I remember having dinner in Oxford with a young, enthusiastic Pole, who was completing his Masters in Art History before progressing to greater things, who asked me, "What do people in England think about Poland"? This was prior to its entry to the EU. Thinking honesty was called for I suggested: The start of the Second World War, Solidarity and the Pope being Polish as three possibilities if you were 'lucky'. He looked appropriately crestfallen and I was sorry.
Czapski was moved similarly to realise that in spite of its historic importance and its cultural depth, Poland was often simply an absence in people's cultural cartography. Sad to say, I think, this continues to be true, to which my own unfamiliarity with Czapski himself attests.
I cannot remember how I came to recently acquire Eric Karpeles' 'Almost Nothing: The Twentieth Century Art and Life of Jozef Czapski' but I am deeply delighted that I did. Czapski's life virtually spanned the whole of the Twentieth century. His vocation was art, it was accompanied by a distinguished career as a writer and cultural diplomat; and, as a witness. All captured in Karpeles sympathetic, intelligent and highly descriptive prose.
During the Second World War, he was captured by the Soviet Army as it moved, in collaboration with Hitler, to dismember Poland. Sent to a camp with his fellow officers, he formed bonds in adversity that would live with him, and obligate him, for the rest of his long life. Most of the officers he was incarcerated with were, in 1940, on the direct orders of Stalin murdered at Katyn (and elsewhere). After the tentative and short-lived rapprochement between the Soviet government and the Polish government in exile after Hitler's invasion, Czapski went in search of his comrades and Karpeles details the cynical stonewalling to which he was treated, aided and abetted by Stalin's new allies in the UK and the US. It is a demoralising tale of 'realpolitik' that left Czapski however undeterred repeatedly telling his story until finally vindicated just before his death. In 1990, the Soviets admitted their culpability for their 20,000 deaths.
In exile in Paris after the Second World War, Czapski was a leading light of 'Kultura' the periodical that sought to maintain Polish identity and cultural depth whilst Poland remained in the grips of Communism. For it, Czapski wrote humane, tolerant capacious articles on art, literature and history. He was an ecumenical Catholic, a liberal humanist and with a gift for tolerance that strikes one as remarkable given all that he had lived through. He was, also, gay, mostly.
It was, however, art that dominated his life and his practice. That he is not better known is both due to the fact that most of his art is in private collections and as a stubbornly figurative artist recovering after the Second World War from almost a decade when he did not paint, he was always somewhat out of step with current trends. Remarkable it is, and a testimony to his vocation, that he indeed 'started again' and persisted even, as with Monet, the darkness of blindness descended. An obscuring that was experienced as strangely liberating, precision being impossible, the only route was a renewing freedom and spontaneity.
'Almost nothing' refers to his primary artistic focus - on those moments, things, people, places that do not stand out of their ordinariness until they are seen, given attention and shaping form, coloured into life by the artist's practice. It might be a still life, or a woman waiting in the doctor's outroom or the artist himself at his work or at his ablutions.
Czapski was an avid reader of Simone Weil, that complex, infuriating, saintly philosopher, (to whose works he introduced the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, as it happens, whose essay on Weil introduced her to me)! He was fond of that saying of her's that absolute, unmixed attention is prayer; and, though Czapski disliked 'confusing' the language of art with that of Spirit (both crucially important to him), this saying of Weil's aptly captures his practice. Paying attention, always notebook in hand, seizing moments to which that attention would bring life, reveal it, almost nothing, but out of which all is ultimately created. He was fond of quoting Paul Valery, "God made everything from nothing, but the nothing shows through."
Thankfully Karpeles is publishing a volume specifically on Czapaski's art to supplement the relatively small number of reproductions in the biography. I can hope that it stimulates further interest in his work and through the work, also, to the man.
For a running theme in the book is on just how remarkable he was, simply as a person, his generosity, tolerance, tact, his ability to make friends, spanning ages and his support of other, younger artists. He clearly inspired extraordinary loyalty and affection; and, communicated enthusiasm and life, even when most challenged as a prisoner of war in grim circumstances. Here he lectured (from memory) on Proust creating a wholly different world to the one then endured, creating possibilities of memory and meaning, which, as Victor Frankl was discovering in his own incarcerated hell, were keys to a person's survival as much as by bread.
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