The numerous indexes of citations in which biblical scholars specialize, leave no illusions: apart from the Gospel, the most frequently cited book of Holy Scripture is the Apocalypse of Saint John, also known as the Revelation of John. And after all, citation for pastoral or scholarly purposes is only one component of the presence of this book in culture: its name, Ἀποκάλυψις , in the Greek of the first century after Christ, meaning simply “revelation”, became the term for the whole direction of thinking and portrayal focused on the end of the world. The images and symbols of the Apocalypse – be it the harbingers of the end, the Four Horsemen, the Mark of the Beast, or stars falling from the sky – were the inspiration for countless paintings and sculptures, poems and sermons.

Hearing Seven Trumpets

Also – fuel for all kinds of fears, fantasies, visions, even possessions! For this reason, many Church Fathers, indeed John Chrysostom himself, a saint of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, opposed the inclusion of the Book of John into the biblical canon, seeing it as an ideal breeding ground for heretics.

There were indeed many of these, it is difficult to name a thinker from antiquity or the Middle Ages, especially one at odds with orthodoxy, who would not use images and scenes from the Apocalypse. From Origen to Wycliffe, from Luther to John Mathijs, founder of the Münster Anabaptist commune, they harkened to visions of seven seals and seven sounding trumpets. Whenever there was an earthquake, a solar eclipse, a bloody moonrise, or locust that was more troublesome than usual – there was always someone who raised his finger up to the mountain and, mixed with horror and satisfaction that “it came upon him”, said: ‘aha!’

Later, after the prophecy, they began to adapt the remaining elements (apart from locust) of the present day, and – if luck would have it – everything usually matched! Favoring this is the extraordinary ambiguity and suggestiveness of the processed images: the stars falling from the sky could be an August meteor shower, but also artillery fire on cities during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Battle of Armageddon may be the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 68AD, but also Ypres, and Stalingrad.

And the seven kings? (“five have already fallen, one still lives, and the last has not yet come, and when he comes he must remain only a short while.” – Rev 17:10). These could, of course, be Nero (reigning 54–68AD) and his successor Vespasian (69–79AD) – this association is one of the arguments in the dispute among researchers over the timing of the writing of Revelation – but it could also be any six kings, presidents or prime ministers who reigned not long before the moment when the book was being interpreted. I wager that even now, as I am writing this, some particularly desperate fan of Rafał Trzaskowski is foretelling (perhaps not a particularly durable one, but still) his victory in the next presidential election (“he has not yet come, and when he comes he must remain only a short while”)

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the “scarlet-colored beast” is the United Nations, each subsequent attempt to microchip people is perceived by many as giving the Mark of the Beast and interpreting subsequent wars in the Middle East as fulfillment of particular turns in the struggle of the kings of Medo-Persia is the specialty of televangelist visionaries in the United States. But this curiosity has always been there – and the “decoding” of individual phrases was sometimes perceived as a sign of all-knowing, indeed, even used as a temptation... Let us only recall the monologue of the evil spirit in Dziady [Forefathers’ Eve by Adam Mickiewicz], addressed to the praying priest Piotr, a mixture of both trivial and the gravest temptations: “Do you know what the whole city is saying about you?... Do you know what will happen with Poland in two hundred years?... Do you know why the prior is not so favorable to you?... And do you know in the Apocalypse what the beast means?” Never mind the priorities of the prior, but who (probably also Trzaskowski’s voters) would not want to know what will happen to Poland in two hundred years – and the latter?

Grodzisk Interpreters

Who has not asked this question, not only among intellectuals, but also from those of simple nature! “Sodomagomoria!” – the grandfather began his monologue in the film Konopielka. The unorthodox Kasprowicz and the very pious Karol Ludwik Koniński studied the Apocalypse. Stanisław Rembek, a writer, it would seem, far from all passion, even dry in the perception of reality, in his splendid Dziennik Okupacyjny [Journal of the Occupation], published these days by the State Publishing Institute (PIW), several times, between reports on transports pulling through Grodzisk, prices of coal and vodka drunk by oldish, local patriots (this vision of Poland, in suburban Warsaw, lurking, skeptical and agile, perfectly complements the picture of the German occupation) confides in the afternoons and evenings spent with one of his friends, to reading the Revelation of John, reading it into contemporary times. “We came to the conclusion that the Apocalypse should be read in a different way than is usually done,” notes the newly-minted revelator, with somewhat touching pride.

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  So he read the Apocalypse by Kasprowicz and Rembek, viewed it (or listened to it in church) from folk artists, who were almost as eager to carve a woman standing on the moon from linden wood, as a sorrowful Christ or a red-mouthed devil. But probably no one has mulled it over as deeply as Józef Chełmowski, a painter, sculptor, inventor and theosophist from the heart of the Kashubian region, from Brusy.

Born in 1934 in Brusy Jaglie, on the German side of the border that divides Pomerania (“I started my education in 1941 in Volksschüle in Brusy at the age of six” – he writes in the one-page “My creative biography”), and died in 2013, he lived his life – as happens with prophets and visionaries – in a completely common way, without academies and scholarships, spectacular passion and breakdowns, loud vernissages and scandals. The already quoted “biography”, a great testimony, even shows that his initial years flowed in accordance with the model curriculum vitae of a citizen of Communist Poland. “Then there was the Service to Poland [paramilitary, state youth organization] for six months in Silesia, where, for a high quota of 250%, I became a delegate to the first world Youth Rally in Warsaw. Before I was 18, I started physical work at the Polish State Railways [PKP] in Chojnice. After a few years, I went to basic service in the army, where I graduated from a non-commissioned officer school as a radio station commander. After leaving the army, I worked on a 12-acre farm and other state works”.

Service to Poland, the army and PKP – like the portrait of a shock worker! But in the next sentence of his biography, the same shock worker writes: “...and other state works, and there were a lot of them, and at that time I dabbled as an alchemist, I use my experiences to this day”. What kind of guide is this alchemist, who additionally reveals: “I started woodcarving after the war at school with pine bark shrines...”.

Happy Easter, People’s Poland!

Many such originals with a flair for chisels were harnessed at that time into the cogs of the great machine of “supporting and promoting folk art”, the behind-the-scenes of which is perfectly described by Antoni Kroh in the book Wesołego Alleluja, Polsko Ludowa! [Happy Easter People’s Poland!] It was a hybrid in which there was a place for orthodox ideology (“advancement of the working people”) of the older type of ludomania, which was preserved in Communist Poland, the hope for foreign exchange income, academic and media careers for ethnographers, the ambitions of simple people who for the first time in their life had tasted the admiration of the “state” over the hive or spoon that it had carved out, and the agility of common swindlers, who calculated that they would live off of the semi-wholesale production of little Jesuses planed in bark and put into Cepelia [Communist Poland’s folk art stores] better than the cultivation of potatoes on plain soil.

But this strange combo does not exclude the existence of creators who are completely self-generated, noticed with time, maybe even “promoted”, but starting – well, thanks to the divine spark. And Chełmowski was one of them. “In 1970 I started carving and painting again, I don't know what made me do it, not for pay, not for work, there was too much of it at that time, but I started. The first exhibitions were at the Las [Forest] cafe in Brusy, in 1972 I was at the exhibition of the Northern Lands in Sopot, then there were numerous thematic exhibitions, up to the present”.

He started, and his imagination, as is the case with folk writers of the second half of the 20th century, was fed not just as previous generations were – by sermons, Holy Scripture, overheard anecdotes and parables, or at best a scrap of newspaper – but by a deluge of information flooding the world: news from the radio, newspapers, speeches, and with time, from TV (the Las cafe in Brusy certainly already existed then...). Such an unusual mixture of stimuli “from the start” had to result in an unusual hybrid.

A hybrid, because it contains “traditional folk” elements, a little polished and sugar-coated, as we know from countless open-air museums, regional museums and numerous miniatures of artists from countries that have consistently focused on supporting “folk culture” since regaining independence in 1918 – Czechs, Slovaks, Croats and Serbs, to mention, for example, Ivan Generalić from Koprivnica.

Of course, experts distinguish between schools, styles and inspirations in such achievements, but the average museumgoer, who likes to show his kids paintings that are “typical late Gothic” or “oh, you see, chiaroscuro like Caravaggio”, let’s be honest, yawns a little, livening up at most when recognizing the attributes of the Saints: like a crown and a tower, that’s Barbara, like a lily, that’s Anthony, and a dog...? Whoever doesn’t remember St. Roch, needs to Google it.

But let's be honest, this Saint Barbara, with a closed face, flat and square as a board, with an awkward nose protruding from it, is the same in the first, second and tenth museum, in the Old Polish sculpture gallery, and fresh from under the pocketknife of a certified artist: faith in the person can move us, but not the faithfulness of the features.

Bill Clinton’s Oath

There are also some sculptures like these in Chełmowski’s output: sad Pietas, Saint Joseph with red lips and a belt, a few devils (although one, caught in a chimney, perfectly black, is already a great conventional joke of the author). But this is a small part of the collection, in which – for example in the museum in Bytów – you can find several dozen representations, in the convention of “holy figures”, depicting completely secular, albeit important, personages.

And here is the terrible pendulum of the viewer’s emotions between recognition, delight and mockery of the city slicker. And it’s not only that we have managed to get used to the rough features of Saint Barbara over the years, but the rough features of Bill Clinton (President Bill Clinton's Oath, 1993), known from hundreds of agency photos, and here sculpted in the same manner as Saint Joseph, amuses, offends and touches us all at the same time. It is about the selection of heroes, a testimony to this information flood, the streams of which have reached both the Las cafe and the sculptor’s farmstead.

They stand on shelves, shoulder to shoulder with devils and saints, and not only – what is most understandable – with John Paul II, captured in a peculiar cubist shortcut (face, a raised arm and a dove), an unlike Lech Wałęsa, a bas-relief with cranes of the Gdańsk Shipyard, commemorating August and Mother Teresa. Also standing are – on a crescent moon Astronaut Neil Armstrong, 07/20/1969, the aforementioned Bill Clinton, on a podium where he took his oath, but also the already burning Twin Towers leaning against each other, Saddam Hussein and even Masoud Barzani! (Józef Chełmowski’s predilection for wars and Middle East affairs is curious).

Similarly, in numerous paintings, not only vividly commenting on today’s or yesterday’s reality (“evangelical sects predict the fall of the United States”), but also constituting a clear echo of artistic impressions, necessarily chaotic, but astonishing in the breadth of the artist’s inspiration. At least a few canvases feature malicious demons known from the tantric current of Buddhism or the Hindu Kali; Mohammed on a mount and the archangel Gabriel seen as in the Muslim tradition, are as if taken alive from Persian miniatures, a mound made of skulls flashes somewhere, copied straight from Vereshchagin’s Apotheosis of War.

And next to that, completely different, is perhaps one of the most touching paintings: The Passage of the Zeppelin Over Brusy to East Prussia in 1938. Above the yellow-green plateau, above the poplar-lined highway, above the town with the two most important points of reference – the church towers and the smoking sawmill chimney – a strangely pointed airship hangs in the afternoon sky of the late summer. There is calm in this canvas, almost an August idyll, but there is and – perhaps due to the year or perhaps due to the disproportionately large flying machine dominating over Brusy – some shadow of danger. This canvas looks a bit like a monidło [hand colored wedding portrait], a bit as if drawn from postcards, which we flip through so many of in antique shops (“Grüße aus Bruß”) – but who knows how much of it is from the first conscious memory of then four-year-old Józek, or rather, since it is Kashubia, “Jófek”?

Final Things on Glass

Never mind the catalog of inspirations, I would leave their compilation to specialists. What is striking in the several hundred works by Chełmowski collected in Bytów, whether it be the absolutely classic motif of the Holy Family painted on glass, or a warning against fire demons with a piling up on the side of a post made of traced symbols of Burmese writing, or the amazing, handwritten treatises (Księga Światów Świata or Nadzwyczajne śmierci ludzi świata, 1970-2005), or strange cosmological canvases (Dokończenie dzieła M. Kopernika) – striking by his desire to find the world order, the formula that governs it, and at the same time – reflection on the role of man in it, his calling, disobedience and end. So, in fact, “man’s final things”: death. God’s judgement. Heaven or hell.

Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the most astounding work of Mr. Józef, in relation to which I am practically helpless. I imagine that in various guides praising the region, it is referred to as the “Kashubian fabric from Bayeux”, I hope that the seminarians from Gdańsk and Pelplin (at least!) spend long hours in front of it. I can say as much as a scribe making an inventory: it is a one-sided, painted canvas with a total length of 55 meters, width from 80 to 110 centimeters (which is shorter, but much wider than the Bayeux original!), arranged in the museum in such a way that you can look at it like a three-lane frieze. The subsequent scenes (one would like say "frames") are a graphic representation of almost all verses of the Apocalypse.

“The Tacitus of this tree was a geometer, he did not know adjectives, he did not know the syntax expressing terror,” writes Zbigniew Herbert in “Sequoia”. The Tacitus of this canvas, that is Józef Chełmowski, did not know the never-ending discussion of the interpreters of Revelation between the preterist reading (a record of the persecution of the Church in the 1st century), the futuristic-eschatological (the harbinger of the end of the world and its circumstances), the historical (allegorical vision of the persecution of the Church for two millennia) and universalistic (a record of the timeless struggles of Good and Evil, God’s Kingdom with the earthly state).

He did not know the disputes between the schools of Anglo-Saxon and German exegesis, he did not know the logical somersaults of the classics of dispensationalism. He simply painted, panel by panel, line by line, most often without copying them verbatim, but using customary abbreviations. Angels and ravens, hogs in cassocks and white-winged angels, dragons with green mouths and butterfly wings like from Tintoretto and fish-tail kings. The seas of blood, eight-horned stars rainbowing down the sky in a parade line.

Tour groups fall silent. The elderly crouch to examine the lowest row of paintings more closely. And dad in tattoos, showing a world-curious five-year-old girl, takes his smartphone out at her next question, a few moments and he starts – for the first time in years, or like every week? – read in an undertone: “They worshiped the dragon because it gave its authority to the beast; they also worshiped the beast and said, “Who can compare with the beast or who can fight against it?” (Rev 13: 4).

– Wojciech Stanisławski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

–Translated by Nicholas Siekierski