The
Piarist
priests had
acquired Graycliff
in 1951. By that time, the estate had already passed from
the Martin family. The
Piarists knew what they were getting: a summer home designed
by a famous architect,
a structure lacking a ready purchaser other than themselves,
a structure in
need of some change in order to make it winter-habitable.
They also knew their
own mission.
The Piarists are a teaching order whose founder was a
17th-centurySpaniard
named Josef Calasanz. In Latin, Calasanz is Calasanctius.
Calasanctius is the
name the order has given to many of the schools it has
founded, including their
school, now closed, in Buffalo.
The bare fact of this story is that in 1967, the Piarists
commissioned a work of
art to commemorate their order’s 350th anniversary. The art
was a mural, a
sgrafitto, depicting St. Joseph Calasanctius and the
abandoned children whom he
saved from the streets of Rome, where Calasanctius and his
fellow priests had
gathered them up, housed them and educated them, just as the
“red priest”
Antonio Vivaldi would so famously later do for the abandoned
girls of Venice.
...
In 1967, these [Piarist] émigrés commissioned a Polish-born
muralist named Jozef
Slawinski to put
his sgrafitto
...
When the Graycliff
Conservancy took possession of the estate in 1999, the
preservationists wanted
the dormitory demolished and the mural removed.
...
It took four years, until 2003, to raise enough money to
remove the Piarists’
mural from the dormitory, which was then demolished. It took
almost two
more years to relocate the mural. (The engineers who did the
job were the same
ones who’d moved the Cape Hatteras lighthouse.) The mural is
now on the campus
of Buffalo State College.
...
Jozef Slawinski’s work is of the same era and dimension as
the Mexican muralist
Diego Rivera’s. It is public, its scale is large, its
subject matter is
heroic,and it is aggressively political. The simplicity of
Slawinski’s
composition is deceptive: it seems to indicate naivete or
primitivism. But to
recall the artist’s education in pre-war Poland,and to
reflect on the rapid onset
of overwhelming change forced by currents in politics and in
the arts in
that place and at that time, is to begin to recognize his
assertions. The icons
of Orthodoxy are
reflected in this work. Slawinski employed the planar and
heroic didacticism
of the Byzantine
imperial style, rather than the fleshy and rounded and
muscle
...
The Calasanctius mural is of the Catholic priest who began
free education,
education as liberation and empowerment of the poor, but of
course not the kind
of socialist or revolutionary empowerment that was the
subject of the other
muralists of the mid 20th century. The central figure in the
Calasanctius mural
is the teacher. The women are iconic Magdalenes
visiting from Byzantine frescoes. The
doubting men of Rome look like senators of great political
stature and power,
but they are marginalized and dwarfed by the presence of the
humble saint,
whose work and subject and focus is Christ-like, and thus
noble. These tensions
reveal Slawinski as thus an emphatically political artist.
Hispolitics are the
politics of John Paul II - the pro-labor, pro-Solidarity
subversive from Krakow
who understood the power of the Soviet empire, and who
undermined it with his
own.
...
The only physical evidence of
the
Piarists’ former presence in Buffalo is an incongruous piece
of what looks like
religious art standing in an alcove behind the library of a
public college. But
it is a handsome work. It is powerful, even there in its
curious new context.
