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Zdzislaw Beksinski: The Dystopian Surrealist Painter You Should Know

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A surrealist painter, a person desensitized to war and tragedy, an award-winning artist, a creative photographer, and a murder victim; these descriptions all apply to one man: Zdzislaw Beksinski. The Polish-born artist lived through endless amounts of pain and suffering throughout his life, from world war to suicide and cancer. Living through so much hardship may beat down some, but Zdzislaw Beksinski was able to channel his pain into his artworks, leaving behind hundreds of gorgeous paintings and inspired fans.

The Early Life Of Zdzislaw Beksinski

Zdzislaw Beksinski was a surrealist painter born in the town of Sanok, Poland in 1929, who grew up in a war-torn nation occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. At the start of World War II, Sanok's population was about 30% Jewish, nearly all of which was eliminated by the war's end. Even non-Jewish Poles were persecuted by the Germans and this was only worsened by the increasing Soviet presence. Approximately 5.6 million Poles died as a result of the German occupation, with about 150,000 more deaths due to the Soviet occupation. While little is known about the specifics of the artist's childhood, it is reasonable to infer that living in Poland at such a time would've been brutal for anyone, let alone a child.

As a young man, Zdzislaw Beksinski studied architecture at the Kraków University of Technology and completed his education in 1952. Afterward, he worked as a construction site supervisor and bus designer, both jobs that Zdzislaw Beksinski absolutely hated. He began pursuing art during the mid-1950s and was interested in photography and sculpting, and eventually became a surrealist painter. Although he had no formal training in the arts, he was successful in selling his work even in the early days of his career. The artist often sold out exhibitions of his art and thoroughly impressed local critics.

The Meaning Behind The Surrealist Painter's Work

Zdzislaw Beksinski's work can be described as and surrealist; always having been rather disturbing, depicting somber scenes of death, decay, distorted faces, and deformed bodies . While all of his work was rather dark, his initial work focused on dystopian apocalyptic landscapes and utilized expressionistic color while his later work was more abstract, formalistic, and used a muted color palette. His early photography can be seen as a clear influence on his later paintings, both containing fragmented and warped figures. The photographs give us a clue to the images the surrealist painter was drawn to again and again.

While it is possible that Zdzislaw Beksinski was unaware of the horrible history behind Prussian blue, it is definite that living through the realities of the war must have been incredibly difficult for him. Zdzislaw Beksinski was only 16 when the war finally ended and even afterward his nation remained under Communist control for decades. Poland gained independence from the USSR in 1989, a few months after the artist's 60th birthday.

The book was analogous to an American Mein Kampf and Rockwell unabashedly believed in and spread Neonazism and white supremacist ideology. Just a few years after 'In Hoc Signo Vinces' was written, Rockwell published another Neonazi manifesto, the racist book filled with anti-Semitism was fittingly titled ' White Power ,' making Rockwell's extremist beliefs abundantly clear.

The Quality of His Art and the Inspiration Behind it

From a technical standpoint, his art was incredibly detailed and precise, utilizing advanced oil painting techniques. From an emotional perspective, his art is even more impressive, just looking at some of his paintings can be difficult to stomach, while at the same time being quite moving.

He took inspiration from both classical music and rock, often listening to it while painting and drawing. Strangely, Zdzislaw Beksinski never seemed to partake in the consumption of other forms of art, not known to enjoy literature or even other artists' paintings. Just like his artwork, Zdzislaw Beksinski himself remained somewhat of a mystery to the public for much of his life. In the late 1970s, Beksinski burned a number of his paintings in his backyard, forever guarding work he called "too personal" from the public eye. The subject matter of these paintings is completely unknown and it appears as though it will always remain that way as Zdzislaw Beksinski took this secret to the grave.

Late Work

In the 1980s, Zdzislaw Beksinski gained more success around the world. His work sold more and more particularly in Japan, France, and the United States. During this period his work simplified, choosing to use a restricted and subdued color palette and further distinguishing the style of his paintings from others popular at the time.

In this era, Zdzislaw Beksinski also created a series of paintings that included a number of crosses, though it is unclear if this motif is a religious reference or not. It is highly unlikely that the crosses were an endorsement of beliefs and many art historians believe that they were perhaps a reference to the crucifixion and the religious persecution he saw growing up in Poland. In the 1990s, Beksinski began using computers and the internet for artistic purposes, experimenting with digital art , photo manipulation, and photography which he often published online.

From what is known about the surrealist painter's personal life, it was fairly traditional and mundane. He married Zofia Helena Stankiewicz in 1951 and they remained married for the rest of her life. In 1958, the couple gave birth to their first and only child, Tomasz Sylwester Beksinski, who later became a radio presenter, movie translator, and music journalist. While friends and family members say that Beksinski was a friendly, pleasant, and seemingly cheerful person, his private life was riddled with tragedy.

In 1998, Beksinski's wife of 47 years passed away from cancer. Only a year later Beksinski's son committed suicide on Christmas Eve at just 41 years old, leaving his father to find his body. Beksinski continued to create new artworks until his untimely death in February of 2005. He was found dead in his Warsaw home with 17 stab wounds.

Zdzislaw Beksinski's Legacy

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Zdzislaw Beksinski: The Dystopian Surrealist Painter You Should Know

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A surrealist painter, a person desensitized to war and tragedy, an award-winning artist, a creative photographer, and a murder victim; these descriptions all apply to one man: Zdzislaw Beksinski. The Polish-born artist lived through endless amounts of pain and suffering throughout his life, from world war to suicide and cancer.

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The Dystopian Surrealism of Zdzislaw Beksinski Artists' Stories

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There are many fans of gruesome and gore art who are attracted to the dystopian surrealism of Zdzisław Beksinski. After all, he created such a gothic, haunting and stressful ambience in his paintings, making it hard to look away. He was a pioneer of Polish contemporary art. So, let's have a look at his life and of course his work!

The Man Before the Artist

Zdzisław Beksinski was born on 24 February 1929 in Sanok, southern Poland. He studied architecture at the Krakow University of Technology. He survived World War II and continued to draw provocative pieces during communist times in Poland, when many forms of art were frowned upon, especially by the pro-Soviet Government.

In 1955, Beksinski returned to Sanok after completing his studies and worked as a construction site supervisor and as a bus designer. He didn't like either of the jobs.

Photography

While working at the construction site, Beksinski also occupied himself with photography and sculpture. His photographic works were characterized as Surrealistic and Expressionist.

In the early 1960s he gave up on photography. He was disappointed by the limited possibilities of altering the images. So, he turned to painting.

Beksinski's Heyday

Beksinski started experimenting mostly with oils, even though he used acrylics too. He started working on the photographs he had previously taken by using the original photo and adding whatever he wanted. He never visited museums and did not admire any great artists in particular. While painting, he always listened to classical music, although he enjoyed rock music too. It was to music that he owed his inspiration to.

Regarding the meaning of his works, Beksinski insisted that there was none. In fact, that is the reason why the vast majority of them is untitled. He left it to the observer to comprehend each piece as they wanted.

Dystopia is defined as an imaginary, undesirable and horrific place. It is the exact opposite of utopia, which is the ideal place or society, where there is no crime or poverty. Surrealism was a 20th-century movement which promoted the full liberation of the subconscious. The two of them combined create the dystopian surrealism of Beksinski. It is this nightmarish ambient with scenes of grotesque, horror, death, anxiety and decay.

Beksinski named this period a "fantastic" one and it lasted up to the mid-1980s. The concept throughout the years, and even in his latest works, remains the same: oneiric and hellish, disturbing landscapes and figures.

Despite the grim overtones, he felt his works were misunderstood. According to him, they were optimistic and even humouros. Plus, he painted in great detail because, according to his words:

I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.

International Acclaim

In the mid-1980s, Beksinski saw his reputation skyrocket due to two factors: the first one would be his contract with Piotr Dmochowski in 1984. Dmochowski spread Beksinski's art to the west. He had exhibitions in the USA, France and even Japan. The second factor would be Beksinski's denial to paint what was popular in the art industry. He didn't have any interest in becoming the critics' favorite, he always created what he wanted and what was true to him.

Personal Tragedy

In 1977, Beksinski moved to Warsaw with his wife, Zofia, and their son, Tomasz. In 1998, Zofia died of cancer. The next year, Tomasz, who had become a famous radio presenter, a music journalist and a movie translator, committed suicide. Beksinski never recovered from that and he closed himself off, even though he wasn't very social anyway. In 2005, age 75, he was stabbed to death by the 19-year-old son of his caretaker, Robert Kupiec, because he refused to lend the teenager some money (around $100). Kupiec was sentenced to 25 years in prison on 9 November 2006.

Beksinski completed his last piece (the one below) on the day of his death, 21 February 2005.

Artistic Legacy

Beksinski inspired many artists. Guillermo del Toro credits him for the movie Pan's Labyrinth, for which he won an Oscar in 2006. Also, Beksinski's works are often compared to those of Hans Giger, the Swiss painter who designed the eerie creatures of the movie Alien in 1979. In 2016, Jan Matuszynski directed a movie, The Last Family ( Ostatnia Rodzina), which is about Beksinski's life. Below you can see the movie trailer:

A big red cross is placed today at the Burning Man location in the USA, as an ode to the artist.

In 2016, the Historical Museum in Sanok opened a gallery with more than 600 works of Beksinski. It is the biggest exhibition in the world with his artworks!

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The Dystopian Surrealism of Zdzislaw Beksinski

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There are many fans of gruesome and gore art attracted to the dystopian surrealism of Zdzisław Beksiński. See the amazing world he created.

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Few VR projects span decades. CGI dates so quickly that the 'cutting edge' blunts in a very short amount of time. So it was remarkable that the VR 'DAVID' experience that allows a viewer to walk around Michelangelo's 17-foot (5-meter) statue of David using virtual scaffold, is built on data that comes from the 1990s!

Dr Marc Levoy is VMware Founders Professor of CS and Electrical Engin., Emeritus at Stanford, but now works at Google Research.

In 1998, Dr Marc Levoy led a team from Stanford University to scan Michelangelo's David in Florence. Over the years, this dataset has been used by many technical papers, but as it totals more than a billion polygons, it has never before been viewable in real time.

Epic Games' Lead Technical Animator Chris Evans is somewhat of a Michelangelo fan. "I am a bit of a Michelangelophile. I actually have a plaster cast of David's face at home, taken from the statue in 1870 when it was moved. I have studied Michelangelo for many years, and I find his life and works really intriguing. At one point I was told that I have more books on Michelangelo than the Staedel Art Library in Frankfurt!"

Over a six month period, with the help of Adam Skutt, (Epic Games character artist), Evans baked the dataset onto an in-engine representation, down to the quarter millimeter.

The Scan

Dr Marc Levoy decided to do a high resolution 3 dimensional scanning project with his grad students as part of an academic sabbatical. As luck would have it, Stanford University had an overseas study centre in Florence and the David Statue had an optically appropriate diffuse, white colour suitable for scanning with the technology of the day.

The scan of Michelangelo's David, begun on February 15, 1998 and took 4 weeks. Most of the art historians in Florence were keen to have such a professional research project, even given the extremely valuable and highly restricted access to the statue.

The team used a Cyberware swept line 3D scanner, mounted on a special rig. The actual scanner was very slow by today's standards but it's 1/4mm accuracy is still considered as very high quality today.

The workstations are a mixture of SGIs and PCs. In the photograph above the gantry is at maximum height. The 2′ truss section roughly level with David's foot (C) was added at the last minute after the team discovered, much to their horror, that the statue was taller than they thought. "We designed our gantry according to the height given in Charles De Tolnay's 5-volume study of Michelangelo. This height was echoed in every other book we checked, so we assumed it was correct. It was wrong. The David is not 434 cm without his pedestal; he is 517cm, an error of nearly 3 feet!" explained Levoy.

The team, from right to left, Kari Pulli (running the scanner), Marc Levoy (with his hand ready on the emergency stop button), Lucas Pereira, and Domi Pitturo. The Cyberware gantry could be reconfigured to scan objects of any height from 2 feet to 24 feet. These reconfigurations, which involved removing one or more pieces of the tower, took several hours to do.

The scanner head was reconfigurable. It could be mounted atop or below the horizontal arm, and it could be turned to face in any direction. To facilitate scanning horizontal crevices like David's lips, the scanner head was also rolled 90 degrees, changing the laser line from horizontal (shown below) to vertical.

"I modeled the interior of the Tribune at the Galleria della Accademia in Florence, where the David is housed, and created the level allowing people to ride a scaffold up and down while walking around the statue".

Although most of the statue is smooth, chisel marks can be seen in several places in VR, such as here to the right of the sideburns. Also visible clearly in VR is a break in the arm of the David Statue that few people will have ever seen. During an anti-Medici rebellion on April 26, 1527, rioters occupied Florence's Palazio Vecchio while soldiers battered the doors. The occupiers threw furniture off the parapets to repel soldiers on the ground. A bench tumbled down and struck the left arm of the statue of Michelangelo's David, breaking it off in three pieces. Interesting aspects such as this are able to be learnt in VR, thanks to Chris Evans incorporating an "inspection mode", that plays various audio files if selected.

The VR version

Chris Evans studied Michelangelo at College. "My landlord at that time taught a two semester course on The Sistine Chapel ceiling, (painted by Michelangelo between 1508 - 1512), and he got me really interested in Michelangelo, and I have studied Michelangelo for years. So when the Stanford work was first presented at SIGGRAPH... I was super interested" he explained.

In 2003, researchers at Stanford released something called ScanView which allowed users to move around a proxy 3D version of the statute and pick any angle and have a high resolution render done offline and emailed to you. "I used a ton of my dorm room's bandwidth using that!" Evans jokes, "But it was a single view jpeg, not a 3D model or anything".

The last work on the full 'billion point set' was worked on actively in 2009, but not at Stanford University. So it was somewhat of a surprise when Chris Evans contacted Marc Levoy about repurposing the Data set for VR. Not only had it been 8 years but the enquiry came from an 'animator at a games company' and not a researcher. Levoy has licensed the data several hundred times, for various reasons, but "this one particularly intrigued me as it was going to be VR, and we had not done anything before in VR", commented Levoy.

For SIGGRAPH 2017, Evans decided to produce an interactive version of the vast data set. The original data was 2 billion polygons. Each part of the statue was covered by at least two scans. Difficult sections were covered 5 or more times, for example when trying to reach the bottom of cracks. In addition, there were 7,000 color images (1520 x 1144 pixels), for a total of 32 gigabytes ofData, which in 1998 was almost incomprehensibly vast. In the 90s, no computer could hold the uncompressed dataset in memory. In 2017 Evans was able to move around the reconstructed statue in real-time in VR at 90fps.

To do a clean bake of the data at the 1/4mm resolution of the face, was complex. Chris Evans wanted all of the details, especially around the face to accurately reflect the vast amount of data. Looking up the 2009 dataset took a couple of hours just to get about 70 -100 million polygons of the face out of the data set.

This original set of polygons then needed to be decimated or reduced to a lower number of triangles, for real time use. The topology needs to be manifold to do this (a topologically closed surface in 3D - and without opposite orientation of normals between polygons), but the key is preserving the boundary edges.

Wrapping fits one geometry to another. For example, it wraps a generic basemesh around a specific 3D-scan. This control fitting process is aided by user-defined point correspondences. Wrapping is a very efficient approach when dealing with big set of similar objects like human scans so that they can be described with the same topology.

The only program that could decimate that data was Blender, and "it decimated somewhere between 70 to 100 million polygons down to about a million, without any visual quality loss - as I have shown with side by side comparisons", says Evans. (See the image above which shows the before and after, left and right, without visible quality differences). Evans then needed a very clean facial topology for the high resolution mesh. But he needed to modify the in-game real time topology of the eyelids etc of the scan so that he would have a clean and well preserved bake. Internally at Epic Games they have a very good in-house and clean topology which is used for all of their face projects such as Senua and MEETMIKE.

The same underlying basemesh facial topology that was used on fxguide's Mike Seymour MEETMIKE with the correct edge loops was used for the DAVID. In Wrap3, Evans could do a non-rigid alignment of Epic's standard high quality facial topology onto the DAVID to bake it across very cleanly.

Wrap3 by Russian3dscnner.com makes it possible to take an existing basemesh and non-rigidly fit it to new scans. It also provides a set of very useful scan processing tools like decimation (although not used on DAVID), mesh filtering, texture projection and many more. It has a node-graph architecture that allows one to convert a series of 3D-scans of say actors to production ready characters sharing the same topology and texture coordinates. In Wrap3 Evans could "pick the edge of the nose, and the ear lobes etc and it non-rigidly aligned the topology onto any face so we could align the same topology we used for our rigs onto DAVID and then that allowed us to do a really clean bake across onto the Statue" he explained.

This video shows Wrap3's wrapping an other features.

Wrap3's wrapping uses a coarse-to-fine approach. For example, the high quality Epic basemesh was deformed by a set of control nodes. The process is divided into several steps. Each step a set of control nodes is generated on the basemesh with specific density which increases with each new step. The algorithm tries to find a position for control nodes so that the basemesh fits the target geometry as close as possible. When a solution is found, it proceeds to the next step. It samples the basemesh with a bigger number of control nodes and repeats the fitting again. The bigger the number of control nodes in the current step the more precise the result.

The lighting

Peter Sumanaseni, senior technical artist at Epic, lit the scene using lots of photo reference and information about the skylight given to the team by Victor Coonin, the world expert on the David. "Pete did an awesome job lighting it", Evans explains, clearly very proud of the team effort to so faithfully realise the data into an accurate virtual DAVID.

The image above shows the result of a 12 hour lightmass bake in Unreal. Lightmass Global illumination creates lightmaps with complex light interactions such as, area shadowing and diffuse interreflection. It is most often used to precompute portions of the lighting contribution of lights with stationary and static mobility, such as this scene. While the Lightmass built from the skylight was given a long time to compute, it plays back in realtime with stunning diffuse bounce area lighting. Sumanaseni simulated the actual skylight above the real DAVID and Epic's Adam Skutt added in a small amount of Ambient Occlusion just to darken around the eyes. "To make it a little dirtier, somewhere between where it was when it was scanned - which was very dirty at the time, - and today when the DAVID is very clean".

VIVE head gear

Chris Evans decided to set the DAVID up in a VIVE capture volume and VR setup. Given the scale of the actual David Statue and the size of a normal VIVE VR capture volume, the actual VR experience requires special extension cables to allow the 17 feet square virtual scaffold to provide a 1:1 space in VR that is still in the volume. The system uses a clever system that raises and lowers the Scaffold allowing people to feel as if they are being lifted up to head height with the DAVID.

Michelangelo's statue was originally supposed to sit on a cathedral roof line, which Evans explains is why some of his features (like his hand) are exaggerated in size, to compensate for the statue being viewed from below. This is also why the VR experience is so interesting. Almost everyone experiences the Statue from the ground. Only a very few, Levoy amongst them, has really stood close to the statue high up.

In 1998, many hours on the scaffolding gave the team plenty of time to contemplate Michelangelo's masterpiece. On the last night on March 27th before the team disassembled the gantry and packed up their gear to leave the Galleria dell'Accademia, Marc Levoy asked the team to leave him alone. "I climbed up the actual scaffolding, similar to the one in the VR, on the last night, around 4 am, and I told my students to not dbother me for the next few hours. I just sat there, cross legged communing with the head of the David Statue, thinking about Michelangelo and his art... while the sun slowly rose over the top of the dome, and the light started to change across the head,... it was a very emotional experience. So I am very familiar with sitting up there and looking at the statute at scale." Now that the project is fully realised Levoy feels that the result is "frigging awesome.. it was a great experience, it was the most real experience of the David since I was actually there on scaffolding in the gallery".

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Few VR projects span decades. CGI dates so quickly that the 'cutting edge' blunts in a very short amount of time. So it was remarkable that the VR 'DAVID' experience that allows a viewer to walk around Michelangelo's 17-foot (5-meter) statue of David using virtual scaffold, is built on data that comes from the 1990s!