7. Boy
English version | Wersja polska
Boy is one of the most mysterious characters in Andrzej Wroblewski's oeuvre. Despite the fact that the motif appears in the well-known Executions of 1949, the boy depicted in the works of 1955 and 1956, including oil paintings, watercolors, gouaches and drawings, seems to be a different protagonist.
A lonely red-haired boy, teenager, standing in front of a wall. He used to belong to the group of his peers and to his family. Then, he appears in the group of prisoners and families awaiting execution. Here we see him in other unrealistic images - in front of a wall or next to a statue of Gudea, the priest and Sumerian ruler of the city-state of Lagash. Always surrounded by complete silence and solitude. Abandoned and left to his own sadness and thoughts, he stands still and motionless like a stone.
The headless monumental figure is a plaster cast copy of a sculpture of Gudea from the collection of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow exhibited in its hall. Interestingly, all known standing statues of Gudea are headless. The inscription on the statue is dedicated to the goddess Bau and the offerings made to the deity. She was the patron of medical arts. Often referred to as the good or the beautiful woman, she was invoked as a protective and caring spirit. With such a background behind the boy's figure we are prone to think about a desire to find the care once lost, the hope for a time of goodness that was so sought after and yet so difficult to find in the artist's life.
References to antiquity, more or less literal, were an important theme in the painting, literature and theater of the 1940s. They served to ennoble the wartime experience and the postwar destruction was typically compared to ancient ruins. Similarly, ancient tragedy - with its archetypal conflicts and the inevitability of fate - became the ideal medium for expressing such experience. It was a metaphor of the human drama in which law, morality and human dignity intertwined in an unbreakable, often tragic, knot. In wartime acts that might have been considered forbidden by the law often acquired the value of moral righteousness because they were consistent with the fundamentals of human dignity. The war brought dramas of impossible choices in which human life and conscience were put at the stake forcing decisions that trespassed the boundaries of traditional norms and values.
The decapitated female statue present in Wróblewski’s oeuvre is yet another depiction of a destroyed and dismembered human body – symbol of trauma and disintegration. The portrait of the lonely boy, however, is a symbolic representation of the artist himself - a helpless, silent witness to the tragedy of war. It is an image of a petrified child, victim of atrocities staring at the brutal destruction around him with the consciousness of a future artist who will have to cope with the memory of that experience. The boy embodies the trauma that has remained in the artist forever. Implicitly, his figure also represents the longing for a world that ceased to exist and for a happy life that was brutally transformed and destroyed by the war. Once again, Wróblewski reaches for a simple, universal motif that is commonly understood and evokes equally strong emotions regardless of cultural background or iconographical sources.
