Stanisław Gliwa - 1938

One of the earliest members of my Horned Heart Tribe, he was one of a cluster of youths to leave the School of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland, to become one.

I, myself, had come to the Academy on the spur of the moment, while walking from the railway station, fresh from America to finish my secondary education in Poland. I was accepted into the Academy as a fourteen year old youngster, without the necessary entrance examinations given to the older graduates of other Art Schools. I spent three-and-a-half years there, not making the obligatory studies from models, but nonetheless receivinng the highest awards for my invented works. In the last two years I Filled more than one room at the Palace of Art with my drawings, paintings and sculptures, while my more mature friends never had exhibited any works at all.

After my second return from America, though, where I had fully developed my creative abilities, I could not get an exhibition anywhere in Krakow, for the professors of the Academy and its former students blocked my chances of being known to Poland.

Thus, I started the war on the Academic Method as destructive to innate Talents. Soon the youths of the above mentioned institutions sent their delegations to see me in the National Gallery (Sukiennice). More and more youths gathered about me and we began meeting every third day at Michalik's Cafe to discuss the formation of the Horned Heart Tribe. Each time, in the simplest words, I explained the principle of my CREATELIER (TWÓRCOWNIA) pedagogy, of working from memory, never from models. After two weeks of meetings, I departed for the United States. Within one year, with Stanisław Gliwa (pron. glee-vah) as an important member, the Tribe became the most renowned group of exclusively creative, inventive artists.

Some of them were executed by the Nazi Yetinsyny one, a Jewish tribesman, Strassberg, committed suicide in faraway Tiflis, while dying from hunger. The remaining few recently had, for the first time since the war, an exhibition in Communist strangled Poland. Had the Tribe of the Horned Heart been organized anywhere but in Poland, it would have fared better, but in the barbaric society of Polish pseudo-intellectuals, my students were boycotted, prevented from having joined exhibitions, yet they survived, none of them a failure, for my Method developed their Talents.

Gliwa, while defending Poland, became a war prisoner for two years. Then, he was able to join the 2nd Army formed by General Anders in Iran to move into Italy to fight the German Yetinsyny. Where various national armies had failed at Montecassino, the Poles finally succeeded in obliterating the vast complex of the ancient fortification and its invaders. The large cemetery attests to the vast number of Poles who died there. Gliwa was the main photographer and illustrator to record the Battle of Montecassino. His moving, striking work was combined with author Melchior Wankowicz's account and later published in three volumes.

Since the end of the war, on an invitation by the English to the Polish Victors, he has lived in a London suburb, where he has remained faithful to his profession of bibliophilic publisher, applying his best taste in typography, earning him the greatest honors internationally.

spis treści Politics and Statescraft