COURAGE

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The photo made by Tomasz Sikorski in 1989 or 1990 shows the wall of the underground passage under Rozdroże square in Warsaw. The square, located in the center of the city, is a transport junction where Warsaw citizens everyday change a bus. The walls of the underground passage were an attractive space for the graffiti creators who put there their tags and stencil graffiti. That way, the spontaneous, informal graffiti gallery emerged there.
On the picture there are visible the stencil graffiti by Towarzystwo Malarzy Pokojowych (Association of Peaceful Painters), for example one with the Superman posture with the face of general Wojciech Jaruzelski, acronym PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party) on his chest – a token of the affirmative and in the same time waggish attitude toward the ones in power, placed in the same line with the pop culture heroes. Another stencil graffiti depicted general Jaruzelski with a mohawk, dressed as a punk in a leather jacket. There is also a graffiti with characteristic inscription ‘Solidarność’ (Solidarity) and Israel’s flag above it what one can interpret as an anti-Semitic connection of mass union movement with the Jewish influences.

Congratulations to President Vaclav Havel from Ivana and Pavel Tigrid, sent to him by fax on 5 October 1998, at 2:52pm. Pavel Tigrid and Václav Havel held a long-standing friendship that began in the spring of 1968 when Havel returned from the United States. They scheduled a short meeting in the transit area at Orly Airport in Paris, which then stretched into a whole week that Havel spent at the Tigrid House in Héricy near Paris. In this case, the encounter happened to be when pilots and air dispatchers went on strike at the airport. Tigrid even met Havel and his wife Olga briefly in 1969 when they visited him on his trip to France. After that, Václav Havel was deprived of his passport for a long time, about twenty years, leaving only telephone and written contact between Tigrid and Havel. And it was Havel, who invited Pavel Tigrid to Prague in December 1989 for his inauguration. Tigrid returned to his homeland after over forty years away to help build a democratic state.

Skirt, in Sorin Costina’s private collection, is a painting in oil on canvas. It is unsigned and undated, but is one of the well-known works of the artist Ion Grigorescu, at present the most well-known Romanian artist internationally. The painting is 32 cm in width and 58 cm in height. It was acquired on 20 April 1982 at an exhibition in Căminul Artei (Home of Art), the Union of Visual Artists gallery in Bucharest, at a price of 1,000 lei. At the time of its acquisition it was unframed. Its present frame was made from a rod of oak, at the suggestion of another contemporary artist of considerable fame in Romania, Paul Gherasim. It was brought to the collectors home by Ion Grigorescu himself, who stopped for a time in Brad in June 1982 on his way to a monastery in the region. Skirt may placed in the context of the artist’s visual experiments with the human body, a taboo theme in the communist period. It has been displayed in a number of thematic or solo exhibitions, including various Ion Grigorescu retrospectives, the most recent of which was hosted by the Museum of the Criş Land in Oradea in 2018.