Ludomir Benedyktowicz (1844-1926), a 1863 January Uprising insurgent with a biography that was repeatedly 'filmed', did not, however, escape the insurgent fate. When he returned to Poland ten years after the uprising and after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, he was recognised by an informer in Brok on the River Bug, arrested and imprisoned in the Warsaw Citadel.

- And it was there that the drawing 'Girl with a conch' was created, because he observed the model as a prisoner, looking at the same view outside the window for many months," says Katarzyna Haber, curator of the exhibition at Warsaw's Kordegarda gallery, where we can admire this unusual picture. Drawn with a pen, it still delights us today with its precision in showing the movement of the hand, the focus on the face, the cut of the corset.

Katarzyna Haber makes no secret of her fascination with the artist and his work. She is also delighted to show the "Interior of a forest with an old oak tree" - a thicket of trees which, when you look at it, you can just feel the touch of the leaves. But it is impossible to understand how the artist was able to draw like this without a pencil or pen in his fingers, but in some kind of metal hoop attached to the stump of his hand.

"With each drawing or painting, he shows that everything is in the head, and not in a severed hand or amputated leg," emphasises Katarzyna Haber. As the curator adds, his presence at this exhibition has an additional meaning: it can be a great support for all those people whose various physical limitations do not allow them to use their talents, fulfil their dreams and ambitions.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE "Benedyktowicz had wanted to be a painter since childhood, but his father wanted him to become a forester because he was one himself. And, as was the case in those days, after high school the boy landed a job at the Forest Practices Institute in Feliksów near Brok on the Bug river, as it was a real forestry academy then," recounts Katarzyna Haber. "From there he knew the forest very well and could be a great guide for the insurgents, whom he immediately joined. And when he lost both hands, he could not really become a forester any more, but he could finally become a painter.

In order not to expose him to persecution, it was announced that he had died in a skirmish with Cossacks near Kaczków, and a grave was made, which still exists today. Hidden from tsarist spies, cured and given a little training at the Warsaw school of Wojciech Gerson, he left - probably on forged papers - for Munich. He took the examination at the Academy of Fine Arts there in a specially tailored long-sleeved cape to cover up his lack of hands. However, when it came to the announcement of the admission list, one of the professors wanted to shake hands with such an excellent candidate as he saw in Benedyktowicz. The latter then had to admit that he could not shake hands because he did not have one.

A scene like from the blockbuster movie. And maybe one day such a film will be made.

The amputated leg, in turn, stands for Adam Chmielowski (1845-1916). He is an insurgent a year younger than Benedyktowicz - how young they all were and in that uprising! - and his colleague from his studies in Munich. He also lost a leg in the uprising. And he too, through the efforts of the whole family, was "smuggled" abroad. He is perhaps better known to the general public than Benedyktowicz, because he is, after all, Saint Brother Albert Chmielowski. He gave up art to save the homeless, founded the Congregation of Albertine Brothers and the Congregation of Albertine Sisters, set new trends in charity work and became a unique figure not only in Krakow. Also thanks to the film 'The Miser and the Madame'. For the exhibition, Katarzyna Haber has prepared two of his watercolours, one is 'A hunting trip'. Simply a hunting trip, painted as early as 1870 - a scene as if from normal life, although, after all, in the conditions of the uprising, leaving the manor for a hunt could mean completely different things . And perhaps this is what Chmielowski had in mind.

Such, non-obvious, are the works we will see in Kordegarda at the exhibition 'The January Uprising. The Path to Independence". The works are striking not only for their content, but perhaps even more so for their creator's biography. For example, Maximilian Gierymski (1846-1874), also a fellow student at the Munich academy, was even younger, as he joined the uprising at the age of 17. And he painted the uprising until the end of his short creative life (he died of tuberculosis).

The curator has done the unusual - she has dug through the drawers and cupboards of the 'stored' collections and found various treasures, the unexpected and those she was looking for. This includes the watercolours and sketches of her great-great-grandfather Maksymilian Oborski (1809-1878), who - unlike the rest - went into the uprising as a mature man and ended up in Siberia, additionally with the burden of the betrayal he had committed by decongesting his brothers in arms. In Katarzyna Haber's memoirs, a sentence from her childhood is tangled up, when her eldest aunts said that "grandmother Oborska was left alone with her children on top of her head" and a sense that they needed to be educated without the property that the tsarist authorities had confiscated. Oborski stayed in her mind, even though, she says, each of us already has sixteen great-grandparents, so it is difficult to be particularly attached to one, already unknown. But the fact that he, in exile, in Usol - where there were many exiles because their labouring hands were needed for the famous salt mines, hence the name - began to draw, he broke through from oblivion.

In order not to talk about the whole exhibition, however, I will stop at recommending a very special watercolour, a kind of reporter's record of the moment: here the prison officials enter the cell of the condemned man, Edward Jürgens (1824-1863), with his sentence, while next to the door stands... unbelievable - a camera (or whatever it was called then) on three long legs and a photographer ready for the last shot. An unbelievable picture, shocking many times over - watercolour like a photograph, photographer on watercolour, last moments - and praise to Katarzyna Haber for taking it out of storage and bringing it back to life, or rather giving it new life.

The contemporary artist Teresa Murak - because there are works from our times in the Kordegard as well - has given new life to objects that are completely unexpected, but which nevertheless take us back to the Warsaw streets, which were awash with blood in 1861, a harbinger of the coming struggle for freedom, and also later, during the January Uprising. We will see this situation in a small but telling watercolour with a sketch of these street battles, against the background of a tenement on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street, which still houses - as in the watercolour - a patisserie. On this very tenement house there is also a plaque commemorating the death of Michal Landy, a student at the rabbinical school, who picked up a cross then dropped by a beaten boy to encourage people to fight.

In the 1980s, Teresa Murak used to take her son Mateusz (born in 1979) to religion lessons with Father Jan Twardowski, who - as we all know - lived in a tiny annexe next to the Church and Monastery of the Visitation Nuns on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. She came across a pile of old, even very old, linen cloths - hand-woven and hand-tufted (how else!) by the Visitation Nuns back in the previous century, from the linen they grew in the convent garden. The artist began to investigate where they came from. Maybe these cloths were used by the sisters to wipe blood from the floor when the wounded took shelter in their retreat, maybe they were used to make bandages for the insurgents, maybe they are witnesses to the heroic attitude of the sisters, who will never speak of themselves. The Visitation Sisters' cloth installation is very impressive, especially as it has a follow-up.

During the January Uprising, mothers sent their sons into battle, equipped them with weapons and courage, with bread and with valour. In this exhibition, the son stands next to his mother and presents an insurgent scythe, perhaps the most famous weapon of the 1863 uprising. Mateusz Murak Rembieliński forged "his" scythe in Orońsko, at the extraordinary Centre of Polish Sculpture in Józef Brandt's old manor house. And from Orońsko, as you know, it is only a short distance to the hotbeds of Polish irredentism, the Jodłowa Forest and Wykus near Wąchock, where both the dictator of the January Uprising, Marian Langiewicz, and, during World War II, the Home Army partisan, Colonel Jan Piwnik "Ponury" ("Gloomy"), had their camps. The forging of scythes - whether in the paintings of Artur Grottger or shown by Mateusz Murak Rembieliński - leaves no doubt: we really know how to do it.

I really urge everyone to go to that little gallery on Krakowskie Przedmieście. And enter that - and yet our - world.

– Barbara Sułek-Kowalska
- Translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

Exhibition "The January Uprising. Path to Independence" - from 12 January to 12 February 2023. Kordegarda - Gallery of the National Centre of Culture, 15 Krakowskie Przedmieście Street, Warsaw. Opening hours: Tuesday - Sunday 11:00 - 19:00.

The exhibition commemorating the 160th anniversary of the outbreak of the January Uprising features drawings, prints and watercolours by artists who took an active part in the uprising, including Kazimierz Alchimowicz, Michał Elwiro Andriolli, Adam Chmielowski, Ludomir Benedyktowicz, Maksymilian Gierymski, Edward Jürgens, Antoni Maksymilian Oborski, Alfred Izydor Römer and Stanisław Witkiewicz. As well as those who supported the uprising while living abroad at the time, such as Walery Eljasz-Radzikowski or Artur Grottger. The Kordegard also displays works by Franciszek Streitt, Adrian Głębocki, Józef Chełmoński and Antoni Kamieński, as well as installations by two contemporary artists, Teresa Murak and Mateusz Murak Rembieliński.