The neglected genius of Stanislav Szukalski

Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1988 by Jim Woodring

American tarmac, I first saw the work of Stanistav Szukalski in issue # 1 of R. Crumb's magazine Weirdo. I was intrigued but not exactly smitten, and when I found a well-thumbed copy of the Szukalski sampler Troughful of Pearls lying perused and abandoned in the back of a Santa Monica magazine rack I bought it on a whim, without any real interest in him or his work. Two days later the glacially flowing substance of his genius had slid into my conventional mind and f Wed it up, transforming me into a raving Szukalski cheerleader who showed his work to everyone I encountered, including total strangers in public places.

When I found out through pure chance that he was alive and living in Burbank, California, scant miles from my own house, I was agog. I looked up his number in the phone book and called him. When he answered the phone in his deep, nasally mellifluous voice I was so palsied with excitement that I could barely speak, but he was very gracious and when he rearised that through my choirboy croaking I was asking if I could visit him he acquiesced warmly.

I had envisioned him living in a comfortable house with a sculpture garden, tended by a doting wife and a small staff of minions and apprentices, dealing nimbly with a steady trickle of art world executors. Instead I found him in a depressingly characterless apartment building, living in two stuffy rooms crowd ed with statues, personal effects and the clutter of various works-in-progress. His wife had died a few years before and he had no minions, no apprentices, no admiring public, His mainstay and sole major patron was comics art collector and publisher Glenn Bray, who printed trougbful of Pearls in 1976 in an attempt to bring Szukalski's work before the eyes of the world. As our meeting rolled on, it became horrifyingly evident to me that Szukalski was living in poverty and almost total obscurity.

Yet plainly he was one of the greatest artists of this or any age, a relentless creative force that produced an incredible number of astonishing works during the course of a career that spanned seventy-five years.

The story of his life is so interesting, and his list of count of them would take volumes. He was born in 1896, achieved recognition as an artist of rare promise while in his teens, endured two decades of sickness, hunger and neglect, and had a museum devoted exclusively to his works at forty. He produced hundreds of elaborate and profoundly expressive sculptures and dozens of thousands of drawings; he discovered what he believed was the prototypical language of ancient humanity; he formulated an original anthropological science and substantiated it with forty-two large volumes of drawings and writings; he designed monuments and buildings - and all this he did with a mastery of draughtsmanship and an originality of design that never fails to astonish whoever sees it.

Ben Hecht in his 1954 autobiography A Child of the Century describes the twenty-year-old Szukalski he met in 1914 as starving, muscular, aristocratic and smoldering with disdain for lesser beings than himself. When an influential art critic favored Szukalski's Chicago art studio with his presence and appraisingly touched a statue with the tip of his cane. Szukalski seized the stick, broke it, and roughly threw it and his potential benefactor out into the street.

In fact he categorically loathed all art critics and invariably repaid their admiration with profound contempt; the result was a predictable dearth of career. Szukalski didn't mind. He continued to toillike a madman, producing one amazing work after another, confident that his artistic and intellectual supremacy would triumph over the cultural gag order that had been imposed on him.

In 1934 he was vindicated. The government of his native Poland declared him "The Greatest Living Artist' ' and brought him and all his works to Warsaw, where the Szukalski National Museum was built as a monument to his glory. There could be no greater honor for Szukalski, who considered himself to be Poland in miniature, and whose heart yearned ceaselessly for his homeland and his people all the time he was in America.

During WWII the Luftwaffe demolished the museum during its first bombing raid on Warsaw. Szukalski returned to the United States, there to spend the rest of his life in varying degrees of comfort until his death. His reign as "The Greatest Living Artist" had lasted only a few years.

He Worked with fierce and single-minded devotion, indifferent to matters of personal comfort or nutrition. When a stroke felled him on June 17, 1987, at the age of ninetyone, Szukalski was still tremendously vital. At an age where the overwhelming majority of Americans are either dead or ruined, Szukalski was a veritable sprite. He possessed an uncommon clarity of mind which age did nothing to obscure. He lived contentedly alone, walked considerable distances every day for exercise, and managed his own affairs. He could subsist on a diet of cornflakes and water, and yet maintain such muscular strength that his arm felt like a piece of steel drainpipe.