COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

In 1970, when in New York graffiti just was being born, 18 years old Włodzmierz Fruczek made his first works on the walls of Warsaw. Fruczek was a beginning artist working as a decorator in the Fish Central Office. He regularly crossed the district of Warsaw after the war known as the Wild West, located partially on the ghetto area: ruined, filled with debris, rumored to be a dangerous site of criminality and black economy. The landscape of ruins and dead walls must have a strong impact on the young artist who without any project or idea in a few days painted a set of figures on the walls of the buildings of Żelazna, Grzybowska, and Waliców street. The paintings, made with emulsion paint, depicted outlines of human bodies, sometimes only torsos or limbs. Some of the figures stayed calmly, even holding hands but many of them were outstretched in extreme postures. The painting on the photo, made on the wall on Waliców 14, showed the scene of execution and as the only one of the set had a title: Dance of Death. It was a spontaneous, emotional reaction of the artist on the remains of war and Shoah that he was surrounded by.
Tomasz Sikorski took his picture about 1974. In his narrative, the Fruczek’s work is a symbolic beginning of the graffiti in Poland, independent from the American patterns of street art, artistically significant, and closely tied to the local history. For that reason, the photography of the Dance of Death opens the story about the post-war artistic graffiti in Poland.

Source:
Tomasz Sikorski, Marcin Rutkiewicz, Graffiti w Polsce 1940-2010, Carta Blanca, Warszawa 2011.

Tymoteusz Onyszkiewicz claimed that the most important artefacts from the Fuck 89 Collection are photographs of youth demonstrations from 1988 and 1989. He argued that mass demonstrations that occurred one after another in two-three weeks period were essential for the anarchist movement in the late 1980s. Anarchists, socialists, punks, Rastafarians, pacifists, ecologists, and other alternative youth groups used to regularly gather together in the streets of Warsaw to manifest their disagreement with the state policy and socio-economic situation in Poland. What they showed was also the solidarity among different groups of young people, when the whole movement fought for rights of small parts of itself. Exemplification of this united fight of the youth opposition is given by unique photography which captured one of the demonstrations demanding the legalization of Independent Students’ Union (ISU) in 1988. The photo shows a mob of people with flags and banners of ISU as well as anarchistic, marching through Krakowskie Przedmieście street nearby university’s gate, in spite of ideological differences between liberal-democratic ISU and radical anarchists and socialists. The author of the picture is unknown, but the message about the solidarity of rebellious youth movement is very clear.

In 1968, Zaborskaitė finished and published her book about the life and work of the Lithuanian poet Maironis. She presented it for her doctorate. During her speech, she acknowledged that the idea to write a book had come to her in the 1950s, and the book was written in 1958-1961 (see Stonytė V., Ir aš ją pažinojau...Atsiminimai apie Vandą Zaborskaitę [I Used to Know Her. Memories of Vanda Zaborskaitė], 2016, Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, p. 503). Nevertheless, due to the political situation and the regime's attitudes towards the Department of Lithuanian Language and Literature at Vilnius University, Zaborskaitė not only could not publish her book on Maironis, but was also dismissed from her position as lecturer (in 1961).

The poem “Poslední růže” (“The Last Rose”) from the collection Dům Strach (House of Fear) was written by Jan Zahradníček during his time in Pankrác Prison in the early 1950s. The manuscript of this poem was hidden by Václav Sisel , a guard and technical chief in the Pankrác Prison print shop. This manuscript finally became part of the Jan Zahradníček Collection at the Museum of Czech Literature in 1968. The poem depicts a real event: Václav Sisel, in accordance with Jan Zahradníčekʼs request, gave a rose from the prison garden to Antonín Ludvík Stříž, the canon of the Royal Collegiate Chapter of St. Peter and Paul at Vyšehrad. The rose, which grew and bloomed before prisonersʼ eyes, was then put on the main altar of the Vyšehrad cathedral.

“The Book of Mařenice” (Mařenická kniha) was published as a samizdat in 1977. It includes texts by Pavel Zajíček, Czech poet, musician, artist and leading figure of the Czech underground. These texts (diary notes, personal comments, reflexions, poetry, lyrics) were written in the first half of the 1970s, during Zajíček’s stay in the village of Mařenice in Northern Bohemia. Only one copy of “The Book of Mařenice” was published. This unique exemplar with its original visual concept is currently part of the Libri Prohibiti collection.