The stroke of the pen - the sweep of the brush: Karpowicz paints from Miłosz
For most of us, the difference between literature and painting seems natural and obvious—a painting and a poem are, after all, entirely distinct and separate entities. Yet it was not always so. As late as the eighteenth century, the prevailing belief was that these arts were akin to each other, indeed identical; taken as a given was the dictum of Simonides of Ceos, the Greek lyric poet of the fifth century BCE, who regarded poetry as speaking painting, and painting as silent poetry. The famous phrase ut pictura poesis ("as is painting, so is poetry"), found in Horace’s Ars Poetica (Epistle to the Pisos), was also continually repeated, according to which both forms of creative expression were to be interpreted in the same manner. For early painters and poets had much in common: not only did they draw from the same repertoire of subjects—comprising the Bible, mythology, and history—but they were also educated in a similar fashion.
Young painters in ateliers and academies began their journey in art by copying the works of recognized masters, while poets took the works of great poets as their models. It was also emphasized that literature and painting shared the same rhetorical approach to the artwork and a common way of conceiving its composition. It is hardly surprising, then, that when poets addressed painters in their verses, they often referred to them as "fellow brothers in art." An end to this brotherhood was brought only by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who in his 1766 treatise Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry underscored an ontological distinction, defining the first of the arts named in the title as existing in space, and the second in time. From that point on, they became neighbors rather than siblings.
The theoretical boundaries delineated by Lessing began to blur only in the second half of the past century, and it was Julia Kristeva who first brought them emphatically to light when she introduced the concept of intertextuality into literary studies in 1969. She observed that no work is an autonomous entity, but is de facto a mosaic of quotations from and references to other, earlier texts as well as broader cultural heritage, of which the author or the reader may not even be entirely aware. This concept subsequently came to be applied to the analysis not only of literature, but also of the other arts. This led (to put it in broadly simplified terms) to the emergence of a new field of inquiry—intersemiotics, which concerns itself, among other things, with the phenomenon of intersemiotic translation. Behind this formidable-sounding term lies a fairly straightforward concept: namely, the transposition of different sign systems (which may include, for example, painting, literature, music, film, video games, or gesture) into others. As a result of such translation, a comic book gives rise to a feature film, a literary work is turned into a ballet or a screen adaptation, a painting inspires a pantomime, and a theatrical play receives a poster. In other words, it is a matter of transmuting form while preserving meaning (and often also the emotions aroused by the original work).
Intersemiotic relationships occur with exceptional frequency between literature and the fine arts; they can be close or distant, faithful or free. People of letters craft artistic descriptions of sculptures, buildings, or paintings known as ekphrases (an example being Wisława Szymborska’s poem Brueghel's Two Monkeys), or else invest an artwork with significant narrative weight (before Vermeer’s View of Delft, the critic Bergotte, one of the protagonists of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, experiences an epiphany and dies). In the same manner, visual artists draw upon literature, to mention only the Assyrian relief depicting Gilgamesh with a lion, Jacek Malczewski’s cycle of four paintings The Death of Ellenai inspired by Juliusz Słowacki’s poem Anhelli, or Gustave Doré’s engravings illustrating more than five hundred books and poems. Doré preserves the sense and content of the originals, and although he perceives them through the prism of late-Romantic sensibility and nineteenth-century realism, it is immediately evident that we are dealing with the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven.
Katarzyna Karpowicz, in painting her Miłosz-inspired cycle of sixteen canvases, enters an entirely different level of reference, however. She does not create obvious illustrations for the works of the Polish-Lithuanian poet (no one would suspect her of such a subservient, albeit noble, intent in any case), and we learn of the sources of inspiration solely through the context of the Vilnius exhibition itself. Were it not for that context and the titles of Czesław Miłosz’s poems accompanying the paintings, each of the canvases would stand primarily as an autonomous work by Karpowicz. For this is not a matter of intersemiotic translation—not of transposing the language of poetry into the language of the fine arts—but of a dialogue founded upon the synergy of lived experiences and emotions. Reading the Nobel laureate’s poems, the painter discovers within them feelings and experiences close to her own, which she weaves into her own way of perceiving the world and her (hyper)sensibility, even integrating them into the constellation of characteristic motifs that perpetually recur throughout her oeuvre. Yet Karpowicz does not visualize Miłosz’s poems, as the title of one of the paintings might suggest (In the Studio I Paint Poems is, after all, a self-portrait set in her Krakow atelier); rather, she paints "out of Miłosz," discerning within his works moments of shared resonance. She steps into the role of Tomasz breaking into the library from The Issa Valley (In a Dream, Words and Images Come), while the Lithuanian Šeteniai becomes Karpowicz’s Szczebrzeszyn, an idyllic childhood paradise. I might add that Šeteniai etched itself into the poet’s memory in truly painterly terms. In the 1988 book Czesław Miłosz’s Contrary Self-Portrait, a transcription of an interview conducted by Aleksander Fiut, he described one of the manor rooms in this way: "Precisely those pots of a vermeille color that stood there, combined with those scents—that was pure Chardin, all of it together! Chardin and Dutch painting. Here lies the key to my predilection for Dutch still lifes and for Chardin."
Katarzyna Karpowicz’s encounter with Miłosz’s poetry began just as mine did, with the poem By the Peonies (to which the painting Pink Little Ball stands as a response). As children, we both memorized it and recited it aloud—Kasia on the occasion of Mother’s Day, and I whenever I was told at home to recite for guests. We both also saw the poet in person: in 1990, the future painter was shown the Nobel laureate in a café by her mother, while five years later I attended one of his lectures and handed him The Issa Valley to sign. Two years before the poet’s death, I was also granted a considerable honor: as an accompanying guest, I was taken to meet him in his Krakow apartment on Bogusławskiego Street. I was so intimidated that I took no part in the conversation, all the more so because our host stepped into the role of a bard listened to reverently by his visitors. He immediately brought to my mind the "frosted oak" of which he wrote in the poem Fate:
Is the acorn the same as the frosted oak?
Is the fern the same as the pit coal?
Is the drop the same as the ocean billows?
Is the raw metal the same as the precious ring?Why then do you ask me of ancient verses
And of bygone girls' whimsical names?
Let my verses wander whichever road anyone wills,
Let my girls bear children to other men,
Give me the coal, the oak, the ring, and the foaming wave.
Thanks to Karpowicz’s paintings, I saw once more in Miłosz’s poems the acorns, ferns, and drops - and in the man himself, not the figure of an old patriarch or a dead classic, but a reflective, nostalgic boy with a bullfinch, just as the painter portrayed him in her imaginative childhood portrait. Through Kasia, I reclaimed my old Miłosz, and above all, that lost wonder that once accompanied the reading of his poetry.
And since we are speaking of painters and Nobel laureate poets, I would like in closing to recall (and thereby preserve for posterity) a certain event I witnessed in October 1996, when Krakow was celebrating the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Students from the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts came to the meeting with him and, as a tribute, presented him with their works, explaining in broken English: "This was the inspiration of your poetry" (meaning "This has been inspired by your poetry"). When I saw Karpowicz’s cycle of paintings and reread the works by Miłosz that ultimately guided her toward the canvases, I thought that, in truth, those young artists were not so entirely mistaken. The word "text" derives from the Latin textum, meaning fabric or woven cloth—both a poem and a painting crafted on canvas are woven, after all, from the very same threads of inspiration: from emotions, lived experiences, and reflection upon the world.
