Tadeusz kantor biography template
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Tadeusz Kantor
Polish painter
Tadeusz Kantor (6 April 1915 – 8 December 1990) was a Polish painter, assemblage and Happenings artist, set designer and theatre director. Kantor is renowned for his revolutionary theatrical performances in Poland and abroad. Laureate of Witkacy Prize – Critics' Circle Award (1989).
Life and career
[edit]Kantor was born to Marian Kantor-Mirski and Helena Berger. His family were staunch Catholics. His mother was related to composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, through her German father. Born in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, Galicia (then in Austria-Hungary, now in Poland), Kantor graduated from the Cracow Academy in 1939. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he founded the Independent Theatre, and served as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków as well as a director of experimental theatre in Kraków from 1942 to 1944. After the war, he became known for his avant-garde work in stage design including designs for Saint Joan (19
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Tadeusz Kantor
DiedDecember 8 1990, Kraków
The absolute artist, universal performer, director, stage designer, author of happenings, actor, writer, painter and art theorist Tadeusz Kantor was once named as the best artist in the world among polish artists and the most polish artist among artists from the whole world. Kantor had tied himself firmly to the native land, Wielopole where he was born and Krakow where he worked. But his provincial madness goes far beyond the polish cultural and linguistic context, to whose isolation he intensely opposed.
1933
Tadeusz Kantor studied painting and scenography at the Krakow Akademia Sztuk Pięknych/ Academy of Fine Arts from 1933 to 1939. His scenography teacher was Karol Frycz (1877 - 1963).
Studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow
1942
During WWII, he co-created the underground Independent Theater in Krakow where he staged three plays, Orpheus (1942) bygd Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), Ba
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Tadeusz Kantor
Tadeusz Kantor always insisted that he was uninterested in inventing new forms of expression. “Everything I do,” he claimed in an interview, “I do from known elements, from known reality, from real objects, saturated with certain conventions [and] essences.” The artist’s role, he thought, was not to invent but to question and destroy conventions and systems. To bring art into life, the artist should utmaning established values, regardless of their aesthetic prominence or political cast.
A seminar figure in twentieth-century Polish art, Kantor (1915–90) was always controversial. His admirers saw him as an iconoclast who steered Polish art away from its local context toward uncharted territories. His opponents accused him of uncritically importing artistic novelties to Poland as soon as they occurred in the West and presenting them as the latest word on contemporary art. He was a chameleon-like figure who based his artistic program