www.sfweekly.com/issues/2005-07-27/culture/art.html
with a modern twist When I first heard of the late, great Stanislav Szukalski, I thought he m ust be a hoax -- a fabrication of some canny art dealer out to make a bu ck, or an artist's joke aimed at deflating the pretensions of art histor y How could an early 20th-century sculptor who had once been dubbed "Gr eatest Living Artist" in his native Poland and who had had an entire mus eum dedicated to his work have fallen so completely off the historical r adar? Szukalski fans proclaimed him a lost genius, but it sounded too ou tlandish to be true. It wasn't until I saw the current retrospective of his work at Varnish Fi ne Art -- an impressive collection of about 20 large bronzes and many sm aller sculptures, drawings, and documentary photographs -- and read more about his life that I understood: Szukalski's story is too strange not to be true. A child prodigy in Poland, he came to the United States in the 1920s, mad e a name for himself as an artist, and returned home in the 1930s, when he received the "Greatest" title. The museum that the Polish government established for his work was then promptly destroyed, along with his pla ce in history, during World War II. He escaped the Nazis to return to Am erica, and lived out the rest of his life in Los Angeles in utter obscur ity, continuing to produce increasingly eccentric works of art as well a s numerous crackpot theories. For example, he maintained that all langua ges were derived from Polish, and he developed his own anthropological p seudo-science, Zermatism, which traced the development of humankind back to Easter Island and the survivors of the biblical flood. Perhaps stran gest of all, he believed that what he saw as the degeneracy of humankind was due to interbreeding with an evil race of yetis. Yes, that's right: The downfall of Western civilization was precipitated by rapacious abom inable snowmen. With such, um, unique views, it's no wonder the art establishment has fai led to grant him a place beside Picasso and Matisse in the pantheon of e arly modern art. But in recent years, Szukalski (who died in 1987) has f ound fans among aficionados of underground comics and in, of all people, Leonardo DiCaprio, who in 2000 donated $15,000 toward a retrospective a t the Laguna Art Museum. Refusing to fit neatly into any category, Szukalski's art is refreshingly oddball. He claimed to have no artistic influences or antecedents, alth ough his work contains clear traces of the Western art that surrounded h im -- particularly the hallucinatory subject matter of surrealism and th e streamlined curves of art deco -- as well as Mayan and Aztec artifacts (which he studied extensively in the course of his anthropological rese arch). His sculptures and drawings depict fantastical subjects -- often involving the grotesque fusion of animal, plant, and human parts -- with clean, angular lines and solid, muscular volumes. Struggle is a sculptu re of a hand, its flesh torn from the bone with the effort of its grasp. More bizarre still are its fingertips, each of which sprouts the head o f a screaming, bird-beaked creature. Szukalski's work depicts an idiosyncratic world with near-compulsive dept h and detail, reminiscent of the mythic stories of Tolkien's Middle Eart h But it's a totally insular vision, and the artist was unafraid to exp lore its darker recesses. He pompously envisioned The Rooster of Gaul as a gift to France in exchange for the Statue of Liberty, but it's hard t o understand how he could have seen it as a flattering image. In the mod el for what was to be a colossal sculpture, the hulking, barely recogniz able rooster extends several beaklike tentacles to bind and harass a tin y female figure. To Szukalski, the woman stood for France, tortured by t entacles representing communism, fascism, and ... Another study, Promerica, is possibly the strangest monument to Pan-Ameri can solidarity ever conceived. A muscled, shirtless worker recoils from the outstretched arms of a Native American in full, feathered headdress. The native, whose feet are rabbits -- bunny slippers, perhaps? Present -day viewers might be tempted to interpret this bizarre tableau as a par ody of monuments, or a political commentary, especially when they read t he trite inscription on the back, in English and Spanish: "Know me and I will be your friend." But the piece's intricate detailing, and Szukalsk i's weighty style, make the work feel entirely earnest. It's impossible to hail Szukalski as a progenitor of tongue-in-cheek irony. Instead, he comes across as a passionate eccentric -- in short, a geek -- so wrapped up in his own relentless vision of the world that even his public monum ents are projections of dark (or whimsical) personal fantasies. It's therefore not surprising that Szukalski has garnered a posthumous fo llowing among aficionados of underground art. Not only does his status a s an outsider in the art world confer subcultural cool, but also the ext remely mannered quality of his work displays affinities with graffiti an d the high-contrast, exaggerated style of graphic novels. Atlantea is a sculpture of a woman with her feet anchored in a sea of glyphs -- styliz ed waves that resemble ancient Mayan patterns or graffiti lettering. One of her arms disappears into a mass of flames that engulfs her head. The flames are carved in snaking ripples whose sharp edges are reminiscent of the curvilinear depictions of lions and dragons in traditional Chines e painting; or they could be the flames on the front of a 1950s hot rod. These multiple associations -- looking both backward and forward in time -- are what make Szukalski's work so engaging today. His art is simultan eously a product of its era and seemingly timeless. While completely des erving his own branch on the art historical family tree, Szukalski has a lso been adopted as an unwitting forefather of so-called "lowbrow" art: the graffiti, comics, animation, and design that dare to imagine and giv e form to intensely weird and wonderful personal worlds.
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