Adventurer in Poland

Throughout its history Poland has been ravaged by war, crushed by invaders, enslaved by dictators, has even disappeared as conquerors' booty. But the Poles are one of the world's most individualistic peoples, have always broken through their bonds to reassert themselves as men and as a nation. Today, under the regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka, Polish artists have burst irrepressibly from their cellars in an outpouring of expressionist and abstract canvases just as if a dozen years of Nazi and Stalinist suppression had never been.

Gomulka, seeking an uneasy balance between Communist orthodoxy and his countrymen's predilection for Western traditions, has not only relaxed the traditional Red dictate that artists must paint faithful replicas of tanks and tractors, but has also given an official stamp to contorted, explosive paintings that Stalin would have labeled "bourgeois degeneration." Last December some of these canvases were shipped to Russia for exhibition at the Central Exhibit Hall in Moscow. But paintings by Poland's more extreme abstract expressionists were not included.

Last week the paintings by the leader of this group, Tadeusz Kantor, were being shown in a Paris Left Bank gallery. Unveiled by Ambassador Stanislaw Gajewski, it was the first official one-man show of a Red-ruled abstractionist outside the Iron Curtain. And it was a whopping success. Said Paris' Combat: "An adventure, a frenzy of living which recalls Jackson Pollock, but goes beyond him." Concurred L'Express: "The work of a Pole who has pursued magisterially, against wind and tide, the grand adventure of modern art."

Kantor paints with vibrant colors, slashing strokes, free-flowing dribbles of thick paint. His work is both vicious and brooding, echoes his own tortured existence. Born near Cracow in 1915, Kantor was influenced by Bauhaus geometricists, then with a group of fellow painters went into hiding as Russia and Germany carved up their country in 1939. "We went on painting and exhibited clandestinely in each other's houses," he says. Kantor's father was a Jew turned Christian, and Tadeusz was overlooked in the Gestapo purges. But he saw his friends hauled off to the gas chamber, poured his emotion into his painting. "I tried to express the absurdity which connected us with the war, the cruelty, inhumanity of war, its meaninglessness, the macabre juxtapositions."

But the war was also the "period of my great expansiveness," he remembers. "Our group was like an academy; we created art tenets for ourselves. We studied abstractions and arrived on our own volition at present concepts." After the war, Kantor earned a living as set designer for an experimental theater group, but not until the Gomulka thaw did he emerge into the limelight as a painter. Kantor is still considered too radical to exhibit in Moscow. But he is content with progress at home. In Poland, he says with satisfaction, "no one dares any more to make an exhibition of picture postcards."

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