Bruno Schulz visited Paris in August 1938. He wanted to organize there an exhibition of his works of art and for that reason he met, among others, Ludwik Lille, a graphic artist and a painter, member of an avant-garde group called “Artes.” In Lille’s archive, now held in the Polish Library in Paris, there are several texts written for the Polish Section of the French Radio. One of them is titled “On Bruno Schulz, a Poet and a Painter.” The entire text, which was presented on the radio, has been included in the present essay as an appendix. The other appendix is a reproduction of a photocopy of Meczysław Joszt’s portrait drawn by Schulz, which is now also in the holdings of the Paris Polish Library. The drawing was mistakenly published in 1969 by “Oficyna Poetów” and Schulz’s portrait drawn by Lille.
This article aims to reevaluate Schulz’s early drawings from 1919 to 1921, rarely included in scholarship on Schulz’s artwork, by focusing on the motifs of “picture within a picture,” imitation of historical paintings, and the frame of the image. Previous scholarship on Schulz’s artwork mainly discussed the specific theme of men’s worship of women in the 1920s cliché-verre series The Book of Idolatry and regarded Schulz’s seemingly realistic renderings as “anachronistic” compared to twentieth-century modernist art. Here, I will first focus on Schulz’s adaptation of the style of historical paintings into his so-called “masochistic motifs” of men supplicating themselves to women. By creating a gap between the style and the content expectations of the viewer familiar with the conventions of European paintings, Schulz’s early drawings question the custom or conventional understanding of paintings created for acceptance and success in the European Art Academy system. Second, I invoke Derrida’s interpretation of the concept of “parergon” in The Truth in Painting (1978) to reconsider the motifs of frame and “picture within a picture,” omnipresent in Schulz’s early drawings. Through these means, I explore Schulz’s perception and attitude regarding medium specifics of paintings as Clement Greenberg argued regarding modernist paintings. Thus, I discuss his early drawings as self-referential and radically modernist works.
In 1913, the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich published two-volume work, Die Weiberherrschaft in der Geschichte der Menschheit (The Rule of Women in the History of Mankind). Compiling 665 reproductions of drawings, prints and paintings from the collection of Eduard Fuchs, this edition shows how the image of female domination and male submission was widespread in Europe from the Renaissance to the early 20th century. Due to some visual parallels, one can assume that Schulz, endowed with good visual memory, freely adapted graphic illustrations created by other authors in his own compositions, especially in those presented in The Book of Idolatry. Perhaps he also drew inspiration from Fuchs’s famous collection?
The Nishioka siblings are a team of Japanese comic book writers and artists. Recently, they have been working on comic books adapting literary texts, including those by Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. Encouraged by Yuichi Konno, editor of the Japanese subcultural artistic periodical Yasō, in 2009, in a special number of Yasō, focusing on „Monsters & Freaks”, they published a cycle called “A Record of Metamorphosis. Inspired by Bruno Schulz” (Henshin no kiroku. Burūno Shurutsu ni yoru) and in the following number, on Hans Bellmer and dolls, a comic strip “Tailors’ Dummies” (Manekin ningyō), based on four stories by Schulz from Cinnamon Shops. The Nishioka siblings quoted particular sentences from those stories, translated by Yukio Kudo. The essay presents their work to the Polish reader.
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