“The beginning of my scandalous work is that the world is one big scandal to me.”[1]Hans BellmerThe columns, like two trunks of paradise trees – of Life and Knowledge, are supporting a recamier sofa on which a contemporary version of Empire style temptress, Madame Récamier, is lying (in François Gérard’s version laced with eroticism), pushing away a man with her small foot. A slightly androgynous Eros is watching her triumph. Or maybe the columns are two of the three Pillars of Thoth, containing the sum of all knowledge? Maybe not Eros, but a winged nymph?This is just one of the mysterious prints from Bruno Schulz’s Book of Idolatry, from which fifteen boards created in the cliché-verre technique are presented at our exhibition at Kordegarda. The Gallery of the National Centre for Culture. Cliché-verre is a rare print technique which consists in scratching the drawing on a photographic plate covered with overexposed emulsion, and then photographing it on photosensitive paper.The Book was displayed in the early 1920s at an exhibition in Boryslav. Yet the Boryslav exhibition did not bring Schulz the expected popularity or sales. He later gave away some of the works to his friends.Schulz’s artistic work precedes his literary work. His childhood and youth were filled with countless drawings. First, depicting fantastic beasts, then portraits of his family members, and finally, obsessively sketched figures – dressed and naked – in arranged scenes. It is not the type of talent that is easily formed. Effort, struggles, skill honing is clearly visible here. Some of the works are scrappy, awkward, surprisingly variable in terms of their level.Schulz remained an amateur both in his artistic and literary work. During World War I, he attended lectures at the Viennese College of Technology and the Academy of Fine Arts. After passing his exams at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, he only received a certificate entitling him to teach drawing and handicrafts at secondary schools.It is difficult to guess the literary motif of the Book. It is possible that if we could move the date of Schulz’s literary debut about a dozen years back, we would find its literary reflection in his text entitled Undula[2].In dirty urban haze, in the narrow, dusty streets of the borderlands, “time is trickling by with the dull hissing of gas lamps”. A beautiful young woman – Undula – is riding on the back of a hunched man. She is followed by a procession of Bacchantes. One of them, in a perverse dress, is waving a whip. Elsewhere, we can see Undula in a whirl of dancing, “in black gauzes and panties, with glittering eyes glancing from behind the lace of her fan”. We recognise the sleepy and brusque maid, Adela. Young women are showing off their legs with “swanlike contours,” magnetising the viewer with their slim waists and slender proportions. Next to their perfection, the man seems like a mistake of the demiurge. He can see his own ugliness, clumsiness, and misery.Schulz takes us into the twilight zone between the mental and physical worlds. His works are not easily categorised. They may be situated between expressionism and surrealism, between Félicien Rops or Edvard Munch and Hans Bellmer. They are a record of phantasms aroused by desire that comes close to surrealistic visions.Schulz’s works are scandalous, born of obsession, they expose the subdued projections of desire, pushed into the taboo domain. We can see fetishistic and masochistic fascinations.The images are pervaded with fatalism, marked by gender pessimism, some panerotic notion of reality. The world appears as an emanation of clashing drives and impulses. It is a nearly Manichaean vision of a clash of the elements, where the woman becomes a murderous, destructive force, while the man is attracted to her ghastly world like a moth to a flame. In a numb half-sleep, overpowered, he becomes brutalised in humiliation, in contempt for himself, in his boundless sexual urge. He crawls and writhes in spasms of agony. The body of Schulz’s woman accumulates all the sins and obsessions of the present time. She is not a passive odalisque – a harem ideal of the 19th century, but Rops’ satanic woman, deceitful and seductive, or maybe rather drilling the stunted heroes. She is the incarnation of the seven deadly sins. She assumes different faces. Sometimes, she takes on the role of Sappho, other times – crafty Phaedra. Sometimes, she is a nymphet, other times – a mature woman. She can tantalise and seduce. Whoever succumbs to her charm, ends up “on Cythera”. Yet Schulz’s Cythera is Watteau in a distorting mirror. In the scenery of an eerie town, pain and suffering have replaced pleasure. The ecstasy of erotic passion turns into choking sorrow and the pain of loneliness. Immoral eroticism threatens with annihilation. Undula personifies death. The compositions resemble dark initiation rites. The celebration of spring turns into a witches’ dance, and in the next print – into an almost diabolic cancan. The man is sacrificed on the altar of drives and desires. He has to pay the highest price. His body is lying inertly under a row of legs stretched out in a dance pas.The fetish of women’s stilettos is very significant here. In the European tradition, the shoe is perceived as a symbol of male power. Men from Schulz’s depictions, kneeling or lying under a cordon of women’s shoes, clearly give up their right of supremacy. Submissive, they give in to the power of women.It is clear that in visual arts, he allowed himself to express more. In his prose, Schulz used self-censorship. In an interview he gave to Józef Nacht for the “Nasza Opinia” magazine published in Lviv, he admitted: “I could not write a masochistic novel. Besides, I would be ashamed”[3].The world of Bruno Schulz is a very individual creation, though not devoid of certain influences. Women are in the centre of this world. Listing the artist’s sources of fascination, we may mention expressionistic and symbolic obsessions of femmes fatales, Rops’ harlots. Lecherousness is combined with mysticism here, and eroticism pervaded with masochism. During his stay in Vienna during World War I, the artist came across Freud’s theories and there are many indications that he became fascinated with them. Schulz’s bold art anticipates a revolution in thinking about eroticism. The woman is never treated like an object. Quite the opposite, she is a femme fatale combining power, predatory instincts, and – at the same time – gentleness. Characterised by ambivalence, this vision of an ethereal and destructive woman, destroyer of men, and simultaneously an eternal child, becomes a projection of romantic and erotic desires. The figures of dominant women and submissive men are entangled in a complex dialogue of relations. Dionysian ecstasy is combined with pain and longing.However, the exhibition also presents a much more distant source of fascination with eroticism – Lucas Cranach the Elder’s prints. Cranach created his works at a time when images of the gardens of earthly pleasures were associated with visions of damnation. His Eves, Judiths, and Venuses are the embodiment of beauty and cruelty. Their bodies, escaping anatomical observation, as though devoid of skeletons, are synonymous with suppleness and sensuality. They take on studied, affected poses, but their faces are twisted with a cold grimace. They look at the viewers with indifference, with blank eyes. Their strong, confident posture, alluring bodies, and cold glances anticipate Schulz’s obsessions.Curator, Katarzyna Haber[1] K.A. Jeleński, Bellmer albo Anatomia Nieświadomości Fizycznej i Miłości, Gdańsk 1998, p. 23.[2]Undula was published under the pseudonym Marceli Weron in the “Dawn: The Journal of Petroleum Officials in Boryslav” magazine in 1922, issue no. 25-26 (15 January).[3] As cited in: J. Ficowski, Regiony wielkiej herezji i okolice. Bruno Schulz i jego mitologia, Sejny 2002, p. 438.