Three paintings by Zdzisław Beksiński

The article is dedicated to the art work of one of the most significant Polish surrealist artists, Zdzisław\nBeksiński. The article reveals the main periods of the artist’s biography, lists the people of art who\ninfluenced the establishment of the author’s individual style and the art works Z. Beksiński preferred.\nSpecial attention is paid to the dichotomy of form and content as well as Z. Beksiński’s original opinion\nof it: the artist believed that the major significance was borne by the form, not the content: what he\ncreated was the form, while content is something contributed by the spectators. The article continues\nwith the review of three works by Z. Beksiński, leading to the following conclusion: in the situation\nwhen god has been crucified but not resurrected, when the human loses his last hope for salvation,\nwhen his forces are a null in the face of an unknown but horrifying enemy; in the situation of the End of\nthe World, the total night when the monsters (such as the monstrous words) come alive, the only thing\nleft for a human is to remember of this situation at every moment of time, to understand the nature\nof words and the threat they present, to understand the mechanism of protection from them; to take\ncare of the closest people, to protect them, thereby allowing neither themselves nor himself to turn into\nstone of the horrors the reality brings. The final analysis of art works by Z. Beksiński is performed\nthrough the prism of “after Auschwitz” art concept

Art · Art history · Painting · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism