Zdzisław Beksiński was a Polish painter, born in Sanok in 1929 and murdered in his Warsaw flat in 2005. From the late 1960s he painted dark, dreamlike scenes of ruined landscapes and gaunt figures, in oil on hardboard, and he never gave a single one of them a title. Most of his work now belongs to the museum in his hometown.
He said the pictures meant nothing. "Meaning is absolutely meaningless to me," he said, and he asked to be looked at through psychology, "or even psychiatry," rather than as "artsy-fartsy Art with a capital A."
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From the late 1960s Beksiński painted the end of the world and declined to say what it meant. Then, in the last seven years of his life, the worst things in his pictures began to happen to him.
In 1998 his wife Zofia died of cancer. On Christmas Eve 1999 his son Tomasz, a radio presenter and film translator, died by suicide at the age of 41.
On 21 February 2005 Beksiński himself was found dead in his Warsaw flat, with seventeen stab wounds. He was 75. The man who killed him was the son of his caretaker, and Beksiński had refused to lend him a few hundred złoty.
What You'll Discover
What he did before painting.
Why not one painting has a title.
What he burned before leaving Sanok.
Who sold his work in Paris.
What the last seven years took.
Where the paintings hang now.