Czapski wobec abstrakcji.

Józef Czapski, as a painter and critic who lived and worked after the WW2 in the Parisian centre, was watching ubiquitous abstraction of the 1950s with certain astonishment; he used to treat it rather as a symptom of a superficial, lacking philosophical background fashion than a serious, or to call it more appropriate, forerunning and significant artistic offer. He pointed out inaccuracy in terminology and confusion with ideas he was able to notice in the literature of the subject, which he was perfectly aware of, and art critics’ discussions around abstraction in the then contemporary times. On the other hand, he drew a panorama of abstract painting striving which spread between a vision of an art language of “Puritans”, like Malevich and Mondrian, and “the dazzling elucubrations” of the Tachists of Mathieu type. In Czapski’s considerations there are plenty of rhetorical questions about the status of abstract art and its significance in presence and future. His restrained acclaim for tremendous successes of Abstractionists in galleries and art centres is combined with his doubts about the quality and range of this noisy wave of abstract painting. They are welded by his accurate and erudite observations of status quo. The author of the paper makes an attempt at critical reconstruction of Czapski’s theoretical views regarding “the Niagara Falls of abstract production” on the one hand, while on the other he recalls Czapski’s valuation of abstraction prime in Poland at the period of Thaw, he also recalls the painter’s late fascination with Nicolas de Stäel’s oeuvre and poses questions about influence of this painting formula on the artist’s work itself.