POLISH ARTISTS DIP THEIR BRUSHES IN ‘POLISH REALITY’

Paint the city, in summer, in tones of green and gray. The Polish foliage overgrows its boundaries, burdened tree limbs bend over the curving walkways of the public parks and the weeds come up to the thigh. It seems a city where the lawn mowers have been confiscated.

In the old center of the city, vegetation surrenders to concrete, to patches of bared brick where the dirty stucco has lost its grip. Public buildings wear faces of soot and the scars of acid rain, and the oldest dwellings display the shrapnel wounds of World War II, the way an ancient veteran wears medals on his coat for the walk to church.

It was just this sort of progression, from green to gray, that a Warsaw artist named Lukasz Korolkiewicz made, a few years ago, moving from the weedy gardens of the suburbs to the cracking heart of the city. The journey--and the time he chose to make it--altered his vision as well as the content of the canvases, big as plate glass windows, that he began to paint in a studio on the top floor of a downtown building.

The thick foliage and dappled sunlight disappeared from his pictures, and in their place came a kind of grit that was the essential urban Warsaw. In a style that at first suggested a kind of photo graphic realism, Korolkiewicz found himself painting the quiet, grimy courtyards tucked between the old buildings, where rusty hump-backed trash receptacles overflow into oily puddles and blue-robed plaster Madonnas gaze from flowered niches set in the cracked and peeling walls. The pigeons seem as gray as Warsaw faces in winter.

These close-focused cityscapes were but a part of the work he began six years ago, a time coinciding with the end of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland and the imposition of martial law. Finding himself near the heart of the city’s public spaces, Korolkiewicz also painted the flower crosses laid in the streets by Solidarity supporters. But, seen in Korolkiewicz’s dimming light, the flowers lose their color and suggest, somehow, a human form inert on the pavement.

“If I put my work in one sentence,” Korolkiewicz said recently, “it is about the passing of time and the degradation of people, places and things.” His work had become inescapably political. Even when overt symbols of protest or authority were absent from the canvas, the atmosphere itself suggested a deeper social meaning, the pervasive mood of which was gloom. “I am,” Korolkiewicz said, “always depressed.”

What seems so striking about the art of Poland is that scores of other artists here feel the same way. They reflect the same heightened political consciousness and much of the same pessimism. Korolkiewicz, 39, is one of Poland’s more highly regarded young painters, but he is not the leader of any particular school. It is simply that the artists of Poland are steeped in what one of them calls “the Polish reality.”

While perhaps all serious artists reflect their personal visions of reality, the art of the West seems as diversified as the styles of life from which it emerged. But in Eastern Europe the one central reality of everyday life is the so-far-unalterable domination of the Soviet Union.

“This will not go away,” said Jerzy Kalina, a sculptor renowned in Poland for his powerful design for the grave site, in a Warsaw churchyard, of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the priest and Solidarity supporter who was kidnaped and murdered by government security police in 1984. The grave, with a large marble cross resting on a grassy hillock surrounded by large stones, has become one of Poland’s political shrines. “The system may adapt itself, but in its principles, it will not change.”

The resulting sense of powerlessness is a recurrent theme of Polish artists. Warsaw painter Gustaw Morycinski creates entrancing portraits of dolls and toys. At first glance, the soft light and gentle nursery colors surrounding the figures on canvas seem warm, fanciful, inviting. But then, with a closer look, some of the dolls have leering, demented expressions or sinister, featureless faces. The jack-in-the-box strides forth in military goose-step.

Morycinski, 50, spent six years of his childhood near the end of World War II exiled with his parents in Siberia. “As a young man,” he recalled recently, “I could touch this system and see what was there. I became immune to what comes from it.”

Morycinski may have been immune to its persuasions, but it inspired a powerfully pessimistic view.

“I see the world (in my painting) as artificial, a world of puppets, a world which is not a human world, a world which stands to attention for the presentation of medals but does not have a face.”

Such an outlook is not calculated to win prizes or patronage from the government of Poland. The Polish Union of Artists, with 14,000 members, was disbanded here with the imposition of martial law in December, 1981, and few of its former members returned to the organization afterward, for nonparticipation has remained a kind of protest. Now, in officially sanctioned public galleries, only work that is politically neutered, or is interpreted as supportive to the regime, is given exhibition space.

Instead, artists such as Morycinski, Korolkiewicz, Kalina and others who refuse “collaboration” with the system exhibit their works mostly in churches, which have become a refuge--although sometimes a cautious one--in defense of Polish artistic liberty. It is in part because of the strength of the Roman Catholic Church here that Polish artists--despite their constraints--enjoy a degree of freedom that is notable in the Communist Bloc. In Romania and East Germany, for example, the kind of art accomplished in Poland could be shown only in private homes and smuggled out of the country at considerable risk.

The Catholic Church on Zytnia Street near downtown Warsaw, its maze of rooms and basement chambers under constant expansion and redesign, may be the largest gallery for what could be called free art in Poland. The exhibitions are uneven in their quality but fascinating in the range of their lament for Poland’s martyrdom, its lost freedom and its striving people.

Even the work of amateurs conveys a prevailing mood--the barren limbs of an orchard against a winter sunset, an empty straight-backed chair in a barren room, the sloping, shroud-like figures that seem to represent the Polish view of the human condition. Apart from the frequent depictions of religious affirmation (in itself a kind of protest), there is little on display in the Zytnia Street church that could be described as optimistic.

In popular art and posters, this gloom frequently veers toward the grotesque and the bizarre, a style described by one Western resident here as “the headless-body and dead-baby school” of protest art. But the fact that it continues to be produced and bought suggests that despite its monotony, it strikes a chord with the public, particularly the young.

At loftier levels of the artistic community, a long-running debate touches on the question of monotony: the issue of whether art--in writing as well as the visual arts--devalues itself in a ceaseless preoccupation with politics. Art critic Andrzej Oseka, who stopped writing for official publications at the outset of martial law, decries what he calls political expressionism in art. And yet, he concedes, the issue is far from resolved for Polish artists and intellectuals.

“We have three choices,” he said. “We can give up and do what they say. We can exert ourselves in a constant wrestling match with the political opponent, the government. Or, the most difficult but the most exciting--we can attempt to build an independent intellectual atmosphere and life.”

But the power of the system itself, the great fact of life in Eastern Europe, has a way of imposing itself, of refusing to be ignored. It blunts the independent impulse.

“I think the ideal job of the artist,” Gustaw Morycinski said, “is to provide some affirmation of the world. I wish, as an artist, I could do this, but I cannot. I would like to paint these flowers here--because they are beautiful. But they are not a reflection of reality.”

“In my opinion,” said Jerzy Kalina, “the political situation has caused artists to define themselves, both as human beings and in relation to their art. To be independent, for an artist, is a handicap, both emotionally and intellectually.”

Lukasz Korolkiewicz’s eerily accurate renderings of crumbling concrete illustrate the daily decay of his environment but they also reach, he hopes, toward a wider meaning.

“I do not want to be a political painter,” he said, “or a journalist or a poster painter. I want to watch reality in its layers. This reality is connected to what I see, to my life, my existence, to the things that shaped me.”

Some of these, Korolkiewicz says, are unseen. He says he cannot avoid the sense that he is painting cemeteries hidden under the pavement of his courtyards. It is Poland’s history, he says, that people died, in World War II, beneath the concrete where he now walks. And it is this suggestion of passing time that for him contains the real meaning of his art.

When Korolkiewicz moved to his studio in the center of the city, the view he discovered from its southern window was that of the National Gallery of Art, sitting right beside the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Polish United Worker Party. He painted the view once, set on a stormy summer’s evening, the streetlights dappling the museum’s facade through the trees--and a bolt of lightning striking at the rear corner of the party headquarters.

He shows the picture with a shy grin, almost apologetically. Despite its technical virtuosity and arresting evocation of summer weather, it is all artistic license. In addition to the bolt of lightning, he has removed the Polish flag from the party headquarters.

“It is,” he sighs, “just wishful thinking.”