Artwork of Stanislav Szukalski
Stanisłav Szukalski was a Polish-born painter and sculptor who became a part of the Chicago Renaissance. He also developed the pseudoscientific-historical theory of Zermatism, positing that all human culture was derived from post-deluge Easter Island and that mankind was locked in an eternal struggle with the Sons of Yeti (“Yetinsyny”), the offspring of Yeti and humans.
In 1934 the government of Poland declared Stanislav Szukalski the country’s ‘Greatest Living Artist.’ It built the Szukalski National Museum in Warsaw to hold his massive sculptures and dramatic, mythological paintings.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they destroyed the museum and all of Szukalski’s sculptures and paintings. He fled to the United States, where no one recognized him as a celebrated hero. He lived in a small apartment in Glendale, California and made a meager income drawing maps for the aerospace industry.
Szukalski would have remained in total obscurity if he hadn’t been discovered by a few popular underground cartoonists: Robert Williams, Rick Griffin, and Jim Woodring – who recognized Szukalski’s immense artistic talent, and befriended him. In 1971, Glenn Bray, a publisher who had previously specialized in the work of Mad Magazine artist Basil Wolverton, befriended him and later published one book of Szukalski’s art, Inner Portraits (1980), and another of his art and philosophy, A Trough Full of Pearls / Behold! The Protong (1982).