Wojna Strzemińskiego
Strzemiński’s War

Summary/Abstract: Nader treats selected cycles from Władysław Strzemiński’s so-called “war drawings” (1939-1944) as a particular mode of visual testimony where a liminal experience is constructed from an observer’s position. Nader reads the drawings as an “abstract” or “universal” idiom. Her interpretation is based on Strzemiński’s “empirical method” as outlined in his The Theory of Sight. She examines the autobiographical and referential value of the works discussed, exploring each cycle of drawings with reference to the artist’s experience and understanding, as well as the particular framework of wartime events that Strzemiński witnessed – deportations under the Soviet Occupation of the Eastern Borderlands, the resettlement of the Polish population of Litzmannstadt and the mass murder of Jews. Using both historical and neuroaesthetical frameworks (based on the work of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein), Nader proposes to describe Strzemiński’s wartime drawings in terms of neurotestimony: a visual image that supposes not only an active process of seeing but also a process of understanding that must begin on the level of the body’s neurological phenomena.

• Details
• Contents