Son and His Killed Mother

Andrzej Wróblewski • 1949 • National Museum in Kraków, Poland

This is my favourite portrait of sadness. My all-time favourite painter, my all-time favourite colour. I fear writing about this son, sadness, despair, and grief. But you’ve surely read something on the subject? Something about Wróblewski? With this in mind, I’ll leave this exhibit of suffering without any classical ekphrasis. Instead, I’ll offer a few excerpts from my book Queenless, which enables access to a sisterly exhibit of grief: to the image of myself-the-daughter and my late mother:

When your mother dies, it feels like evisceration – like chest trauma – performed by bare hands, and yet it feels much worse.

In my childhood I obsessed with my mother’s death – I feared it would catch me off guard. I was so afraid. When I finally stopped thinking about it, she died.

When I was small, and whenever my mother cried, I would tell her: “Please don’t cry or else I’ll cry too.” And we sobbed together. When I turned thirty-one, I would tell her: “Please don’t die or else I’ll die too”. We all know what came next.

She was the source of my greatest joy, much as now she is the source of my greatest despair.

Nothing in the world is more atrocious than when a human dies and leaves a fellow human behind. When an animal leaves a fellow animal behind.

Two different gloves unraveling at the bottom

WRÓBLEWSKI’S BLUE – SHADOW ZONE, IMMATERIALITY, AND TRANSCENDENCE. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT VIRTUAL MUSEUMS OF MAŁOPOLSKA