Fishers

Henryk Streng – a graduate of Lviv's School of Industry, student of Paris' Académie Moderne, pioneer of Polish Surrealism and creator of the authorial concept of factual realism - changed his identity during World War II. Coming from a Jewish family, he could count on relative peace during the Soviet occupation of Lviv, but had to go into hiding from the moment the Nazi army entered the city. His incarceration in a camp on Janowska Street, his escape and two years of total isolation in the flat of his fiancée and future wife Janina Brosch did not stop Streng from his artistic activity under the assumed name Marek Włodarski. In 1944, the couple made their way to Warsaw, but Streng/Włodarski was taken captive again, in the Stutthof concentration camp. Despite the special place where he stayed during the last nine months of the war, between the Gulf of Gdańsk and the Vistula Lagoon, the liberated artist saw the sea for the first time only in 1947. The Włodarskis spent their entire summer holidays in Ustka, which they visited during two consecutive summer seasons. Although maritime themes had already appeared in his works in the 1930s, the painter transformed his Baltic impressions into numerous surrealistic paintings typical of the Polish pre-Stalinist interregnum. He presented some of them during the famous Modern Art Exhibition in Krakow (1948/1949), which he co-organised. I don't know if you notice that there are: a landscape with a ship, some objects, an oil lamp and so on. But that is not important. Look at this smallest picture. There is no question of any object here. It is purely decorative or, if you like, abstract. There is nothing in it that usually attracts attention - nevertheless it is pleasant to look at. If you feel this, you are sensitive to colour, wrote another new marine artist, Andrzej Wróblewski, in his instructions for workers' trips at the time (after: W kręgu lat czterdziestych [Within the Circle of the Forties], ed. by Józef Chrobak, Kraków 1991, part. II, pp. 38-43).

Szymon Piotr Kubiak