Almost everything that could be written about Andrzej Wajda has already been said. His work has been interpreted through the lenses of history, literature, theatre and politics, firmly establishing his place within both Polish and world cinema. Far less frequently, however, has visual art served as the point of departure, despite the fact that Wajda himself repeatedly acknowledged that it was art that had shaped his way of perceiving the world.
A painterly understanding of the image lay at the core of Andrzej Wajda’s artistic practice. His years at the Academy of Fine Arts were not simply an early episode in his biography but became the enduring foundation of his artistic language, shaping the construction of the cinematic image, the organisation of pictorial space, and his understanding of the relationship between the human figure, light and the surrounding world. Seen from this perspective, Wajda’s oeuvre emerges not as a succession of individual films but as a consistently evolving visual practice, whose medium changed over the course of his life. Painting, drawing and cinema do not function here as separate disciplines; rather, they form a single creative organism rooted in the continuous act of observation. For Wajda, film became another means of composing the image, just as the sketchbook remained an indispensable instrument for ordering thought and recording experience.
The origins of this artistic outlook can, however, be traced back well before his years at the Academy of Fine Arts or the Łódź Film School. The future director’s earliest aesthetic experiences were fundamentally painterly in nature. His encounter with the Racławice Panorama by Wojciech Kossak, his experience of Stanisław Wyspiański’s stained-glass windows in Kraków’s Franciscan Church, and his first visit to an exhibition of Japanese art at the Cloth Hall (Sukiennice) were among the formative experiences that, as he later recalled, shaped his visual sensibility. These were not fascinations with particular artists or individual works, but encounters with the very power of the image itself and with the narrative potential of space. Wyspiański demonstrated the expressive role of light as a compositional medium; and Japanese art drew his attention to the eloquence of synthesis, asymmetry and deliberately articulated emptiness. No less significant was the experience of painting itself. In his autobiographical writings, Wajda recalled with remarkable tenderness the first box of oil paints he received at the age of fifteen. He remembered not only the act of painting itself, but even the distinctive scent of the oils, which throughout his life continued to evoke memories of those earliest artistic experiments. This recollection reveals that painting was, for him, an almost tactile experience – a way of understanding the world through colour, texture and the materiality of the image. In his later cinematic work, this exceptional attentiveness to the visual structure of reality became one of the defining characteristics of his artistic language.
Owing to his artistic interests, it was only natural that Wajda should choose to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. There he became part of a generation of young artists who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, sought a new visual language capable of expressing a reality that resisted the conventional modes of representation inherited from previous generations. Within this milieu, the work of Andrzej Wróblewski, Wajda’s friend, today widely regarded as one of Poland’s most significant twentieth-century painters–proved especially influential. Encountering his Executions (Rozstrzelania) series was, as Wajda later acknowledged, one of the formative experiences that shaped the direction of his artistic development. Yet this was not a matter of adopting a particular style or aesthetic. Wróblewski demonstrated that an image could convey the experience of violence and history without resorting to illustration, through the organisation of form itself, the tensions of composition, and the dramatic relationship between figure and space.
His decision to leave the Academy and enrol at the Łódź Film School did not entail abandoning this painterly way of thinking. On the contrary, the camera assumed the role once performed by the paintbrush. Wajda constructed his films not primarily through action or dialogue, but mostly through the image itself. The composition of the frame, the rhythm of light, the relationships between pictorial planes, and the deliberate orchestration of colour became his principal narrative tools. In his cinema, the image does not merely illustrate the narrative–it generates it. It is for this reason that his films may be understood not only as works of cinema, but also as a distinctive form of painterly composition unfolding in time. Painterliness, understood in this sense, cannot be reduced to explicit quotations from the history of art. Although Wajda’s films contain numerous references to Andrzej Wróblewski, the great masters of European painting, and the artists of the Young Poland movement, their significance extends far beyond recognisable formal borrowings. More important is the adoption of a particular way of seeing: the conviction that composition generates meaning, that light shapes dramatic tension, and that a carefully chosen detail can convey more than an elaborate narrative. Film thus becomes a medium in which the experience of painting remains continuously alive, realised through the language of the moving image. It is from this perspective that Andrzej Wajda’s surviving sketchbooks should also be understood. They are neither supplementary to his cinematic work nor private travel journals. Rather, they constitute an integral part of his artistic practice, revealing the process of observation that preceded the creation of every image. It is within these sketchbooks that the continuity between painter, draughtsman and filmmaker becomes most fully apparent– a continuity that remained, throughout his life, the primary source of his artistic imagination.
Image Before Narrative
Andrzej Wajda’s transition from the Academy of Fine Arts to the Łódź Film School did not signify a change in his understanding of art. The medium changed, indeed, but his way of seeing remained the same. Wajda did not cease to be a painter; he simply began to paint with a camera. For this reason, his cinema cannot be understood solely through the lens of narrative. The fundamental unit of meaning in his work is the image itself, whose composition, light and spatial organisation precede and ultimately shape the narrative. This distinctive visual consciousness is already evident in Wajda’s earliest films. In A Generation (Pokolenie) and Kanal (Kanał), the framing of the human figure and the construction of cinematic space reveal a profound engagement with the visual language of post-war painting. These are not literal quotations from works of art, but the adoption of a particular pictorial logic. As in Wróblewski’s Executions (Rozstrzelania), the human figure is embedded within a space that is far from a neutral backdrop; instead, it actively participates in the creation of meaning. Subjected to compositional tensions, the figure’s relationship with its surroundings becomes a metaphor for historical experience. In this sense, cinema assumes one of the defining functions of modern painting: rather than illustrating reality, it interprets it through form. Light is an equally essential component of Wajda’s artistic language. It is employed not merely to draw objects out of darkness or to create the illusion of three-dimensional space. Instead, light structures the dramatic force of the image, directs the viewer’s gaze and establishes the emotional rhythm of the scene. In this respect, Wajda’s work remains closely aligned with the traditions of European painting. As in seventeenth-century art, light becomes an event in itself rather than simply a condition of visibility. It draws a face from darkness, isolates a figure from its surroundings, and focuses attention on a gesture or a glance. As a result, the individual frame acquires the autonomy of a painted image while simultaneously retaining its function within the structure of cinematic narrative.
Painting also instilled in Wajda a profound discipline of composition. His films rarely contain an incidental arrangement of figures or objects. Every element within the frame is subordinated to the coherence of the whole, much as in a carefully conceived painting. Equally characteristic is his ability to construct meaning through detail. A single object, an architectural fragment, a tree or a character’s gesture can assume the role of a symbol that organises the entire scene. In this sense, Wajda’s cinematic image does not simply reflect reality; it subjects it to continual interpretation. It is precisely for this reason that his cinema remains so deeply rooted in visual culture. Painterly references never function as decorative quotations or as simple demonstrations of the director’s erudition. Rather, they constitute an essential element of his artistic method: a way of constructing the image and a means of understanding the world, through which the experience of painting finds its natural continuation.
Although Andrzej Wajda is remembered above all as a film director, drawing accompanied him throughout his life. It was neither a marginal pursuit nor a private pastime, but an integral component of his creative process. His working notebooks, continuity scripts and screenplay drafts all functioned as visual notebooks– places where observations, impressions and spatial relationships were recorded before assuming the form of the cinematic image. The surviving drawings do far more than document journeys or encounters; they reveal the working methods of an artist for whom looking constituted the first stage of every creative decision. Unlike set designs or storyboards, Wajda’s sketches– particularly those produced during his journeys to Japan between 1989 and 1997– were not created in preparation for a specific film. They record a daily practice of observation. Their economy of means reflects an effort to capture only what is essential: the rhythm of architecture, the structure of branches, the proportions of a figure, the trajectory of a line, or the relationship between light and shadow. Drawing thus becomes a disciplined form of enquiry, an attempt to understand the underlying structure of the visible world. This capacity to select, eliminate the superfluous and reveal the essential structure of an image became one of the defining characteristics of Andrzej Wajda’s artistic practice.
Drawing as a Way of Seeing
The sketchbooks Wajda produced during his visits to Japan are dominated by studies of architecture, gardens, temples, landscape details and scenes from everyday life. Yet these drawings are far from documentary records. Wajda did not seek to reproduce faithfully the places he encountered. Rather, he was interested in the underlying order of composition, the organisation of space, and the relationships between the individual elements of the image. Each sketch represents an attempt to understand the principles governing the visual structure of its subject, while at the same time bearing witness to an extraordinary discipline of observation. It was in Japan that drawing recovered its original function for Wajda, becoming an instrument of attentive looking. The principles of Japanese aesthetics– rooted in synthesis, asymmetry and the deliberate use of empty space– found a natural counterpart in his own way of recording the visible world. A few restrained lines proved sufficient to capture the character of a place, just as a single cinematic frame could encompass the meaning of an entire scene. Drawing is therefore not presented as a preparatory stage in the making of a work of art, but as an autonomous cognitive practice through which the artist organised and deepened his understanding of the world. These sketchbooks invite us to view Wajda’s work from a different perspective. They reveal the creative process that precedes the making of a film– the moment when the image still exists as an observation, a gesture of the hand and the trace of a gaze. In this sense, the drawings preserved in the collection of the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology are far more than valuable biographical documents. They provide an essential key to understanding Wajda’s visual imagination and the creative process that, throughout his life, remained inseparable from his engagement with the visual arts.
Japan – The Fulfilment of a Painterly Imagination
Andrzej Wajda’s encounter with Japanese culture was neither an episode in his biography nor a departure towards a new field of artistic interest. Rather, it represented the natural continuation of a creative path whose foundations had always rested upon a painterly understanding of the image. Within Japanese aesthetics, Wajda recognised qualities that closely corresponded to his own artistic practice: formal economy, compositional discipline, the expressive potential of empty space and an attentive observation of nature. These were not discoveries that transformed his artistic language; instead, they confirmed and deepened a way of seeing that had been evolving since his youth.
For Wajda, his journeys to Japan were above all experiences of artistic enquiry. As he visited temples, gardens and cities, he did not remain a passive observer. He drew continuously, analysing architectural proportions, the rhythms of the landscape and the relationships between light, space and material form. Sketching became a practice of attentive looking– an attempt to understand the principles governing the organisation of the image rather than merely recording the places he encountered. The surviving drawings reveal the remarkable continuity of Wajda’s artistic practice. The same understanding of composition that shaped his early painting and later structured the cinematic frame is equally evident in the restrained sketches executed during his travels. With only a few precise lines, he was able to capture the structure of space, the character of a place and the relationships between its constituent elements.
Viewed through the collection of the Manggha Museum, Wajda’s individual drawings and sketchbooks acquire a particular significance. They invite us to see him not only as one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished film directors, but above all as a visual artist for whom painting, drawing and cinema constituted complementary forms of artistic expression. They reveal the creative process that precedes the cinematic image and affirm that the foundation of his artistic imagination remained, throughout his life, the simple yet profound act of attentive looking.
Dominika Górowska
