The Drawings of Bruno Schulz

In 1941, fearing for his life, Bruno Schulz gave away many of his drawings. I letters, and manuscripts to trusted friends who took them underground After his murder, the Germans systematically eradicated most other traces of Schulz's existence. Having devoted over forty years to the task. Jerzy Ficowski has uncovered and preserved a small but important collection of Schulz's surviving sketches. drawings. and engravings. The Drawings of Bruno Schulz is the first publication of the complete body of Schulz's known artwork, and represents a major contribution to the archives of European expressionism. Schulz's work is at once highly personal and deliberately eclectic, deriving its power and form from both the Viennese Expressionists and the 61d Masters. His art, like his writing, is deeply infused with a sense of personal and cultural degradation, an ominous, prescient aura of the horrors in store for the fragile and rapidly disappearing world in which he lived. The originality of Schulz's work lies not only in the intimate conveyance of line, but in the grotesque eroticism of its iconography. Schulz's engravings describe the struggle between spirit and matter, the pain of creation, and the compelling force of sexual torment that fertilizes the imagination of the artist. Bruno Schulz was born in 1892 in Drohobycz, Poland. He is the author of Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, and The Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz. Jerzy Ficowski is a poet, an accomplished cultural ethnographer, and a longtime Schulz scholar and the editor of The Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz. Ewa Kuryluk is a Polish writer, artist, and art historian and the author of Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, also published by Northwestern University Press. Adam Kaczkowski is a distinguished Polish photographer whose works include the internationally acclaimed Bramy Tragedii (Gates of Tragedy).