb at the Central Cemetery in Sanok. Since 2012 Sanok has housed the Beksiński Gallery in the rebuilt wing of the castle, where his Warsaw studio has also been reconstructed.