Breakfast
Painting
ID:
1687
Number in cycle:
10
Ending number:
212
Date:
October 1972
Medium:
acrylic; canvas;oil
Dimensions:
146 cm x 114 cm
Description:
After graduation from the Academy Teresa and I had almost no money. We took different commissions. To get them you had to go to the Visual Arts Studio. It was a state company, which received orders for different things: interior decoration, exhibition arrangements, facade design, monuments, medals etc. Clerks and managers, in other words, just some guys behind some desks, collected those orders and passed them further. Of course we could never design anything. There were clans of architects who took designing. We, poor graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts, could only realise their designs. In this painting you can see the Visual Arts Studio and its clerks called "curators" of all those projects and of the visuals of the Polish Communist Party's wonders. Here they are eating breakfast. Everything always started with a glass tea in that world.
(E.D.)
In the 70s we used to go to the Visual Arts Studio to get some work and we suffered agony. It was awful. One had to enter a room and ask if there's work. We were always afraid that the clerks would be eating breakfast and so that they will be angry and throw us out of the room. And if they'd be angry they wouldn't give us any commissions. And what if we get there 5 minutes late and somebody else snatches the commission right from under our noses?
High-rise buildings visible outside the window suggest a city. It's a thought abbreviation. These are big-town clerks. We didn't have glass houses in Warsaw at that time. It was the time of omnipotent clerks who could decide on everybody's position, do whatever they liked. I really disliked going to the Visual Arts Studio.
Of course, one can read this painting more universally. This is an office in which all workers pretend to be working. In fact they are bored to death. Torpor and tea refills. There are lots of such places everywhere.
(T.G.)
Owner type:
private
Tags:
government;man;Polish people
