Alina Szapocznikow, Petits Deserts I, 1970-71. Colored polyester resin and glass, 8 x 11 x 13 cm. Kravis Collection.

Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) was a Polish sculptor. Born to a Jewish medical family in prewar Poland, Szapocznikow’s talent for depicting anatomy became apparent at an early age. During the war, she and her family were detained in the Pabianice and Łódź Ghettos, and following their liquidation, sent to a series of concentration camps, among them, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Terezín. Szapocznikow’s brother perished, but she and her mother, separated in 1944, miraculously survived and reestablished contact (her father had died in 1938 of tuberculosis). Following the war, she relocated to Prague, beginning her training as a sculptor in Otokar Velimski’s studio, and later to Paris, where she attended Paul Niclausse’s atelier at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and fell in with a group of Polish expatriots and visiting intellectuals. There, she met and married the mathematician turned art historian Ryszard Stanislawski. Back in Poland, the couple adopted a son, Piotr. Szapocznikow’s early bouts of ill health, in particular a damaging episode of tuberculosis, had left her unable to have children, a reality which would become an underlying motif of her work. She and Stanislawski separated on amicable terms (he would later become the custodian of her estate) and she married the graphic designer Roman Cieślewicz.

In Paris, Szapocznikow found work producing sculptures for international monuments and later, designing gravestones. During the forties, and again in the sixties, she rented a studio near the Père Lachaise, and intermittently kept one in Poland as well. She began her career working primarily in stone and bronze, but in 1963, she began to combine fragmented body parts with revolutionary sculpting materials including polyester and polyurethane. These materials gave her sculptures the embalmed quality of something that had once been alive. It was during this time that she found an important ally and friend in the French art critic and philosopher Pierre Restany, founder, along with Yves Klein, of the Nouveau Réalisme movement. Their potential was enhanced by her experimentation with imbedded electrical bulbs, which caused individual pieces to alight as if from within, heightening their erotic delicacy but also their uncanny disembodiment—what another critic and friend, Urszula Czartoryska has described as a realization of our “cannibalistic” or “autophagic” impulse.

Szapocznikow was a critic of high modernism, which she saw as being increasingly academic and impotent. Her sculpture Noga (Leg, 1962-65) was cast from her own body in part as a reaction to the exalted status of abstraction in the critical literature of the day. She died in 1973 of breast cancer. Like Eva Hesse or Frida Kahlo, her art can be interpreted as an encounter with the degradation of her own body. But in its emphasis on the uncanny and the absurd, and its subtle parody of bourgeois propriety, it more closely parallels the work of Louise Bourgeois.