04. Umbrella
In the early nineteen sixties, Tadeusz Kantor’s work underwent a significant transformation, marked by a departure from Informel and a turn toward the object. Disillusioned by the limitations of matter painting, the artist began to seek new means of expression that would allow him to go beyond the constraints of the painting as an autonomous medium. Around nineteen sixty-two, the first emballages were created and a year later Kantor formulated their manifesto.
Emballage - from the French emballage, meaning “packaging” - becomes one of the key concepts of Kantor's artistic practice. It emerges from earlier experiments involving the incorporation of real objects into paintings: fragments of fabric, paper, or everyday objects that the artist fixed to the canvas. In this way, a new aesthetic sphere comes into being, defined by Kantor as “poor reality” or “reality of the lowest rank.”
Simple, worn-out, and unpretentious objects fall into this category: bags, envelopes, clothes, and umbrellas. Their significance does not stem from their material value, but from their emotional and symbolic potential. Packaging becomes a key gesture – it is both a practical and a ritual activity. It signifies protection, concealment, and storage, but also the conferral of a new, almost sacred status upon the object. Emballage is thus both an act of protection as well as the creation of meaning: an attempt to stop time, to preserve what is fragile and fleeting.
Umbrellas have a special place in this practice. For Kantor, their introduction into the painting represents a radical transgression of the boundaries of painting.
“Due to my attachment to painting and, at the same time, to my awareness of the exhaustion of its possibilities , (…) I felt that affixing an umbrella to the painting was a massive transgression, a betrayal, incomparably greater than in the case of a bag, a matchbox, or a rag” – said the artist, adding that from then on he considered the nature of the object “as if completely external to the painting”. Affixing an umbrella to the surface of a painting for the first time was for Kantor “the most shocking moment”. He recalled: “in my personal life, I can’t stand umbrellas”, yet “their ambiguity and allusiveness / helped me tremendously / in speaking about many matters / I couldn’t come to terms with. / They simply spoke for me. / I called them / Poetic Emballages”
In some paintings, a fixed umbrella accompanies human figures; at other times, it becomes an independent protagonist of the landscape. It seems, however, that each time the meticulously crafted canopy of the umbrella – with its constellation of ribs and folds of fabric – provokes strong emotional reactions in the viewer: puzzlement, nostalgia, and sometimes almost fear.
Here, the umbrella ceases to function as an object; it becomes an interpretation of the paradigm of a picture. In the case of umbrellas, as with other objects incorporated into the realm of art by being transferred from everyday reality, the object is stripped of its original utilitarian function. Kantor transforms it – he prepares it, destroys it, or refines it, endowing it with new meanings. At the same time, however, the object does not completely lose its former character. It remains suspended between the everyday life and art, between the unfamiliar and the recognizable. Thanks to this, Kantor’s paintings featuring objects, such as umbrellas, evoke a particular tension in the viewer: they are simultaneously familiar and unsettling, material and imbued with mystery.
Analyses of Tadeusz Kantor’s work often consider the umbrella not only as an object of the "lowest rank reality", but also as a model that represents a distinct organization of the space within a painting. Its structure – based on the tension between the light, stretched fabric and the fragile, almost skeletal arrangement of its ribs – introduces an element of instability and internal conflict to the picture. The umbrella, whether open or closed, suggests a movement between opening and closing, exposure and concealment, making it a dynamic form rather than just a static object.
Some interpretations also emphasize the umbrella's existential dimension: as an object that protects against the outside world yet is easily destroyed, the umbrella reveals the fragility of human defense strategies against the world. In this sense, it becomes a symbol of the temporary and helpless nature of things, while its deformed or immobilized form can be interpreted as a sign of the loss of its protective function.
Another significant aspect is the serial and repetitive nature of the motif in Kantor's paintings. The multiplication of umbrellas leads to their de-individualization as they become part of the logic of almost mechanical reproduction, which in turn weakens their individual character and shifts the focus from a single object to the system of relationships between all of them. As a result, the umbrella ceases to be merely a “thing” and begins to function as an element of a larger visual and semantic structure that organizes the space of a painting.
