Umbrellas

Where did the umbrellas
in the Poor Room of my Imagination
come from…
It was about the year 1965
that they started to drop from above,
from the sky, in great multitudes.
They mixed helter-skelter with
other objects
and figures
in my little Room.

"Emballage II. An Umbrella and a Figure," 1967, the National Museum in Wrocław

“Emballage II. An Umbrella and a Figure,” 1967, the National Museum in Wrocław

 

At one point when I was at a loss, what to do,
I hung an umbrella just
on the frame of my picture.
I had a lot of fun with them;
their ambiguity and allusiveness
helped me enormously
when I wanted to talk about the things
I could not cope with.
They simply did the talking for me.
I called them Poetic Emballages.
But for fear that I might omit something important,
I would like to remind you that they did not
drop “from the sky” after all.
Just after the war
I began collecting old umbrellas.
I called that space
which id a super-scientific concept in itself,
an “umbrella space”.
Of course, that idea referred only
to my LITTLE ROOM.
Personally, I hate umbrellas.

 

 

Tadeusz Kantor, “Intimate Comments”, 1986-88, typescript in the Cricoteka Archives, p. 35-36.

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