Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski

I knew when I made those Betamax films,

and sitting there...

Oh, to warm it up?

...three hours, four hours a night,

visit after visit, accumulating into 200 hours.

The predators--

I knew I wasn't making 'em for me.

Maybe if somebody at the museum sees it and says,

"Wow, we need to rewrite the history books."

I survived tremendous hardships.

I knew somewhere, somebody would find these tapes,

and they'd see what was on there

and make something out of it. That-- I knew that.

There are geniuses out there.

I found mine.

Opposing thumb created all the civilizations.

Commonplace people cannot stand the idea that he has such importance.

So they dig a hole between him and themselves.

So this is struggle...

between quality and quantity.

I never collected things because they were famous.

I collected things 'cause I liked 'em.

I grew up collecting comic books.

And when I got a little bit more mature,

I started collecting books on surrealism.

One day, I was in a bookstore in Hollywood,

and headed towards the surrealism section,

and I see this brown spine.

What I thought-- It was a snake on the binding.

I thought, "What is this?"

The thing was 200 pages, full of drawings, photos of sculpture...

This is incredible.

"Hey, kid, are you buying that or are you just looking?"

I bought the book. It was... kind of expensive,

'cause it was from 1923.

And it was of a Polish artist. I didn't know Poland from Portugal.

Took the thing home,

read it 100 times, or just linger on a few of the pages.

I'd been visiting Robert Williams and Suzanne Williams

for... two, three years, by that point.

I took over the book, plunked it down. I said, "What do you think of this?"

I belonged to one of the lowest phylums of art culture

that had ever come along in America.

A rather unsavory world of underground cartoons

that society considered novel pornography.

I couldn't have been more happy.

Glenn showed me the book by a sculptor named Stanislaw Szukalski.

Extremely strong artwork.

Nineteenth-century sculptors that were so famous

and so heralded, Rodin and stuff,

I don't think they could've held a fucking candle to him.

They couldn't have held a testicle to that guy.

You know, it's just remarkable. Um...

Uh, what was your questions?

One day, I walked into this bookstore in Tarzana.

And I knew this lady. I'd seen her before.

She had something pinned on the wall. It was a poster...

and it's Copernicus.

I didn't know who Copernicus was.

And I looked at it.

I see that snaky signature at the bottom.

I said, "What's this poster?"

And she said, "Well, there's a nice man that lives in Granada Hills

that frequents the bookstore, and he gave me that to hang up."

I thought, "Shit!"

I thought he was dead,

and he lives like five miles away from me.

Who would have thunk?

So she said, "You know what? Look him up in the phone book."

Am I supposed to look up

Salvador Dalí or Picasso in the phone book?

Go home, call him up.

This nice, low voice answers the phone.

"Hello?"

Glenn asked me if me and my wife Suzanne

would go meet this guy.

We met Szukalski at his own house.

This was probably the most intense meeting

of any person I've ever met for the first time.

So I go over to this common post-World War II house...

And I kind of was ready to look up when the door opened,

and I had to look down, because he was shorter than me.

He was already 80, and I was probably 25 years old.

He shook my hand heartily, just iron grip.

I saw these plaster monuments, just...

in this little den.

They were kind of all beat up,

'cause they'd been through an earthquake.

They were just absolutely fantastic.

It felt very European, because his wife came out and served tea.

She seemed kinda quiet and reserved.

He was the opposite.

We didn't have what you'd call a conversation.

We were talked to.

It was stream of consciousness,

of information and visuals.

And he couldn't sit still, and he was incontinent with imagination.

Cyclops with one eye on the forehead.

Stuffed mattresses on the shoulders so they look like Titans.

In whole history of art, you will not find anything equal to this.

I could tell he loved it,

'cause I'm sure he wasn't having anybody else come around

at that time.

This a very strong arm. It's like a weenie, like a sausage.

...boastful and just say the most outrageous, outlandish things.

I think it was because I grew up watching Freddie Blassie

that I just thought it was hilarious.

You know, great men come along very seldom,

but I am one of the greatest that ever did come along.

I'm the greatest authority on any subject

that has pictographic value.

Anything anybody can do, Freddie Blassie can do 10 times better.

Just don't forget that.

I was the most renowned sculptor in America.

I never was referred to any other way, except as genius.

I remember distinctly going,

"I have the worst headache I've ever had in my life."

Because it was just so much so take in.

I thought he was amazing.

He would stand at a sculpture, tell you in great detail

all about it, why he made it.

This hand was more than four times larger than life-size.

Well, one of the things that struck me especially

was the work Struggle.

It is somewhere in Poland.

But no one knows about it, because I live in Los Angeles.

Found out that it was missing, and I was so sorry to hear that,

because I just thought it was brilliant.

Jesus, you know! He's got a whole bunch of work here

that nobody's seen, and I don't know why.

Why is this guy left behind?

I would visit him alone, with people...

Like Ray Zone, I took George DiCaprio...

He offered us a glass of port, but he was very careful to...

empty the glasses out,

and have all the marble dust fall out.

Uh, he was an amazingly fun guy.

You got quite a lecture for your money, I would say.

When you met Szukalski, he would ask, "What's your nationality?"

"What's your background?"

You could say, "I'm Brazilian," or you could say, "I'm English."

And he had a reason to run that country down in detail.

England never had conquerors who came and invaded.

England is an island of rabbits. Even rabbits can survive on an island.

Okay, I'm a rabbit. I can settle with that.

He was a very bigoted man,

but he was bigoted in a very unusual way.

You'd go to a filling station, or something,

and he would jump out of the car and go over to the attendant

and start measuring his arms.

He would refer to them as a yeti.

Troglodytes or Australopithecine...

It was... kind of quirky.

They have extraordinarily short arms.

Two short legs, long, long torsos, throwback to yeti.

You couldn't point out to him that this is kind of, like, a little...

you know, questionable. This is a little questionable, here.

At the time, it was kind of... kinda funny,

because of the fact that he believed so much of it.

Now, I'm not sure...

he thought people were lesser.

But I know he thought he was the greatest.

He was such a contrarian.

He had no use for the entire gamut of human beliefs.

Most of the time, we would kind of humor him,

and we had no way of knowing what these things connected to

in his past.

If I knew back then what I know now,

I would have been compelled to warn my friends away.

Glenn spent an awful lot of time with him,

but me and Suzanne spent enough time with him.

We were always calling each other...

Mr. Bray, Mr. Szukalski.

I had published books in the early '70s, but little comic books.

And I said, "We could do a little book, you know, on the cheap."

"No, no, no. I'm waiting for China.

I'm waiting for Swedes.

They're gonna do a big book on me." I said, "Okay. Uh...

But I'm-- I'm still here.

You know, I'll come back next week, and we'll talk some more."

So one day, I was sitting there, and we're discussing a drawing of his...

and I jokingly remarked,

"You just draw what you see, right?"

And he looked at me. He says, "Oh, you don't know."

I was born in a little town in Poland.

This was... very long ago.

He says, "I was four or five, living in Gidle or somewhere.

My parents really let me do whatever I want."

He wanted to see how long he could look at the Sun,

because he loved the glow of the Sun.

Little did he realize that he'd burnt a hole in his, I guess, cornea.

All his life,

he was drawing and sculpting

with a big goddamn dot in his eye.

So, when I was seven, I was carving figurines

for my harem.

I had about three, four beautiful girls my own age that I loved.

Only one way I could be nice to them was give them little sculptures.

And they called me a sculptor.

So ever since, I want to be a sculptor.