Zdzisław Beksiński, the Polish artist who wanted to photograph dreams and painted nightmares

Poland is a country that in the 20th century was brutally torn apart by the two great totalitarian regimes: Nazism and Communism.

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Some people attribute the works of an absolutely unclassifiable Polish artist: Zdzisław Beksiński to that experience. I came across his work eight years ago, looking for an image for an article that some must have found as strange as his works.

Beksiński was born on February 24, 1929, in Sanok, a small town in southeastern Poland. When he was ten years old, on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded the western part of his country. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded the eastern part. Everything had been prearranged between the two dictatorships.

Like many other Polish children, Beksiński had to pursue his studies in secret, as the Germans banned education in Poland. The nazis considered Poles "subhuman" and refused to provide them with any schooling beyond the most basic level.

In addition to the atrocities that all Poles witnessed during that war, the German invasion left an indelible mark on Beksiński's body: he lost the index finger of his left hand and part of his thumb when he was playing with unexploded ordnance.

After the war he studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Krakow, obtaining his degree as an architectural engineer in 1952. While he was studying this degree, he married Zofia Helena Stankiewicz, with whom he had one son, Tomasz, who ended up being a well-known radio announcer.

Initially, Beksiński worked as a designer for the bus company Autosan in Sanok, his hometown, where he distinguished himself with highly original creations for bus bodies, decorations, and logos. However, his designs were so innovative that none of them went into production. In September 1977, he moved with his family to Warsaw.

Beksiński began his experience in the art world as a draftsman. Later, in the late 1950s, he experimented with photography, creating somewhat disconcerting montages, such as his famous self-portrait of 1956. He finally opted for painting as the best medium to unleash his powerful imagination. It was this artistic modality that ultimately made him famous.

It is said that Beksiński could not stand silence and always painted while listening to classical music. The genre he usually chose for those moments was Neo-Romanticism, whose most famous representative is the renowned Polish musician Frédéric Chopin. The Sanok Historical Museum preserves more than 1,500 Beksiński CDs, including works by Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, Dvorak, Bruckner, Shostakovich and Górecki. Apparently, his favorite musicians were the Czech neo-romantic Gustav Mahler and especially the Soviet-German Alfred Schnittke, a composer of Jewish origin, who converted to Christianity at the end of his life and had a very varied style and notable mystical influences.

Zdzisław Beksiński never explained the meaning of his perplexing works, which he never titled, and about which he stated: "Ja nic nie chce powiedzieć, ani niczego przekazywać. Maluję to, co przychodzi mi do głowy" (I don't want to say or convey anything. I paint what comes to mind). He dedicated himself to painting fantastical motifs, with paintings that seemed marked by the terrible experience Poland endured in the 20th century.

On one occasion he simply said: "Pragnę malować tak, jakbym fotografował sny" (I want to paint as if I were photographing dreams). It is one of the very few explanations he was willing to give about his work.

However, what Beksiński painted looked more like nightmares. His works depict monstrous figures, tortured-looking beings, and landscapes from a fantasy world closer to Mordor than Lothlórien, though even Sauron's orcs would have been terrified by some of this Polish artist's creations.

Beksiński broke all ties with any known artistic style, and in the 1990s he simply described his painting style with one word: "barokowy" (baroque). A word perhaps appropriate to define a highly detailed, figurative visual style that is quite reminiscent of the work of the Swiss artist Hans Rudi Giger, as seen in the American films of the "Alien" series.

His final years were as heartbreaking as his work. His wife, Zofia, died of an aortic aneurysm on September 22, 1998. His son, Tomasz, committed suicide the following year, on December 24, 1999, Christmas Eve, with a drug overdose. Beksiński was the one who discovered his son's body.

Some say that because of this Beksiński's work was "cursed", but the reality is that he had already been painting grotesque pictures for several decades, despite which he was always a man of good humor and affable manner.

Beksiński's life came to a violent end just days before his 76th birthday. On the night of February 21-22, 2005, he was stabbed to death in his Warsaw apartment. Robert Kupiec, 19, the son of a man who had cared for Beksiński for years, was convicted of the murder, allegedly because the painter refused to lend him money.

Today, several dozen of his works can be seen in museums across Poland, such as the Sanok Historical Museum (to which the artist bequeathed most of his work in his will), the Częstochowa Municipal Art Gallery, the National Museum in Wrocław, the Nowa Huta Cultural Center in Kraków, and even the Museum of the Archdiocese of Warsaw. Since 2023, his work has also been available on the website Archiwum promocji sztuki Z. Beksińskiego (Zdzisław Beksiński Art Promotion Archive).