Stanisław Szukalski (1893, Warta, near Sieradz – 1987, Los Angeles), "Echo," 1986

Provenance
Szukalski Archives, California

Private collection

Exhibited
Stanisław Szukalski. Wait! My Heart Still Beats!, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles, May–June 1989
Szukalski. The Lost Genius, The Polish Museum of America, Chicago, August–October 1990
Stanisław Szukalski. Struggle: The Art of Szukalski, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, November 2000–January 2001

Bibliography
Stanisław Szukalski, *The Work of Szukalski*, Chicago 1923, no page numbers (ill.)
Stanisław Szukalski, *Troughful of Pearls / Behold!!! The Protong*, Sylmar 1980, no page numbers (ill.)
Stanislav Szukalski. *The Lost Tune. Early Works (1913–1930) as Photographed by the Artist*, Sylmar–Chicago 1990, pp. 92–93 (ill.)
Lechosław Lameński, Stach z Warty Szukalski and the Rogate Serce Group, Lublin 2007, pp. 265–267 (ill.)
Szukalski Album, introduction by Lechosław Lameński, Warsaw 2018, p. 133 (ill.)
Stanisław Szukalski. Fotografista, exhibition catalog, Bytom 2021, pp. 2, 33–34.
Stanislav Szukalski. The Lost Tune. Early Works (1913–1930) as Photographed by the Artist, San Francisco 2023, pp. 112–113 (ill.)

Biography
In 1903, he left for the United States with his parents. As a 13-year-old boy, he attended the Institute of Art in Chicago, where he caught the attention of his teachers with his exceptional talent for sculpture. In 1909, at the urging of the sculptor Antoni Popiel, who was living in the U.S., his father decided to send 15-year-old Stach to the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He was an exceptionally colorful figure in the artistic circles of interwar Poland—revered by a group of young artists gathered in the “Rogate Serce” (Horned Heart) group he had founded, yet sharply criticized by a circle of older artists. A fanatic of Proto-Slavic culture and the myth of Polish greatness, he gravitated toward historical and allegorical themes, employing elements of geometric stylization in his formal approach. Between 1936 and 1939, he carried out a commission in Katowice to create bas-reliefs for the Silesian Museum building, which was then under construction. In 1939, he left Poland and settled permanently in California, where he devoted most of his time to unraveling prehistoric puzzles and the mysteries of humanity’s ancient history, the origin and development of languages, beliefs, customs, art, and the migrations of peoples, while his work as a sculptor took a back seat. The last retrospective exhibition of his works—the first in the postwar period and the last during his lifetime—took place in May 1978 at the Palace of Art in Kraków. During the war, nearly the entire body of the artist’s work created in Poland was destroyed.