The Nightmare Artist

Source: The Nightmare Artist, In Praise of Shadows, 13:57, uploaded 2020-01-31, playlist index 419.

Zdzisław Beksiński spent roughly fifty years turning dreams and nightmares into photographs, paintings, and film. In Praise of Shadows follows that work from the staged photographs of the 1950s through the war-haunted paintings of the following decades, the digital experiments of the 1990s, and Beksiński’s murder in 2005. The film’s claim stays close to biography: the images become a record of the historical violence that Beksiński saw around him, although they keep enough strangeness to resist a single explanation.

Sanok and the first photographs

Beksiński was born in 1929 in Sanok, a city with a large Jewish population before the Second World War. The film says that a concentration camp appeared on the outskirts in 1940 and remained there for three years. Beksiński grew up through the war and the Soviet occupation of Poland. The narrator connects those experiences to the emotional force of his later work, while giving no independent source for the camp’s history or for the precise share of Sanok’s Jewish population.

Beksiński studied architecture in 1955. The training taught him to draw and gave him a working knowledge of architectural history and symbolism, which later let him use buildings as social and political forms. After his studies he returned to Sanok and designed buses for a construction company. He kept making photographs, often using objects from the construction site, and treated photography as a part-time artistic practice.

His early photographs already reject the idea that a camera should simply record a subject. The dominant ideal of “straight” or “pure” photography, associated in the film with Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams, sought sharp images that showed the natural texture of things. That approach had developed partly in opposition to pictorialism, whose photographers softened and staged life in the manner of impressionist painting. Pure photography presented itself as a correction to that romantic haze.

In 1957 Beksiński showed a photograph called Sadist’s Corset. The picture turns a nude figure away from the camera, removes the head and legs through cropping, and holds the body in a stiff, non-sexual pose. The critic Alfred Ligocki attacked the photograph in public. The film paraphrases Ligocki’s objection as a defence of the photographed subject’s natural appearance: Beksiński had interfered too much with what the camera recorded, so the work counted as “anti-photography.”

Beksiński answered in an article titled “The Crisis of Photography and the Perspective to Overcome It.” He argued that pure photography left too little room for artistic expression and that the medium should allow a photographer to make a deliberate artistic statement. His pictures put that argument into practice. An out-of-focus chair cuts a body into sections. Mirrors interrupt the body’s symmetry. Figures become silhouettes, disappear into shadow, or lose their faces in deliberate blur. The subject remains a body, yet the photograph refuses to offer it as a stable, untouched fact.

By the early 1960s Beksiński had stopped making photographs. He gave the work to the Historical Museum in Sanok and said that photography had limited his imagination and left him with nothing else to say through the medium. The film treats the photographs as the first clear appearance of the existential style that later defines his paintings.

Untitled paintings and the refusal of a fixed meaning

From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, Beksiński developed the period for which he became best known. The narrator calls it the “Fantastic” period. The paintings combine architecture, spiritual imagery, eroticism, war, and dream logic in landscapes that feel damaged before the viewer has worked out what happened there.

Every work remained untitled. Beksiński disliked the way a title could impose a meaning or guide an audience towards an interpretation. In a 2002 interview quoted by the film, he says that paintings should be admired or contemplated without the question “what does it mean?” If he had something to say, he would write it down or say it. He also said, “meaning is meaningless to me,” and rejected the idea that he painted from a settled story or symbolic plan.

The narrator respects that position enough to avoid assigning one grand meaning to the whole body of work. He still finds recurring images that make Beksiński’s biography and political setting hard to ignore. The war appears through burning buildings, destruction, helmets, thin bodies, and crowds pressed into collective behaviour. A red creature hides behind elegant Greco-Roman architecture. Figures ride on helmets whilst dragging bodies behind them. The scenes keep bringing an organised human world into contact with what that world has done to the human body.

The film gives particular weight to blue. It links Prussian blue to prussic acid, also called hydrogen cyanide, and then to Zyklon B, the pesticide used in Nazi gas chambers. It says that chemical conditions could leave a blue residue on surfaces exposed to the gas. Two paintings receive this reading. In one, a death-like figure in blue watches a train of carts covered with religious symbols carry tightly packed, emaciated figures away. In another, a similar figure hovers over a child in a cradle whilst a man behind him is eaten by birds. The phrase In hoc signo vinces, meaning “in this sign you will conquer,” appears on a wall. The narrator also says that the phrase was used as a slogan by the American Nazi Party.

Those connections belong to the film’s interpretation. The narration does not identify the paintings by title, cite the historical sources for the chemical claim, or establish that Beksiński intended these references. The images support the association between bodies, religion, industrial killing, and war. They do not settle the artist’s meaning.

The body, the crowd, and the problem of one explanation

The human body appears in almost every painting, although it rarely keeps a human shape. Bodies stretch into other forms. Faces bloom into nature. Buildings grow out of flesh. A tree becomes a dome of tissue. Numbers are tattooed or carved into people. A man turns into a building, and a torso becomes a chair. The narrator reads the last images as possible references to reports that victims of the German camps were turned into household objects such as soap and lampshades. The qualifier matters because the film presents this as a possible connection rather than a documented statement by Beksiński.

The bodies stay thinner than they should be. A corpse plays the violin. A ruined dancer poses. Faces shift until they stop reading as faces. Cropping, segmentation, and awkward poses make each figure appear almost natural and entirely wrong at once. The film gathers these images under a common sense of nihilism. Its language becomes Hobbesian here: the hundreds of paintings look like separate pieces of a long statement about human nature, although the narrator has already acknowledged that Beksiński resisted statements of this kind.

Crowds extend the argument from the individual body to social power. Groups stare ahead with empty expressions or gnash their teeth in a form of joyful anger. Helmeted figures block a path. A huge head consumes a mass of people. A religious being hovers above the earth with a symbol in its pocket. A cardinal has a diseased, rotting face. Graves cover the grounds of Notre-Dame, whilst crosses rise through the remains of war. Government officials, religious figures, and the crowds around them share a world in which institutions become bodies and bodies become material for institutions.

The film then draws back from its own pattern-making. Many paintings carry no clear historical reference and remain mysterious even after the recurring images have been named. Beksiński also made a group of sadistic erotic drawings that surprised the narrator because they differ so sharply from the rest of the work. The fact that war shaped his adolescence cannot account for everything he made or everything he was. The paintings keep their range because the biography explains a pressure on the work without closing it.

Digital reality and a late return to painting

The narrator likes Beksiński’s 1990s work least. During that decade Beksiński became interested in digital art and returned to photography through Photoshop. He manipulated his own photographs and images made by other people, using the software to construct artificial realities that could be viewed from any angle. A quotation from this period describes the work as a refreshment of the mind because it offered a perspective different from painting.

The film sees the digital images as recognisably Beksiński’s, yet less raw and visceral than the earlier paintings. The narrator places that judgement within a wider frustration with artists who adopted new tools before the tools had matured. Beksiński eventually grew dissatisfied with digital work, abandoned it by the 2000s, and returned to painting. This remains a personal assessment from the presenter. The film gives no account of Beksiński’s own later evaluation beyond the quoted pleasure he took in constructing artificial reality.

The last years and the historical record

On 21 February 2005, Beksiński argued with Robert, the son of his housekeeper, after refusing to lend him roughly one hundred dollars. The argument became physical, and Robert stabbed Beksiński seventeen times before taking his life and money. The film says that a memorial at Burning Man displayed a red cross shaped like a T that year. Sanok later opened a museum dedicated to Beksiński’s work in a local castle, which the narrator says remains open.

The closing argument returns to the distance between biography and interpretation. Beksiński stands for the birth of modern Polish art in the film, and his work records a perspective formed by war, occupation, totalitarianism, and the crimes that came with them. He absorbed that history and turned it into a sustained emotional response. The paintings offer information about their time through feeling and form. That information matters precisely because it comes from a person who lived through the period, although the film leaves the individual images open enough to exceed the history that helps us approach them.

Limits

In Praise of Shadows presents a persuasive visual and biographical reading of Beksiński’s work, yet the short film supplies few primary references. Its claims about Sanok, the concentration camp, the use of In hoc signo vinces, Zyklon B residue, the possible reuse of victims’ bodies, the Burning Man memorial, and the museum remain claims made within the film unless checked against independent historical sources. The captions also misrecognise Beksiński’s name several times, so this note uses the standard spelling rather than treating the caption text as an authoritative transcription of proper names.

The film’s strongest qualification comes from its own narrator. Beksiński’s work contains recurring forms that invite historical interpretation, whilst individual paintings remain too varied and complex for one thesis. The note keeps that tension in place. It records the film’s readings of war, religion, crowds, and the body without turning them into the artist’s confirmed intentions.

Further reading / references

• Andy Teszner’s channel, recommended in the video description for more films about Beksiński.
• Sturqen, credited in the video description for the music.