Aleksander Krzywobłocki – indywidualista fotomontażu

Abstrakt

ALEKSANDER KRZYWOBŁOCKI – THE INDIVIDUALIST OF PHOTOMONTAGE

Aleksander Krzywobłocki rests on a Nowa Huta cemetery in Krakow; one of the most significant Polish photography artists, the leading representative of the interwar photographic vanguard. Throughout his life connected with photomontage, he discovered its peculiar, autonomous face, avoiding, unlike the majority of artists from the period, commercial or socio-political engagement. He was born on the 23rd of May 1901 in Lvov. He studied architecture at the Lvov Polytechnic, during which time he completed a year course in photography under professor Henryk Mikloasch. In the summer of 1929 he founded with Jerzy Janisch and Mieczysław Wysoki the artistic group Association of Visual Artist “Artes”; he became its active member, the organizer of a number of exhibitions, at which he presented architectural and photographic work. His career was connected with architecture and preservation of monuments; he worked in many conservatorial offices, first in Lvov, and then after the war in Wrocław. He continued his photomontage work intermittently; he spent the end of his life, after retirement, in Krakow, where his last photomontage cycle was created. He died in November 1979. Krzywobłocki had been creating first pictures and montages since 1926; being unsure of their worth, he hid them. Only with time the gathered illustrative and photographic material became an impulse for “the first in 1928 attempts at photomontaging”. Works on the photomontage proper were preceded by the creation of “portrait photo-records”, parts of “montages from nature” and “photographic compositions”. They consisted in experiments with photography, discovering new phenomena, creating arranged scenes, which in fact could be “surreal events”. A completely different kind of representation is characteristic for many photographic composition from the early 30s, inspired by Bauhaus and the montages of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The tendency to erase the distinguishability of objects and to expose the abstract qualities of the photographic image is visible in these works. Post-war series of photomontages was created in 1948 and 1949. The artist used for their making a whole string of antique motives drawn from an old prints album. Indefiniteness of their place, ambiguity of situation and mystery hovering over everything asks us to place them in the region of art of surrealist imagination. The repertoire of already known sculptural and architectural motives appeared in the following cycles from 1955 and from the beginning of the 70s, enriched in the first case with lace and crystals and in the second with floral elements, from which the artist built crowded, closed compositions. The last, unpublished as a whole, cycle had been created in Krakow since 1973. They were completely new photomontages, in principle abstract, in the diagonal setting, with dominating contrast and open composition. They were complemented by two works in the pre-war manner, for the making of which Krzywobłocki used elements drawn from Krakow and Nowa Huta landscape.