Rather than an essay about the adventures of an influential painter who left his mark on our century, this very personal chronicle offers a portrait of Joseph Czapski as he appeared to a young writer in 1975.
An anguished man, haunted by the stakes of his work and manhandled by advancing age, the artist, remarkably attentive to the goings-on of his era, turns out to also be an exceptional human being, extremely generous and with a remarkable spiritual fervor.
When they first met, this Pole exiled in Maisons-Laffitte (France) had already lived a life of a rare intensity.
He was born in 1896 to an aristocratic, well-educated Saint Petersburg family. Member of the Pages Corps, he quit the first regiment of Uhlans because of his pacifist convictions. He studied Fine Arts in Warsaw, struggled against the Bolsheviks in 1920 and spent seven years in Paris before becoming involved, as a reserve officer, in World War II, which swallowed up most of his work.

Taken prisoner, interned in the USSR, he witnessed the disappearance of thousands of Polish officers for whom he searched for in vain until realizing that they had been liquidated by the Soviets. With the Polish army, he crossed Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt, participated in the Italian campaign and denounced the atrocities committed, particularly in Katyn, on Stalin’s orders.

Banished from his homeland, he collected funds in the United States to create KULTURA, the journal of Polish emigration.

In 1975, Jil Silberstein was a young student when a precise event gave a new direction to his life: his encounter with an extraordinary character, the Polish painter and writer Joseph Czapski. From the connections between the old artist and the young essayist stemmed an intense friendship, illustrated by a rich written correspondence, revealing, among other topics, both men’s admiration for personalities such as Cyprian Norwid, Hofmansthal, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Nicolas de Staël, Degas or Tsvetayeva. Jil Silberstein is fascinated by the brightness, the purity and the intensity of the light Czapski’s paintings as well as by the personality of the painter; he is equally thankful to him for the kindness and for the care which he and his work receive from the old man. Lumières de Joseph Czapski gradually evolved from a very personal chronicle of the successive encounters between the two men, into a refined and authentic sincere tribute to this exceptional artist gifted with an unusual spiritual strength as well as with a noble cardinal humility. This work was in 2004 honoured with the Swiss Schiller Prize