For the majority of his life, Beksiński embodied the famous Flaubert quote about a regular, orderly creative life. Judging an artist’s body of work by the worst things that have happened to them, however, is manifestly unfair. The impression we get from these scant details and Beksiński’s disturbing work, is of an individual probably best left alone. Music, he said - not literature, film, history, or even other artists - was his only inspiration. He preferred that others keep silent as well, though he himself hated silence, working to loud classical music and rock. Unlike artists whose work can seem inseparable from their statements of purpose (or personal or historical tragedies), Beksiński had nothing to say about his art or his life. If we add to this account Beksiński’s childhood in Nazi-occupied, then Soviet-occupied Poland, we have ample reason to speculate about the meaning of his nightmarish visions.īut the “Nightmare Artist,” as he’s called in the video above, wants us to stay away from making meaning of any kind. The life and death of Polish painter, photographer, and sculptor Zdzisław Beksiński has been sensationalized, made into a cursed tragedy in the telling of events late in his life that, taken together, all seem horrifying enough: the death of the artist’s wife from cancer in 1998, the suicide of his son, Tomasz, one year later, and, finally, his own stabbing death in 2005 at the hands of his caretaker’s teenage son. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.” - Guillermo del Toro “In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh - whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish - thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life.
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