Krzysztof Siatka: Could you please tell us about the idea and the meaning of the exhibition of Mieczysław Wejman’s works?

 

Krzysztof Wejman: The exhibition, which is being prepared, will be the first after the death of Mieczysław Wejman, who co-founded the International Print Triennial in Krakow. Soon we will also be celebrating the 10^th anniversary of the his death. That’s why we were overjoyed about the possibility of organizing the exhibition, which is also going to be a part of the International Print Triennial 2006. I would like to stress here that I am very grateful to Prof. Witold Skulicz, who made this exhibition possible. The undertaking is additionally supported by the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and the International Cultural Centre. All works to be shown come from the family collection of my brother, Stanisław Wejman, and mine. We both manage the organization of the exhibition.

The idea behind the exhibition is based on juxtaposing a series of prints entitled Cyclist with drawings which are their guiding ideas. It will allow the viewer to see how artist’s ideas developed from working on paper to creating etchings and aquatints. We are going to show about 90 drawings, which will show artist’s work techniques.

 

 

My father created a number of series, including Dancing, Moon, Table Tennis Player and the painting series Monument. The series Cyclist includes 27 prints, which present 13 anecdotes. Very often here we have a few alternatives of one scene – then the work is entitled for example Cyclist Ia. These are artist’s comments to thoughts and ideas contained in prints.

In my opinion the collection of works entitled Cyclist is a story of ups and downs, not so much artistic ones, but it is first and foremost a story of experiences of my father’s lifetime. Cyclist presents very personal works. The series is structured in such a way so as to draw our attention to the main character of the work.

We would be very glad to be able to show other series of his works in the future. It would be wonderful to put them all together and organize a kind of exhibition showing father’s artistic work in retrospect.

 

No. I think the reason for choosing this theme is different. My father had a great passion for bicycles. He believed that a bicycle is the most human machine and the best means of transport. I remember when in the time of the war my father used to keep an old French bike in our attic. He highly respected and admired the combination of words ‘bicycle’ and ‘French’. He did not like cars.

 

 

No. There is no trace of it. While working on the series, which took him many years, my father also used to paint, however it was his work as a graphic artist that absorbed him most.

 

 

The catalogue is going to include a text by Prof. Tomasz Gryglewicz, which has been specially written for the occasion. Moreover, it is going to include a selection of texts by recently late Jerzy Madeyski, a renowned critic, who once wrote a book about my father artistic work. The publishing will also be complemented with a few texts by Mieczysław Wejman himself.

 

 

While organizing the exhibition I remembered my father’s process of working – all the complicated way of making etchings. As my father used to discuss with us a lot of alternatives and specific formal solutions, very often it was the whole family that participated in the process of creation. In his works I frequently recognize objects we had at home, like an old kettle or a skull.

Cyclist Xa C makes me think of a situation that occurred after the Warsaw Uprising had ended. The whole family was then leaving the ruined city. The situation was very dramatic, hunger was everywhere and I myself got arthritis. We were then heading along a road, carrying all our belongings, and then by a happy coincidence I found all of sudden 20 zloty for which we could buy some food. I am not sure if this is a depiction of our migration but it resembles it a lot. I must make it clear, however, that this is my personal reflection.

 

My father was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and was surrounded by a lot of outstanding graphic artists, who he got along very well with. Nevertheless, to my mind it was Albrecht Dürer who most influenced the way Mirosław Wejman perceived art. He was fascinated by both the technique of the great Renaissance artist and the subject matter of his works, which present artist’s conviction about the world dualism. It seems to me that its traces can also be found in the series Cyclist. Please note that we can find references to the artistic work of the great German humanist also in Wejman’s iconography. Cyclist XIVa is melancholy.

 

 

Mieczysław Wejman’s views can generally be called leftist, though he never was a member of a communist party. In his art he surely wanted to show important truths he believed in. He indicated that all people at the same time form a unity and are separate individual beings.

My father was an exceptionally erudite person and perfectly knew history which he had passion for. He was able to notice a lot of transformations in the world as they were occurring in his lifetime. The series was created in a very turbulent period in the world history. There were wars in Korea and then Vietnam, which he condemned. This might constitute the human value of his works – an opposition against world’s atrocities makes prints more attractive and readable also for today’s viewer. I hope they will discover timeless values in them.