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| © Eustachy KOSSAKOWSKI |
© Eustachy KOSSAKOWSKI |
Exhibition is taking place
M.Žilinskas art gallery of the National museum of M.K.Čiurlionis
(Nepriklausomybės square 12)
II-VII 11.00-17.00
The opening of exhibition: 16:00, May 21, 2009 (Thursday)
Eustachy Kossakowski was born in 1925 into old Polish nobility. Unusually for such a milieu, the family had a long-standing interest in photography. His grandfather, Count Stanisław Kazimierz Kossakowski (1837-1905), was one of the founders of the Photographic Society in Warsaw and was the author of approximately sixty large albums of photographs showing life in the country manor in Lithuania at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The collection is housed at the Curlionis Museum in Kaunas. His father, a respected surgeon Jan Eustachy Kossakowski (1900-1979), took photographs in his spare time and had an improvised darkroom at home. Here Eustachy Kossakowski already began to develop his own photographs during the Second World War.
Later, having abandoned his studies at the Faculty of Architecture of Technical University of Warsaw, he started a professional career in 1957, at first at a magazine Zwierciadło (Looking Glass), which he supplied with photographs of fashion and reportages. A chance meeting with a young, but already well-established photographer, Tadeusz Rolke, led to a change of direction. In 1959 Rolke introduced him to the editors of Stolica (The Capital), which at the time concentrated mainly on the post-war rebuilding of Warsaw, and Kossakowski soon joined him on the magazine’s staff. In the prevailing atmosphere of the political thaw of those days, they succeeded in modernising the outlook of the magazine, introducing a new style of photographic reportage, inspired by the work of French humanist photographers or the output of the Magnum agency. Pictures of construction sites left room for lively reportages showing the everyday life of the people of Warsaw.
In 1960 Eustachy Kossakowski was accepted as a member of the Polish Union of Photographic Artists, which allowed him to participate in exhibitions in Poland and abroad, together with other leading Polish photographers. He was awarded several prizes, among others for his photographs The washing drying on a line in 1959 and Blind children in 1961.
In 1960 he began to take pictures for a monthly Polska (Poland), published in a number of languages. Its aim was to present the more attractive side of socialist Poland to foreign readers. Large-size photographs, utilising the technology of photo-type, were a prominent feature of the magazine. During that period Kossakowski completed his great photographic cycles of industrial landscapes and the remains of Nazi concentration camps.
In the 1960s he continued to work as a press photographer and entered the circles of the modern vanguard of Polish artists. He formed close links with many of them. 1964 saw the start of his collaboration with Edward Krasiński, whose installations he documented at various stages of their creation.
When the Foksal Gallery opened in 1966, he began to chronicle its activities, including the exhibitions and experiments of such artists associated with the Gallery as Henryk Stażewski, Tadeusz Kantor and Włodzimierz Borowski... He is the author of a unique record of Tadeusz Kantor’s happenings and some of his theatrical shows. In the same period he produced his sole series of photomontages, in which the sculptural projects of utopian architecture, designed by Alina Ślesińska, had found their virtual context. The culmination of Kossakowski’s connection with the artistic avant-garde in Poland was reached in 1970 in his project of a joint exhibition with Edward Krasiński, intended for the Foksal Gallery but never actually staged. It marked the end of his link with the gallery.
Unable to find a truly satisfactory role for himself in Poland, Kossakowski decided to emigrate. In 1970 he and Anka Ptaszkowska settled in France. The professional and artistic experience gained in Poland allowed him to establish a new concept and regime of work. He moved away from ‘humanist’ photography and the ‘decisive moment’, as understood by Cartier-Bresson. The new ideas came to fruition in the first series of photographs taken by him in Paris. The city became his favourite source of inspiration, including the circular route round its peripherals and the large-scale renovation projects which had transormed its face. The famous cycle 6 metres to Paris, shown at the musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris in 1971, was one of the products of that period.
Living in France, he continued to maintain his links with the world of art. He often met a leading art critic, Pierre Restany and artists such as Daniel Buren and Niele Toroni. He enjoyed a close friendship with Raymond Hains. For many years he continued to work as a photographer for the Centre Georges Pompidou and then for the musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris. He was also an avid chronicler of independent exhibitions which took place in Paris in the 1970s and of the activities of alternative galleries, for example Galerie 1-36. In 1974 he documented a theatre performance of Jerzy Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum figuris, which took place in Venice - the second time he photographed the famous ensemble. The first time was in Poland in the 1960s. On 30 August 1976 he married Anka Ptaszkowska.
The Parisian period of his life coincided with several trips abroad. His longer stays in New York, Italy and Tunisia resulted in a series of photographs - in colour and with the role played by colour in photography. At the time, Kossakowski concentrated his efforts on experimenting with ‘light as a subject’. The coronation of those experiments was a particularly lavish book, Lumières de Chartres (The Lights of Chartres), enthusiastically received by the critics and the public. The success of that publication led to more books, among others Pompéi. Demeures secrètes (Pompeii. The Secret Dwellings).
Until his death in 2001, Eustachy Kossakowski spent his life between France, Italy and, in particular, Poland. At Brok, a little village on the banks of the Bug, 90 kilometres from Warsaw, he took his last series of photographs and restored an old wooden house, visited by storks.
Anka Ptaszkowska
Art critic Anka Ptaszkowska was born in 1935 in Warsaw. She is one of the founders of legendary Foksal gallery (1966), also worked with such a famous artists like Henryk Stazewski, Edward Krasinski, Tadeusz Kantor, Krzsztof Niemczyk. Was married with Edward Krasinski. From 1970 lives and works in France. In seventies collaborated with Daniel Burem and Michel Claura and was the director of art gallery in Paris. This gallery was changing name during every new event: Gallery 1, Gallery 2 etc. There were exbited numerous well known artists – Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, André Cadere, Carl André and more others. After marriage with Eustachy Kossakowsky, Anka Ptaszkowska helped him in various projects and researches, for instance “Six meters before Paris”. Directed "Vitrine pour l'Art Actuel" in Paris. From 1984 to 2004 lectured in School of Fine Arts in Caen, Normandy. Also organized lots of various projects such as “USA and Poland artists exchange” (1981-1982), wrote plenty of publications about avant-garde art in Paris and Poland.
