Sailor

Alfons Karny, after a year-long apprenticeship at a sculptor's studio, began his studies at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts in 1924 under Tadeusz Breyer, a representative of the new Classicism. After graduating (1930), he specialised in portraiture, at the same time following the monumental tendencies of the Warsaw school of the interwar period. Karny's sumptuously and smoothly chiselled heads evoked the works of ancient Egypt, archaic Greece, Etruria and Rome: In art, I recognise neither the qualities nor the fashions of modernity, nor sensationalism - I recognise eternal values, inherent in the essence of spiritual being. [...] I seek eternal peace and eternal aesthetic joy in a nice soft line, harmonious, quiet and yet titanic, without a hint of drama, dilemma, pain and disbelief. The essence of sculpture is a life-giving source of peace, constructional sense, melody and the power of unchangeable eternity, he confessed in a survey of a professional magazine (Głos Plastyków 1937, no. 1-7). Karny lost most of his works during the Warsaw Uprising, and from the destroyed capital he moved to Zakopane and Sopot for four post-war years. He began to return to the Baltic Sea periodically from 1960. There, during his summer holidays in Gdańsk, he created the images of sailors. The Szczecin head, modelled in rough terracotta, commemorates a member of the crew of the ORP Orzeł submarine. Frozen in timelessness, the appearance of the hero with a convex forehead, massive beard and thick, tabular neck, despite the intimate size of the composition, has the character of a monument. Its variants, finished with various glazes, are also known (Marynarz z kolczykiem [The Sailor with an Earring], 1962; Marynarz z Orła [The Sailor from the ORP Orzeł], 1972, 1973), indicating fidelity to old ideals.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak