Leon Getz’s form of recording the everyday life (with particular reference to the "Dąbie album 1918–9")

Abstract

The article is an analysis of memoirs that turn seamlessly into diaries and, in particular, a specific sketchbook with features of a diary and a memoir, by the Ukrainian painter and graphic artist Leon Getz. Both memoirs are invaluable sources of knowledge about the artist’s life. In addition, they give an insight into the form – also the material form – close to him that captured the everyday life. In both memoirs, Getz combined verbal narration with supporting documents, photographs and drawings incorporated into the text. The aforementioned personal documents provide the necessary context for the presentation of Getz’s specific work, the album Dąbie 1918–9, which consists of drawings – portraits of people, genre scenes and sketches of spatial arrangements – accompanied by daily dates, the author’s signatures, short notes and/or entries of the portrayed people. The drawings were made “on various random papers” during the artist’s stay in the Dąbie internment camp, to which he was sent in 1919. After leaving the camp, Getz collected the drawings, stuck them on cardboards and prepared a “canvas-bound case” for them. The work, essentially, is a sketchbook. However, the daily dates and notes accompanying the drawings give the sketchbook the characteristics of a diary and indicate the author’s aim of recording the oppressive everyday life of the camp. The elaboration of the work post-factum, on the other hand, brings the sketchbook closer to a refined memoir and makes it a work of art. Between the sketchbook, the diary and the memoir; between the random paper and the decorative binding – this is the borderland where Getz’s characteristic form of “recording” the world, including the world of war (in this case the Polish–Ukrainian War of 1918–1919) is located.