Józef Sławiński - Table of Contents    .........................     Public Art  - Table of Contents

2008 photos
Joseph Calasanctius Mural
E. H. Butler Library, Buffalo State College, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY

Created:

1967

Artist:

Józef Sławiński (YOO sive  swa VIN ski)

Style:

Sgraffito

A type of decoration executed by covering a surface, as of plaster or enamel, ofone color, with a thin coat of a similar material of another color, and then scratching or scoring through the outer coat to show the color beneath.

Slawinski extended the technique to four layers of cement, each in a different color.

Original 1967 location:

Graycliff

2008 location:

Buffalo State University

Distinction:

The size and four color sgraffito



Excerpts from
  Choosing Icons
By Bruce Fisher
July 5, 2007
Artvoice  (online Nov. 2014)

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.







Dedication Brochure: 
Slawinski's Calasanctius Sgraffito at Buffalo State College
May 30, 2003




Graycliff                 2002 photo

The mural at Graycliff where the commission to  Slawinski was given by the Piarist Fathers. Bruce Fisher and the Polish Arts Club, led by Peter Gessner, arranged financing to move the mural to the Buffalo State College campus after the Graycliff Conservancy decided to demolish the building which was not part of the original Graycliff estate. Weight of the moved wall: 18 tons.  Restoration of the mural was by a Czech immigrant who was loaned Slawinski's tools by the artist's widow, Wanda Slawinska.




Slawinski working on the mural   



North elevation, E. H. Butler Library, Buffalo State College        Note mural towards left


 






St. Joseph Calasanctius before a panoramic view of Rome; surrounding him are the children he sought to educate




St. Joseph Calasanctius founded the order








Four layers of cement, each in a different color: black, red, off-white and yellow               This image is located near the upper left of the mural, with two further details below:


St. Peter's Basilica




St. Peter's Basilica






Castellammare del Golfo in upper right




Street urchins beating a girl.  Calasanctius extends a loving hand to them  in lower left



Lower left detail



Lower left detail



Well-behaved students in the school that Calasanctius founded - perhaps the first public school in the world               Lower right detail


See also:


Photos and their arrangement © 2008 Chuck LaChiusa
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