In September 1968, the Delaware Park Barn in Buffalo, NY, burned to the ground. Everything inside the storage warehouse was destroyed, including Yaltantal, a statue of Prometheus by the then-little known Polish sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski.
“Everything in the barn was a total loss. I remember the statue; it was made of plaster and burned with the rest of the barn,” Thomas Caulfield, superintendent of maintenance at the city’s Parks Department, told the Buffalo Evening News.
One can imagine how devastating a loss like this is to an artist. But for Szukalski, the heartbreak must have resonated well beyond this disaster. For one thing, Buffalo wasn’t supposed to have Yaltantal in the first place, much less secrete it away for 13 years prompting the local paper to publish “missing” articles.
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But this incident also held echoes from the past. This wasn’t the first time Szukalski had faced the destruction of his work.
Szukalski may not have been a household name in the late 1960s, but, once upon a time, he was an internationally renowned artist known as one of Poland’s greatest sculptors. And then, at the age of 46, nearly his entire oeuvre was destroyed by the Nazis. As Szukalski and his wife escaped to the U.S. with just a few suitcases to their name, the artist slipped into obscurity.
In the fall of 2018, Netflix premiered a documentary about a little known sculptor living in the Valley who, in the 1970s, had become something of a guru to the outsider artists of L.A.. Struggle: The Life and Art of Szukalski had been a long-time passion project of its producer, Leonardo DiCaprio, and his father, who was one of Szukalski’s acolytes.
“It’s kind of like a Searching for Sugar Man but a sculptor,” DiCaprio recently told Marc Maron. “It’s been my father and my idea for almost 20 years now and we pitched you know, 15 times over the years.”
He summed up the pitch that finally won over Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos: “So there’s this sculptor, you know, everything was bombed during World War II, his whole life’s work disappeared, and he ends up living in obscurity in the Valley. And then has a resurgence, and it’s his life story.”
It was an unusual tale, one befitting the life and work of the man himself. As Glenn Bray, an art collector and the member of the 1970s outsider art scene who first discovered that a genius was living in their midst, puts it to The Daily Beast, “He was doing surrealism way before Dalí had a mustache.”
Szukalski was born in 1893 in central Poland, but immigrated to Chicago with his family at the age of 12. From his earliest days, he was given free rein to explore his interests and indulge his wild fantasies.
Left to his own devices, a four or five-year-old Szukalski decided to stare at his beloved sun for awhile and burnt a hole in his cornea. When his Chicago school teacher called his father in to discuss his son’s determination to only use an alphabet he had invented himself, the elder Szukalski stood firm in support of the young neologist.
From an early age, it was clear that this originality was translating into some serious artistic talent. At 14, Szukalski went back to Poland to apply for entry to the Cracow Academy of Art as one of 171 candidates. The first step in the application process was to sculpt a nude from a live female model. He submitted only a knee and immediately won one of the 11 coveted spots—no further examination required.
But with this extreme ingenuity came a contrary streak. Szukalski was self-taught and his method for composing his extraordinarily intense and powerful figures and scenes was to imagine them in his head and create from there. He refused to work from live models (it “destroys the talent,” he later told Bray); his art-school professor refused to allow him to work from only his imagination.
Szukalski left school in protest at the impasse, but his lack of formal training and acceptance by the art establishment was no obstacle for the precocious young sculptor. He became an enfant terrible of the art world, and he had the ego to go along with it.
“He was incontinent with imagination,” artist Robert Williams says in Struggle. “Nineteenth-century sculptures that were so famous and so heralded, Rodins and stuff, I don’t think they could have held a fucking candle to him. They couldn’t have held a testicle to that guy. It was just remarkable.”
Szukalski would have agreed with the sentiment. “I am the greatest authority on any subject that has pictographic value,” he says in one clip found in the nearly 200 hours of film that Bray made of the artist over the course of their relationship. “I was the most renowned sculptor in America. I never was referred to any other way, except as genius.”
But it was perhaps this renown that set the stage for Szukalski’s tragedy.
In the early 1930s, the artist was living in L.A. with his second wife, when he received a message from the Polish government. Would the sculptor be willing to return to his home country, which recently had gained independence after World War I, to create the monumental works that would define the new nation?
Szukalski had always been a Polish patriot, and the prospect of becoming a national hero was a siren call he wouldn’t refuse.
In 1935, he and his wife packed up all of their belonging, including all of Szukalski’s art to-date, minus a few pieces that had been sold into collections and the contents of one Hollywood storage unit they overlooked. They shipped everything to Poland, where a giant, state-funded studio awaited him. The sculptor got to work.
In Poland, things get a bit tricky. The country was establishing a national identity for the first time, and, with nearby Nazi Germany aggressively on the rise, sentiments were veering towards hyper-nationalism. Szukalski’s style of sculpture—large, dominant, mythic—fed right into the fervor of the day.
In the film, artist Marek Hapon calls Szukalski’s work “temple art,” explaining that his sculpture was not about ordinary mortals, but dealt with the “dimension of the gods.”
The sculptor embraced his hometown popularity, becoming something of a priest to a group of young artists he named the Horned Heart Tribe. He was unapologetically pro-Polish nationalism, though this sentiment veered into some disconcerting territory. In the course of creating the documentary, the Struggle directors found published writings in a literary journal he created during this time that contain instances of anti-Semitism.
The California artists who later embraced him have had to square these revelations with the man they knew, and the work he did later in life, when his main project was rewriting all of human history in a philosophy he called Zermatism, which posited a universal origin of humanity and culture originating from Easter Island.
“His work on Zermatism was actually bringing everybody, Jews, Indians, Africans, everybody together through culture,” Bray tells The Daily Beast, reiterating a talking point from the film that, despite the many hours he spent with the artist over nearly two decades, he never heard him utter a single anti-Semitic word.
Artist Suzanne Williams puts it differently: “He was a very bigoted man, but he was bigoted in a very unusual way. I’m not sure he thought people were lesser, but I know he thought he was the greatest.”
On Sept. 1, 1939, the residents of Warsaw were going about their ordinary day when life as they knew it changed forever. The Germans opened their attack on Poland with a furious bombing of the country’s capital, destroying around a fifth of the city.
Szukalski was outside when he looked up with his fellow citizens and saw the first bombers flying overhead. Realizing what was about to happen, he ran back to his studio to try to cover a massive statue he was working on. He was there when a bomb dropped, destroying the building and all of its contents.
The sculptor was buried beneath the rubble of his greatest creations for two days before he finally was able to pull himself out from the debris. As he fled, he saw German soldiers machine-gunning one of his sculptures.
In one of Bray’s videos, Szukalski holds up a small, sculpted piece of a much larger arm. “This arm, this was the size of the sculpture,” he says. “This [is the] only sculpture of mine that I can show. And I did 174 sculptures, hundreds of paintings, drawings, projects—all this was looted, destroyed, or whatever they did. So, I have nothing left to show to exhibit my works.”
While most of his oeuvre was destroyed in his studio on that first day of bombing, Szukalski heard rumors over the following decades that some pieces had survived and disappeared into the massive maw of German-looted art.
Bray discovered after the artist’s death that two of his sculptures—Struggle and Echo—had survived and were in the homes of Polish sisters. The story goes that their Polish father was forced by the Germans to gather bronze, brass, and steel to be melted down for munitions. He snuck the two Szukalski bronzes away and gave one to each of his girls. A few of Szukalski’s sculptures are currently at the Bytom Museum in Poland, though only one, Boleslav the Brave, has a known provenance.
When Szukalski returned to California, his world had changed. He was no less convinced of his own greatness, but broke and with no art to show for his career, he was reduced to working in a rocket factory. He continued to create drawings of sculptures, to work on his philosophy of Zermatism, and, later in life, he would begin to make a few sculptures, mostly in plaster. But he no longer had the money to create in large scale or in bronze. He rarely talked about the ordeal he had suffered.
“He didn’t want to sit there and rehash everything,” Bray says. “He wanted to talk about what he was working on now. And that’s basically what he wanted to do the rest of his life when I met him. And whenever I would bring anything up, it’s just like, ‘Well, I don’t remember.’ Or I’d say, ‘When was this made?’ And he’d say, ‘I don’t know.’”
Bray met Szukalski in 1973, five years after he came across a 1923 book of his works and assumed this incredible artist he had never heard of was long dead, not living just a few miles away. Under the encouragement of Bray, Szukalski began to meet a new group of up-and-coming artists who were shaking up the scene with their original, provocative vision. He became something of a guru to these L.A. bohemians.
Szukalski died in 1987 at the age of 93. While he never again saw the international acclaim he had experienced before the war, and a massive portion of his life’s work is lost forever, the story of his later days is not all tragedy. He found a new community to mentor, young artists who looked up to him and wanted to hear what he had to say. And he continued to create.
As Bray says, “He left behind a body of work, even if that stuff that was destroyed didn’t exist, that I think is immeasurable.”
