As an outstanding painter and especially animator of artistic life, Marian Bogusz was a personality of exceeding importance to the history of Polish art in the second half of the 20th century. His disinterestedness, ingenuity and passion were, and have remained, unparalleled. His merits to the development of Polish avant-garde art just after World War II, and again in the second half of the 1950s and during the next decade can hardly be overestimated. An inexhaustible source of ideas for the creative mobilization of art circles, he is credited with new, unconventional forms of activity. Enthusiastic, rather peremptory, preoccupied with his well-founded concepts, Bogusz was ever successful in effecting his plans even if this required a considerable outlay of money on the part of the state arts sponsor and was not thoroughly in keeping with a communist state’s premises of cultural policy. Indeed, Bogusz had the gift for winning people over to his ideas, whether he was dealing with artists, critics and journalists, young people, workers or representatives of the state arts patronage system. He knew when to use persuasion, whom to impress with an imperious attitude, and with whom to negotiate over a glass of vodka. Credit for the freedom of artistic research attained in Poland on a nique scale in the Eastern Bloc as early as the close of the 1950s is to be given to people with a sense of cultural mission like Bogusz. Yet the number and the wide appeal of his artistic initiatives as well as the quite unlimited freedom of his undertakings were without equal.

A communist idealist, Bogusz may be compared to members of the Russian avant-garde of the times of the October [1917] Revolution. He had never striven for any material benefits but always always for art’s good. An attitude like this, incomprehensible today, is viewed as a relic of the romantic past. At that historic stage, however, in the face of World War II experience, this type of relation to people, ideas and material values was not at all exceptional among the survivors.
Bogusz’s personality and views had been moulded by the hardships of his youth. He was nineteen years old in 1939. Having passed A-level exams, he volunteered to the army to fight in the defence of his country attacked by the Germans. Imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, reduced in status to no longer a human but slave with an identification number, he spent four years suffering continuous humiliation and hunger in degrading fear of his life. He saw cases of cruel punishment administered to innocent, prosecution of the defenceless, execution and inhuman death, not knowing when this would become his own lot. But Bogusz had the energy that gives one the force to survive, in which he was aided by his artistic gifts. Improbable though this may seem, he was artistically active in the concentration camp, drawing with, and on, whatever had come in handy, painting, putting on plays, and sketching town-planning and architectural concepts. During his first year in Mauthausen, he worked in horrifying conditions in a stone-pit, witnessing his fellow prisoners beaten up and shoved down the pit. Early I 1942, he was allotted to the building office to draw technical designs for the expansion of the camp. Here it was easier to survive and come by art supplies.

                In Mauthausen, Bogusz made friends with other artists imprisoned in the camp, primarily the Spanish painter Emanuel Munios, and Zbigniew Dłubak, the latter transferred here from the Auschwitz camp in November 1944. Sought by the Gestapo as a soldier in the Warsaw [August 1944] Uprising, member of the Polish Workers Party [PPR], and soldier with the [left-wing] People’s Army and People’s Guard, Dłubak had been hiding under the assumed name of Andrzej Zdanowski. Seriously ill, Dłubak was saved from death by his fellow prisoners, first and foremost Marian Bogusz.
The concentration camp experience had a decisive influence on the artist’s attitude towards people and things: the hierarchy of values established there was to remain the binding standard throughout his life. Where every day demonstrated the apparent frailty and worthlessness of all matter, including the human body, at the opposite extreme was the meaning and weight of the immaterial. This embraced mental strength but, above all, the power of the idea that one served and imagination capable of transferring people into a different dimension, creative potentialities and the righteousness of those disinterestedly helping others, often at the risk of their own life. After the liberation of the camp, Bogusz returned home and entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He gave up his studies two years later and became engaged in all sorts of artistic undertakings, designing decorations for mass-scale celebrations, exhibitions, and interiors as well as illustrating literary works and designing posters.
1947 saw the organization in Warsaw of the Club of Young Artists and Scientists, a highlight of the nascent artistic life. Being one of its founder members, Bogusz headed the Painting Section and was a member of the Theatre Section. The other divisions were the Literary and Science Sections. The club was based in the Polish Army’s House managed by Bogusz’s Mauthausen friend, colonel Dłubak. Bogusz had designed the interiors and put on exhibitions of works by the surviving pre-war avant-garde members and progressive artists of the young generation. He also provided graphic design for the publications of Literary Section. Each club section organized debating meeting attended by members of other sections. The period, one of the fundamental socio-political transformations, saw competition between two contradictory concepts of culture, one elitist and the other egalitarian. Putting on exhibitions of works by outstanding Polish avant-garde artists at the club, Bogusz was in favour of the former. This was in keeping with the theory of [poet] Julian Przyboś that public tastes should be raised to the level of high art rather than art brought down to flatter public tastes. Bogusz’s most important exhibition project in those years was a nationwide survey of Polish avant-garde art, for shortage of space organized on the club premises in two instalments. Put on in 1947, a year before the famous Exhibition of Modern Art in Cracow, it had acted as pattern and inspiration for the latter. In concept and design, the Warsaw exhibition anticipated in a brilliant way Bogusz’s further activity as prime mover of cultural initiatives.
A member of the Polish Workers’ Party and guided by the party’s socio-political ideology, in the area of art Bogusz was close in his views to the Soviet post-revolutionary avant-garde. This is why his formally varied work of 1947-8, at times planer, at other times spatial, at times condensed in a Baroque manner, at other times synthetic, was rapidly striving towards abstraction. For the Cracow 1948 Exhibition of Modern Art , he entered abstract art (five oil paintings, four pieces in tempera, drawings in ink, a portfolio of stage designs and two spatial forms). Because of its avant-garde character, the political authorities had the exhibition closed in January 1949, a month after opening, and the whole print-run of the catalogue, published thanks to Bogusz’s exertions, was sent to be recycled. Also in 1949, socialist realism was declared to be the binding artistic method.

Because of his colleagues’ envy and intrigues, Bogusz was expelled from the party, but his socio-political attitude remained unaltered. Though he continued to be critical of socialist realism and did not paint much in those days, he returned to the representational convention, mostly taking up synthetically approached landscape and portrait motifs. Stage design was to become the main domain of his activity (he entered in regular collaboration with Powszechny Theatre in Łódź). He was also busy designing exhibitions, e.g. the International Fair in Leipzig, Germany (1950, 1951, and 1952). His stage designs, both ones carried into effect for thirty-two theatre productions in 1952-4, and ones only remaining in sketch form, were outstanding achievements, testifying to the surreal and abstract leanings in the artist’s imagination. Along with his later accomplishments of the 1960s and 1970s, they testified to the unity of his stage design and painting concepts. The successive stages in the artist’s painting, ranging from geometric abstraction in 1948-9, through objective art during the period of socialist realism, peinture de la mati re, and a return to geometry with metal pipes, bands, sheets etc., attached to the images, had their counterparts in stage design. In his set design concepts, Bogusz never sought to document the time and place of a drama or convey the atmosphere of the plot. His intent was to create by visual means, i.e. forms and colour, a kind of visual parallel to a given theatre work, often with elements of reflection or comment.

It had not been until after the retreat of socialist realism in Poland in 1955 that Bogusz proposed his original version of realism. The period saw the emergence of images that are among the best known in Polish art of that time. These are Berlin, the Year 1955; Helene Weigel as ‚Mother Courage’ by Berthold Brecht and ‚The Mother’ by Maxim Gorky; Honegger’s Liturgical Symphony; Einstein, and the poetic drawing ‚The Sun Has Deprived my Lamp of its Brilliance’. They carry into effect what Bogusz had expected of art. Each of these images is a result of not only painterly knowledge of the laws of composition, creation of spatial illusion and juxtapositions of colour, but especially of in-depth humanistic reflection and genuine experience. In deliberate opposition to the aestheticism of colour, Bogusz employed in them sharp, disharmonious clashes of colour that are not pleasing to the eye but enhance the dramatic quality of the scenes. Though always operating the language of synthesis, the artist used at that time a variety of means of expression ranging from composed, static realism in Einstein’s portrait, dramatic deformation in Honegger’s Liturgical Symphony to poetry and tender lyricism in Bach’s Concert in St Thomas’s in Leipzig (1956).
Parallel to his work as a painter, Bogusz also contributed, by authoring the concepts or as a participant, to all sorts of initiatives connected with town planning and the shaping of architectural space. He was equally ingenious in pioneering activities aiming to popularize the visual arts, all of which served at least one of what the artist regarded as a basis goals: encouragement and acceleration of development processes in art, and bringing it into in-depth contact with the public.
The former goal was behind the setting up in 1954 of a group of artists related to him in age and views, the painters Zbigniew Dłubak, Andrzej Szlagier, and Andrzej Zborowski, and sculptress Barbara Zbrożyna. Kajetan Sosnowski, who was to become one of the foremost and most representative group members, soon joined them. The group, calling themselves ‚Grupa 55’, was also sometimes referred to as ‚Staromiejska’ [from the Polish for Warsaw’s Old Town]. Their goals included joint presentations of works and accompanying debates attended by artists acknowledged by the group members, such as Henryk Stażewski or Marek Włodarski, and literary and art critics, such as Artur Sandauer, Julian Przyboś or Janusz Bogucki. Valuable to the development of artistic awareness, this was a continuation of the activities of the Club of Young Artists and Scientists.
1955 saw the emergence of an association of extraordinary merit to Polish political and cultural thought, the Krzywe Koło Club. It sprang from the initially purely social debating meetings held in the apartment of Juliusz and Ewa Garztecki at Krzywe Koło Street, which accounts for the name of the club. The meetings were attended by a growing group of members of the young intelligentsia representing different professional circles. The club was granted a seat in the Old town’s House of Culture of the Socialist Youth Union. The spectre of the problems discussed was very wide, ranging from politics to science and culture. The club inspired the emergence of the Young Intelligentsia Clubs in various Polish cities and started the publication of the clubs’ nationwide journal called Nowy Nurt.

Having found that the experiment with socialist realism was not a success, the political authorities of the People’s Poland were beginning to give it up from as early as 1954. This was the background of the organisation, at the political authorities’ recommendation, of the ‘All-Polish Exhibition of Young Art’ at Warsaw Arsenal in July-September 1955, in connection with the 5th Festival of Youth and Students. The exhibition heralded and epitomized the momentous transformation leading towards freedom of artistic research. An expression of protest against imposed subjects and against limitations to artistic freedom, it lacked a constructive programme, however. Group 55 had already worked out one. When the organizers of the Arsenal show addressed Bogusz with an invitation for the group to take part in it, he agreed on condition that the works of the group members would be put on display en bloc, i.e. not separated by works of other artists. Since the reply was in the negative, he organized an exhibition of Group 55 concurrently with the Arsenal Show in the DESA Salon in Old Town’s Square. A year later, in 1956, Bogusz, who had earlier set up an Art Section within the framework of the Krzywe Koło Club, was granted a separate interior for the organization of exhibitions in the Old Town’s House of Culture, one storey above the Club’s debating room. This was where he was to run for a decade the Krzywe Koło Gallery, the first authorial Polish gallery, a pioneering undertaking acting as paragon for many others in the future.

The Group 55 exhibition put on in June 1956 to inaugurate the operation of the Krzywe Koło Gallery was accompanied by a catalogue with the Group Manifesto. It stipulated for the creation of intellectually stimulating images conveying the artist’s thoughts by means of visual signs, proclaimed a campaign against aestheticism, acknowledged visual metaphor as the basic issue of contemporary art, and underlined the superior role of content in a work of art. The articles opened the door and granted the right to unlimited artistic research and experiment.

After the Iron Curtain was lifted, free access to the foreign press and the artists’ visits to the West were to result in the popularization in Poland of Art Informel in the versions of Action Painting, Tachisme, and peinture de la matiere. Though not altering his stipulations concerning the weight of content in painting, Marian Bogusz returned to non-objective art. In 1957-8, he practised painting based on spontaneous gesture, more and more often employing convex textures until arriving, in 1959, at a combination of the expression of vigorous brush strokes and the relief-like convexity of thickly applied paint. 1960 saw the beginning in Bogusz’s art of the arrangement of dynamic textures towards geometric order. In these images the colour is more toned down while texture, though thick and rough, is homogeneous. In 1960-3, the artist worked very intensively on gouaches, producing a large number of them, for the most part very fine in the orchestration of colour. The process of imposing order on forms was accomplished as a result of rhythm imposed on a repetitive modular shape. Consequently, as early as 1961, the first structural paintings meticulously wrought as if from tiny bricks, made their appearance in Bogusz’s oeuvre. The juxtapositions of colour in them are subtle while the hues, far removed from the former brightness, are deep and shot. The problem of space, always occupying an important place in Bogusz’s work, is present in these apparently planar pictures in the relief convexities of paint and often in the illusive impressions of swellings or concavities on the surface.

In painting, Bogusz was continually in search of new means of expression so that the successive stages of his work were brief, lasting from two to three years. He would give up a formula he had worked up and domesticated in favour of a new one that he found fascinating, though not for a long time. In the late 1950s/early 1960s Bogusz’s energy was inexhaustible. Besides staging one-man shows (on an average three a year) and taking part in group shows, the artist joined in the organization of other surveys, such as the 2nd and 3rd Modern Art Exhibition in Warsaw, was active as a stage designer, and published statements on art in the press. He ran the Krzywe Koło Gallery unaided, reluctant to let anyone interfere with his decisions. At the gallery (from 1958 operating as Modern Art Gallery), he presented only searching art, Polish and foreign, and organized debating meetings of artists. His goal was primarily to assist with the streamlining and development of modern art in Poland, and to expand the artistic awareness of colleagues ,who, scattered all over the Poland, might have missed contact with those cherishing similar aspirations. At the same time, he set store by shaping preferences of the wide public and popularizing modern art. Thus besides running the gallery, Bogusz also organized an action of ‚artistic Mondays’, i.e. exhibitions and talks in Warsaw’s industrial plants, workers’ hostels, and peripheral Houses of Culture. What is most valuable, he repeatedly came out with new, pioneer initiatives. He played an essential role in the organization by Gerard Kwiatkowski of the El Gallery in Elbląg in 1962. Convinced of the importance of exchange of experience among searching artists, especially on an international scale, he came out with the idea or organizing an International Meeting of Artists, Scientists, and Art Theorists at Osieki near Koszalin. (His frequent visits to the city of Koszalin were connected with his set designs for the local Baltic Drama Theatre). The firs meeting was held in 1963, and had a summer sequel in the form of the Koszalin Workshop at Osieki. The event marked the beginning of, and acted as pattern for, many similar undertakings in various European countries as well as Poland.

The 1960s saw the emergence of a wealth of novel trends in world art: Pop Art, Arte Povera, all forms of actions, Op Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art. All art trends of that time had two characteristics: a striving for crossing the borders of disciplines and a longing for space. Bogusz subscribed to the tendencies too. In 1964, he ceased painting structural images beautifully orchestrated in colour. Tending towards geometry though still loose, the vertical and horizontal divisions of the canvas remained. In search of real, objective space, the artist cut out openings in the canvas, through which the elements underneath could be seen. Into painted objects, he built metal pipes, and wooden rods and battens. Because of the rhythm and harmony preserved in them, he gave them the musical titles of Fugues, ‘for white and black’‚ ‘for sheet metal’, ‘for yellow and blue’, etc. Colours played an important role in these works.

In the Fugues created in 1964-8, the artist found a possibility of combining painting with three dimensions. Yet the pieces represented more than just a play of forms and an echo of musical sensations. They were an expression of the artist’s emotions, his comment on the goals of art in the new situation of the rapidly changing technological status of the human environment. Also in that period, in 1966-8, Bogusz created some dozen works with elements of figurativeness treated as quotations, for instance, Letters from a Concentration Camp, or pieces referring to the painting of artists of other times, such as the Epitaphs ‚for van Gogh’, ‚Le Douanier Rousseau’ and ‚Modigliani’.

From 1968, Bogusz’s interest focused on line, a thick graphic stroke. A series of fine, original, exceedingly precise non-objective drawings made their appearance, some, such as the Plastered Head or Burned Head, evoking associations with objectivity. At the same time, he used taut string or wire to produce spiral forms, which was a continuation of his innovative spatial objects put on display at the 1948 Modern Art Exhibition in Cracow. His other images were ‚painted’ with fire and soot of burning candles.
Bogusz’s dream of entering three dimensions and helping his fellow painters with it came true in 1956 at the Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elbląg, organized in collaboration with Gerard Kwiatkowski. Of the forty-one participants, thirty-six were painters and only five sculptors. The Biennial also embodied Bogusz’s another stipulation, one concerning the social aspect of art. Collaborating with the artists on the assemblage of spatial forms, the workers and technicians of the ZAMECH Mechanical Works acknowledged the pieces as their own and regarded themselves as their co-creators.

Beginning with his contribution to the Biennial, Bogusz was coming close in his artistic work to the geometric-Constructivist art formation, to which he was to remain faithful. Besides painting, he created spatial metal forms, Constructivist in character.
Space had always featured prominently in Bogusz’s thinking. This was so back in the Mauthausen camp when, with his friend Munios, he was considering a design for an International Estate of Artists. Over a dozen years later, his another architectural project was a design for the Polish pavilion at the 1958 World Exposition in Brussels, and in larger team of architects, for the International Fair in Leipzig. Together with architect Jerzy Oplustil, Bogusz was working out plans for a modern art gallery in Łódź. All these designs were the products of the artist’s brilliant imagination. Likewise as prime mover of the Biennial of Spatial Forms in Elbląg, Bogusz was not only thinking in therms of the individual works and the material basis provided by the ZAMECH Works or the social value of the initiative. He was also thinking in terms of town-planning space. He adopted the same manner of comprehensive approach to the visual impact of works by the group of Polish artists creating spatial forms in the town of Aalborg, Denmark. In turn, he created a spatial mobile object in red, related to the surrounding nature, at the Symposium Urbanum in Nuremberg, Germany. This motif of Bogusz’s dual link with nature, through the association of his works with nature and through his ecological intent, surfaces through all his projects in nature.

In the 1970s, beginning with his participation in the ‚Wrocław 70’ Symposium, Bogusz did not carry his projects into effect all by himself, but with a group of invited young artists, on whom he was a remarkably strong influence. His successive initiative testifying to the exceptional power of his imagination was an action, which consisted in asking the participating artists to design the route between the National Museum in Warsaw and the reservoir at Zegrze near Warsaw. Thirty of Bogusz’s artist friends from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland participated. Regrettably not a single design was carried into effect. Bogusz’s successive in initiatives, such as the ‚Ustka 72’ Symposium of Spatial Forms, ‚Łosiów 72’, ‚Gorażdże 1973’, ‚Krapkowice’ (1974), ‚Opole74/75’, ‚Otmuchów 75’ or ‚Lublin Art Meetings 76’ all had the character of comprehensive spatial-visual concepts at the service of art and people. All resulted in well-aimed designs followed by artistically and socially valuable accomplishments as well as infeasible projects. Bogusz’s trust in the feasibility of utopian visions and dreams, taking no heed of the obstacles, was perhaps one of his most precious characteristics.

Bogusz’s last decade, a climatic period in his painting harking back to his artistic thought of the 1940s, was the most important. As before, a search for order, geometry and rhythm, as well as the increasingly marked tendency to economic and simplified solutions, played an essential role in his work. The treatment of colour, subtle, refined and more and more magic in its evasive changeable quality, shows the same restraint and often asceticism. Only the system of the construction of composition is always the same in Bogusz. The first to emerge was a purely intuitive concept sketch and intuitively chosen colour, which was at times left to remain. Yet more often, the overall composition was subsequently subjected to the order-imposing discipline of a more or less rigorous linear arrangement. The two stages were an expression of Bogusz’s two contradictory personality traits, on the one hand emotionally and unbridled temperament, and on the other, an order-related factor governed by intellect. The latter had come to dominate in the 1970s. As an element constructing the composition, imposing order on, and at times adding rhythm to it, there was a stroke, line, which had earlier also played an important role in his work.

Ceaseless anxiety and a sense of insufficiency were part of Bogusz’s nature that made him always look for something new. This is why there are so many different stages and new experiments in his art, also ones with various materials. Hence also the appearance of sheet aluminium in the early 1970s. Polished and slightly coloured, the surfaces of the sheets vibrate with light. They seem mobile and wavy. They are elusive and spatial, evasive and poetic. Many bear characteristic titles like Meditations or Light in Space. The artist remained faithful to the conviction that art should be a means of communication, not just a formal experiment or a way of satisfying one’s aesthetic needs. At each stage of his work, Bogusz’s images contained an emotional factor; at times allusive, they provoked many-sided associations.

Like all artists leaving a marked imprint on the history of their times, Bogusz was an outstanding individuality. Without his organizational initiatives, which provided his fellow artists with an invaluable stimulus, the whole history of Polish post-war art would have taken a different course. It would have been poorer in creative discoveries as well as artists whose potentialities would not have found stimuli necessary for development. The arts of others was as important to Bogusz as his own. This is why he never sought to rise above them, come to a higher position in the ranking lists of artists or in the hierarchy of offices connected with the visual art. Art was the idea to which he had given all his forces; it was his supreme goal and religion. Nothing was more important.
Bogusz was an exceptional figure also as a human being, as testified by the risk that he had taken to save his fellow prisoners in the Mauthausen camp. In his case, it is impossible to separate the man from the artist and vice versa. Whoever has had contact with Bogusz remembers him as exceptional and unforgettable. ‚Even in his lifetime he was an institution and a legend’, says Zbigniew Taranienko. According to another art critic, Jacek Juszczyk, ‚He was imperious, filled with all sorts of ideas, disturbing and adored, rising to the status of man-cum-legend even in his lifetime. First of all, he was indispensable’.

streszczenie z książki "Bogusz- artysta i animator"; Bożeny Kowalskiej, wyd. Muzeum Regionalne w Pleszewie, Pleszewskie Towarzystwo Kulturalne; Pleszew 2007