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Polish Madness: Tadeusz Kantor's Eccentric Genius
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21354 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 2001 |
2,816 Words |
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John Elsom
John Elsom is a contributing editor to The World & I. |
The southern Polish city of Krak—w was named a "European City of Culture" to mark the millennium year, 2000--a nontitle chosen, a cynic might add, for a nonevent. An exhibition was staged at Krak—w's National Museum to commemorate the work of the artist, designer, and theater director Tadeusz Kantor, entitled I've Got Something to Tell You--Self-Portraits. In one room, the curator seemed to have made a mistake. A painting was hung the wrong way round, with its face to the wall and the back of its frame confronting the spectator. You could see how the canvas had been stretched over a wooden square, with a cross of broad struts holding the alignments in place, solid and functional, too primitive perhaps.
Kantor was born in 1915 in the town of Wielopole, near Krak—w, and died in 1990, while preparing for a stage production, which he called Today Is My Birthday. By now, some readers may have guessed that the picture with its face to the wall was not hung there by accident. The back of the painting was the painting. As it happened, the wall was not the wall but a canvas frame painted to look like a wall. The illusion was of an extreme nonillusion, but the trick took by surprise even those who were faintly expecting it. Elsewhere in the exhibition, there were similar inversions of logic. Paradoxes within paradoxes, some were booby traps for the eyes that turned out to be St. Valentine's Day massacres for the mind.
One theme derived from a portrait by the seventeenth-century Spanish court artist Vel zquez of the Infanta Margareta Teresa, painted in 1656. The pale-faced, timidly smiling young girl in a tightly clinging bodice and voluminous-hooped skirt recurs as a motif in Kantor's plays and paintings, recognizable, always looking the
... (1995 of 16873 Characters)
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