The Fragmentation and Recovery of Zdzisław Beksiński

This article uses literary theory to propose an explanation for the range of responses to the art of Zdzisław Beksiński, whose work tends to provoke either hyperbolic disgust or intense awe. Beksiński's decision never to title his paintings necessitates ekphrasis, the translation of visual images into prose, which in the case of Beksiński's images breaks down due to the impossibility of describing his figures in plain speech. An ekphrasis of these images thus pushes the viewer into the second stage of Thomas Weiskel's three-stage model of Romantic transcendence—deprived of the ability to speak and searching for a way to recover it. Neither of Weiskel's codified approaches to this crisis—the metaphorical or the metonymical—are effective solutions to this problem, marooning viewers in Weiskel's second stage with no chance of reaching the third stage, where they would be reconciled with the contents of their world.

The viewer of a Beksiński painting must therefore contend with what David Sandner calls an "open" response to the sublime, accepting the sublime as an ongoing feature of their world. One of Sandner's codified open responses, fragmentation, precisely describes the response of those who regard Beksiński's art as fearsome or disgusting, forcing the viewer into an encounter with something they dislike. The other, dispossession, closely describes the sense of transcendent power other viewers ascribe to these images. The process of Sandnerian dispossession with regard to Beksiński's paintings is elucidated by comparing it to a similar process in neo-Romantic theory, J. R. R. Tolkien's concept of Recovery, the highlighting of the natural and human via their contrast with purpose-built manifestations of the supernatural and inhuman. Various of Beksiński's paintings yield to such analysis, as studies of humanitas celebrated in contrast to preternatural inhumanity. The key to the power of these images is their ability to show the viewer something of themselves.