A curious network of people are responsible for the fascinating documentary Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski (2018). The film's director is someone named Irek Dombrowolski. But the film is produced by Leonardo di Caprio, the movie star, with his father George di Caprio. Most the people interviewed for the film are associated with underground comix, either drawing or collecting comix ephemera. The odd man out in this peculiar assembly of folks is the famous author Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands among other well-known books), an Ivy League professor and savage critic of Donald Trump. Snyder comments, at length, about the implications of Szukalski's work in Poland particular in the context of ultra-nationalist politics in that country.
Struggle cheats a little, implying that no one knew anything about Szukalski until he was discovered by a ragtag band of renegade comic book artists and rock 'n rollers. This strategy works well because, in fact, Szukalski, who was once a very famous figure, was almost entirely forgotten after World War Two. The style of his art was old-fashioned, lurid, and, even, a bit kitschy. The art world in the fifties had moved away from figurative imagery and Szukalski's problematic, heroically sized sculptures were more like examples of art featured on the covers of pulp magazines like Amazing Stories than the abstract high-culture abstractions favored at that time. There were probably other reasons for Szukalski's eclipse -- notably, the man was insufferably arrogant, opinionated, and, later in his life, crazy. The film posits a journey of discovery -- a man finds a strange out-of-print book in the surrealist section of an LA bookstore. He is smitten by the peculiar art objects on shown in the book. He runs into a friend of a friend who advises him that the legendary artist, now wholly forgotten, lives somewhere in the San Fernando valley. The man, with his attractive girlfriend, goes to Szukalski's house, meeting him, and becomes a protegee -- it's like Michelangelo becoming a father figure to a blonde California surfer and his zaftig girlfriend. The man, Glenn Bray, is a collector of Mad Magazine comics and draws pornography for underground comix. Gradually other enthusiasts gather at the old man's house where he pontificates ad nauseum about his peculiar beliefs. As the surfer dudes and underground comix artists gather in Szukalski's little bungalow, they come to learn about his history and Stac's ("Stash" as he is called by his buddies) life and times are revealed and chronicled in the film. What is Leonardo di Caprio's role in all this? His father George di Caprio drew underground comix and, so, became part of Stac's circle.
The artist's story is bizarre and disturbing. Born in Poland, the child moved with his family to Chicago when he was 12, I think about 1904. The young man was a child prodigy. He developed his own alphabet and wrote all his letters and memoirs in that script. (Someone points that Stac was so intimidating and talented that no one ever sat him down and imposed any kind of discipline on the young man -- he was essentially feral, raised by parents who were afraid of him and who indulged his whims.) He attended the Institute of Art in Chicago and showed great promise as a sculptor -- although he is also an excellent draftsman and graphic artist. When his father, a blacksmith, was killed in a car crash, Stac persuaded a morgue attendant to let him dissect his father's corpse -- this causes Stac as an old man to say that "my father taught me anatomy." I doubt a lot of what Stac tells his interviewers. His accounts of his life are like those of Diego Rivera, a similarly exuberant and unreliable autobiographer -- Rivera claimed that he lived as a cannibal for several years in Mexico City (courtesy of a similarly accommodating morgue attendant), eating prime cuts from fresh corpses for his supper. Stac married well, a doctor's daughter (this was after a short unhappy first marriage) and, then, immigrated back to Poland. There he was immediately proclaimed Poland's greatest living artist and enjoyed prestigious commissions. He traveled back and forth from Hollywood and Poland in the thirties, working on King Kong as a landscape artist. His best friend from childhood was the great screenwriter Ben Hecht who wrote admiringly about Stac in his autobiography. Stac was in Warsaw when Hitler bombed the city, killing 25,000 people. Stac and his wife, who were American citizens, fled Europe with just two suitcases -- all of his elaborate commissions and paintings made in Poland were destroyed. In the United States, he worked in various graphic arts capacities but never regained his pre-war fame -- he had been front page material in Chicago before the war but now was mostly forgotten. Bray and his friends discovered the old man when he was 80, living with his wife, in a little cottage full of plaster-of-paris models of his works. The California underground artists recorded hundreds of hours of interviews and lectures that the handsome old man delivered.. Stac died at 93 and his ashes were scattered on Easter Island. Some of his friends raise funds to create a bronze figure named "Struggle" -- it seems to show an open hand with fingers represented by violently struggling snakes with the heads of birds of prey.. Another art work named for the Katyn Wood massacre in which the Russians wiped out the Polish intelligentsia, slaughtering professors, lawyers, artists and writers by the thousands, is shown as the old man's last work -- the sculpture shows an extravagantly horrible monster killing a heroically proportioned fighter. Stac was wonderfully handsome, albeit in a miniature and androgynous way (he was five feet tall) -- with his aquiline good looks and pale skin, seemingly entirely without whiskers, he was a beautiful ephebe. It is puzzling that he has been so thoroughly forgotten.
But documentaries of this sort are designed to be divided into four distinct chapters. Chapter One is the "journey of discovery," recounting how the people producing the film stumbled onto the subject. Chapter Two is a chronological presentation of the evidence, generally provided from a single adulatory perspective and without complication. Chapter Three is the complicating material that renders the subject matter problematic and, even, disturbing. The Fourth Chapter is denouement -- usually the death of the film's protagonist and some assessment as to his or her legacy. The complicating chapter in Struggle is a doozy. In Poland, Stac's work acquired political significance and his megalomania developed in a sinister direction. Stac's sculptures had strongly nationalistic subject matter and the sculptor's interest in Pre-Columbian Mexican art and artifacts made by so-called primitive tribal people led him into Right wing and quasi-fascist ideology. Stac was instrumental in publishing a magazine called Krac, described as a hyper-nationalistic, pro-Polish publication, roughly equivalent it seems to periodicals like Der Stuermer in Germany. Krac's cover was emblazoned with a scary-looking double-headed axe and some of the rag's content was anti-Semitic. Stac describes streetfighting in Poland between ultra-Nationalists and Communists. The work that he designed during this period for public buildings and monuments is virtually indistinguishable from the sorts of art produced by state-sanctioned Nazi artists. Stac's flirtation with tribal nationalism, more or less, ended with the Second World War. But not really. After the war, Stac devoted himself to the study of cultural symbolism, a creed that he called Zermatism. This ideology asserts that all culture derives from Easter Island and involves a primordial battle between the pure, civilized races originating in the south Pacific and the "sons of Yeti", that is, the "Yetisyny". This means what it sounds like. Stac argues that Yetis (or gorilla monsters) raped the most beautiful women in the ancient world and begot degenerate children with them. These degenerate ape-human mongrels are the source of all the misery, crime, and war in the world. It's an insane system developed over 42 hand-bound volumes comprising 25,000 pages and 14,000 beautifully executed sketches and drawings illustrating the thesis by comparing different sorts of tribal art. It seems that most of Szulkalski's interaction with his young acolytes involved his lectures on this topic. And it's for this reason that the film ends in the early nineties with Stash's disciples scattering his ashes on Easter Island. (The artist died in 1987 when he was 94.)
All of this begs the question of whether Szukalski's art is any good. It is certainly odd-looking. His sculptures involve grandiose battles between monstrous figures embossed with elaborate bas relief, tentacles twining around the massive, heavily muscled warriors and maidens. Spectacular headdresses and armor relate back to Aztec and Mayan sculptures although the artist's approach to this material is more like the elaborate detailing on "low rider" muscle cars that you might find in places like the barrios in Albuquerque than the ancient artifacts that he uses as models. Many of Szukalski's creatures wear weird goggles and seem like outer space aliens. The film doesn't have confidence that this work is any good. Therefore, we can't really see what the artist has wrought -- the camera glides over bronze surfaces, sliding through polished crevasses and fissures, too close for us to really see the form that the sculptor has made. The more elaborate pieces are so heavily entangled with claws and limbs and rending beaks that they can't really be deciphered, a difficulty that is exacerbated by the intricate reliefs and medallions studding the figures. The objects look a bit like H. R. Giger's monsters, for instance, the creature in the Alien movies, but endowed with the musculature of figures from renaissance sculpture, all this combined with bizarre, grisly-looking elements from Pre-Columbian art. The commentators featured by the film are mostly comic book artists and tattoo specialists -- no respectable art critics appear in the film. (Timothy Snyder's appearance is a puzzle and I note the biographical entries about writer don't list this film as a credit.) I assume the extreme subject matter and also the fascist implications of some of the images have scared away more conventional art historians and scholars. It's hard to evaluate this work because the film is shot so that we can scarcely see it. Stac's drawings and paintings are a varied lot, all of them executed in a fantastically accomplished, virtuosic style -- but, again, the subject matter is brutal, weird, closer the Frank Frazetta than Picasso or Matisse. (At one point, someone tried to mount an exhibition of Szukalski's work at the Norton Simon museum among the fountains and orange trees in Pasadena. Stac was ushered into the museum and told the curator that he didn't want his work displayed among the "excremental daubs" by Picasso, Klee, and others -- "they are," he announced, "fartists." Of course, he was quickly ushered out of museum. Leonardo di Caprio sponsored an exhibition of his work at the Laguna Beach Art Museum in 2000.)
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