In February 1956, Andrzej Wajda helped Andrzej Wróblewski organize his first individual exhibition: thirty-six drawings at the Polish Writers’ Union Club in Warsaw. In January 1958, together with Jan Tarasin, Andrzej Pawłowski and Andrzej Strumiłło, he prepared a posthumous exhibition of the painter’s work at Kraków’s Palace of Art. In 2015, the exhibition Wróblewski according to Wajda inaugurates the Europe–Far East Gallery, a new wing of the Manggha Museum, created – like the main building – on Andrzej Wajda’s initiative. Wajda points to the four areas that he considers the most important in Wróblewski’s work as a painter: 'Wróblewski from nature' – depictions of everyday, commonplace objects, such as scales, a briefcase, or a portrait of his own shoes; 'Wróblewski from imagination' – the 'Executions' series, visions of the dead and the living; ‘Wróblewski from memory’– works showing ‘social contrasts’ ('3 x Yes', 'Station', 'Shopkeeper') and 'Wróblewski on…' – war, our past, and things to come. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of the same title, comprising, in addition to its scenario/catalogue, a considerable quantity of archivalia – letters, statements, transcripts of recordings – showing the relations between the two greatest individualities of Poland’s postwar art, and friends: the painter Andrzej Wróblewski and the director Andrzej Wajda. Both the exhibition and the publication are intended as a kind of archive, a ‘deposit of memory’, which will perhaps inspire a new, different look at Wróblewski’s vision as a painter and that of Wajda as a filmmaker.

The hour when I first saw one of Wróblewski’s 'Executions' may well have been the most important moment of my life. It may have been then that I gave up painting and decided to seek another path for myself. It may have been then that I understood that our generation was a generation of sons who had to recount the fate of their fathers because the dead could no longer speak. Andrzej Wróblewski was a continuator of the great line of Polish Romantic artists, those who are sent to us by the dead.


Going back, over the years, to Wróblewski’s works again and again, and observing how the evaluation of what he had painted changed over that time, I thought about an exhibition that would restore this artist to his rightful place in Polish painting. [...] to me Wróblewski is something more. First of all, it’s the 'Executions' and depictions of our postwar reality – painted in the years 1948–1950. Back then, such painting was considered ugly. I know that ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ are not terms used in art theory, but I can’t forget the evaluation voiced by a large group of Kraków painters who lodged their protest with the National Museum when it purchased an 'Execution' by Wróblewski, ‘painted in an ugly manner’. That period (1948–1950) in Wróblewski’s work does not refer to any previous model and is, not only in Polish painting, a separate and autonomous world, which can be called the beginning of new figuration, not only in our country. These paintings show the truth so bluntly that it hurts. [...] The world is ugly and only art endows it with meaning and form. You need to have a great courage and desperation, as Andrzej Wróblewski did, to paint it the way it actually is. This is exactly the reason why I have chosen, out of the whole body of Wróblewski’s work, the twenty paintings that I believe to be the most his – works in which he had neither precursors nor continuators. And as for myself, back in 1949, when summoned by Andrzej to view his first 'Execution', I realized that what I wanted, more – what I desired – to paint, already existed and would never be expressed better in Polish art. I abandoned painting in order to grapple with the same theme in my first four films, only on the screen.

1927 Vilnius – 1957 Tatra Mountains He rests at Kraków’s Salwator Cemetery. After attending a private primary school in Vilnius, in 1938 Wróblewski enrolled in the King Sigismund August Gymnasium there. In 1945 the whole family moved to Kraków, where he studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts (under Zygmunt Radnicki, Zbigniew Pronaszko, and Jerzy Fedkowicz), graduating in 1952. At the same time he studied art history at the Jagiellonian University’s Department of the Humanities (completing his diploma project under Professor Wojsław Molè in 1948). Between 1950 and 1954, he was a research and teaching assistant to several professors: Zygmunt Radnicki, Stanisław Krzyształowski, and Hanna Rudzka-Cybis. In 1947, at the invitation of the International Union of Students, he took a tour of the Netherlands, northern Germany, Denmark and Sweden, as part of a student exchange programme. In the autumn of 1956 he travelled to Yugoslavia. He attended two International Youth Festivals: the third one in Berlin in 1951 and the fourth in Bucharest in 1953. In 1948, together with fellow students, Przemysław Brykalski, Witold Damasiewicz, Konrad Nałęcki and Andrzej Wajda, Wróblewski formed an informal Self-Education Group, pitted against the tradition represented by the professors at Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts.

He headed the group as its principal ideologist, postulating thematic art, comprehensible and involved directly in political change. He took part in a number of group exhibitions, after his debut in December 1948 during the Exhibition of Modern Art at the Friends of the Fine Arts Society’s Palace of Art. His exhibited works included 'Drowned City I', 'The Sun and Other Stars', 'Heaven', 'Emotional Content of the Revolution' and some three-dimensional forms. In 1951, at the 2nd National Exhibition of Visual Arts, he showed his Youth Convention in West Berlin, and subsequently Youth Convention in Berlin at the 1952 Visual Arts Exhibition of the Krakow District of ZPAP (Union of Polish Visual Artists). The exhibition ‘Against War, Against Fascism’ at the Arsenal in Warsaw featured his Mothers. The painting remained unnoticed. In 1956, the Polish Writers’ Union Club in Warsaw was the venue of the artist’s individual exhibition, organized on Andrzej Wajda’s initiative; Wróblewski showed thirty-six of his drawings. Another one was held in September 1956 at the Jewish Theatre ('Salon Po Prostu') in Warsaw, showing e.g. 'Laundry', 'Focused Portrait', 'The Queue Continues', 'Chairing I', and 'Chairs'.

He published articles and reviews in 'Życie Literackie', 'Głos Plastyków', 'Po Prostu', 'Przegląd Artystyczny', Trybuna Ludu, and Twórczość. Initially, Wróblewski experimented with geometric abstraction. He painted compositions containing spinning wheels and circles, metaphoric depictions of the cosmos ('The Sun and Other Stars'), and surrealistic landscapes ('Drowned City'). He had a strong belief in art’s ability to ‘express the revolution through abstraction… Abstraction will not only show to the revolutionary the climate of his soul and give him a pure aesthetic emotion; its inner logic will strengthen him; its disturbing contrasts will incite him; its obviousness, clarity of structure will inspire him with faith in himself and in the future.’ Those activities brought him closer to Kraków’s avantgarde circles centred around Tadeusz Kantor.

He abandoned abstraction in 1949. He wanted to paint pictures that would be ‘as unpleasant as the stench of a dead body’ and postulated thematic art, committed to socio-political agendas, comprehensible and radical, whose form would, ‘as far as possible, be free from transformations, and reflect the common vision and imagination of the working masses.’ He prepared a ‘recipe’ for a modern painting: uniform size, intensive colours and life-size figures, realism combined with deformation. He followed these precepts e.g. in the 'Executions' series and the accompanying paintings 'Mother and Dead Child' and 'Child and Dead Mother', the most important statement about war and death, not only in Polish, but in world, art. He declared his support for the doctrine of socialist realism, and continued to paint still lifes, nudes and landscapes. In the last two years of his life, Wróblewski defined his own version of figuration, which the critics found to be one of the most extraordinary examples of existential art.

In his gouaches, watercolours, monotypes and over a dozen oil paintings ('The Queue Continues', 'Chairings', 'The Chauffer', 'Organic Portrait', and 'The Shadow of Hiroshima') he showed lonely, tragic, objectified and enslaved figures. His themes were death, inevitable disintegration, and ruthless transience. Man in his progress towards death. He minimized his means of expression, looking for the simplest and most impactful forms. His work exerted a decisive influence on Polish artists in the nineteen sixties and eighties. And yet he remains practically unknown in the world art scene.