Tadeusz Kantor

Tadeusz Kantor (1915, Wielopole Skrzyńskie - 1990, Kraków) was a painter, director, stage designer, art theorist, author of happenings and reformer of the theatre - through the richness and diversity of his achievements one of the most outstanding artists of the contemporary world. In 1934-1939 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, under Władysław Jarocki and Karol Frycz among others; during the occupation he founded the underground Independent Theatre.

The inspiration for his painting came from the latest trends of world art, encountered during journeys to Paris and New York - he created works in the current of Informel, Dadaism and conceptual art. At the beginning of the 1960s he gave up the depiction of reality, realising his own idea of ambalages (wrappings) and of works combining painted fragments with banal found objects. Convinced that „the rigid, tradition-sanctified boundaries between the arts should be abolished”, from 1965 he realised happenings, collaborating with the Galeria Foksal in Warsaw (including the „Panoramic Sea Happening”, 1967).

In parallel he ran the avant-garde Cricot 2 theatre, founded in 1955, in which he staged first the plays of Witkacy and then his own pieces. In 1975 he announced the manifesto of the Theatre of Death, realising the legendary production „The Dead Class” - a séance of memory in which old people return to their school benches, dragging behind them the dead dummies of children. Shown all over the world and performed about 1,500 times, it brought Kantor international fame. In the 1980s further masterpieces of Cricot 2 came into being - „Wielopole, Wielopole” (1980), „Let the Artists Die” (1985) and „I Shall Never Return” (1988). Kantor died suddenly during a rehearsal of his last production „Today is My Birthday”; his legacy is documented by the Cricoteka in Kraków.