The volume Granit i tęcza. Dzieła i osobowość Józefa Czapskiego (Eng. Granite and Rainbow. The Works and Personality of Józef Czapski) is an attempt at a monographic presentation of the work of Józef Czapski as a painter, writer, thinker and organiser of cultural life in exile. So far only fragments of this work have been described. Therefore the highest tribute should be paid to the author for her effort to collect work of those who offer varied perspectives on how to appreciate and analyse Czapski’s oeuvre and his way of thinking and communicating with the world.
The arrangement of the individual parts makes it possible to create an interesting and multifaceted image of the artist and the man, allowing readers to build a coherent portrait from information scattered in various sources. Such a collection presents yet another emigrant’s fate, in this case it is a biography and experience of a great humanist”.
From a review by dr hab. Ewa Jaskółowa
The rich, multithreaded and diverse personality and work of Józef Czapski cannot be summarised and enclosed in a narrow, homogeneous formula, hence the four categories or tropes that build and illuminate his artistic profile and personal image. The thematic areas proposed in the monograph: looking at, reading, encounters and memory – are only an attempt to integrate the oeuvre, which eludes such treatments and clearly defends itself against them, combining personal threads and creativity into a single work: a life’s work, taking the shape of ‘granite and rainbow’.
The study of Czapski’s participation in history, his biography, his writing and painting, allows us to look at this outstanding figure as a consistent, independent, unusually complex personality. This volume provides a broad overview of his life and works. It brings together literary scholars: theoreticians and didactics experts, art historians, historians and museum scholars, who together create uniformity in diversity. We are confident that the texts arranged in this monograph reflect the uniqueness of each contribution.
Anna Pilch and Anna Włodarczyk
