„WSZYSCY MAJĄ SKRZYDŁA”. MARC CHAGALL TADEUSZA KUBIAKA
“Everyone Has Wings”: Tadeusz Kubiak’s Poetic Engagement with Marc Chagall’s Painting

Summary/Abstract: This article offers an analysis of a group of poems by Tadeusz Kubiak published between 1957 and 1959 that engage with the painting of Marc Chagall. Kubiak’s work coincides with a pronounced rise in interest in Chagall in Poland during this period and constitutes an important contribution to a multi-faceted sequence of poetic responses to the artist that emerged at the time. The poems under discussion link issues central to Chagall’s imagery with the problem of artistic imagination and with a conception of artistic creation as an escape from empirical reality, which allows these lyrics to be situated within the contemporary literary-critical debate on poetic imagination. At the same time, certain elements of Chagallian reference can also be identified in Kubiak’s poems addressing Jewish themes. The semantic shifts effected by Kubiak in his engagement with Chagall make it possible to conclude that, in Polish poetry of the period – more markedly even than in art-historical or literary criticism – the imagery of this artist functioned as a symbol of unrestrained artistic imagination, providing an important point of reference for the meta-artistic concepts articulated at the time.

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