Piotr Uklanski

Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
Private Collection, USA

Piotr Uklański, Piotr Uklański: The Nazis, Zurich and London 1999, illustration of another example
Michel Masserey, 'Sous leur uniforme luster, les Nazis de Hollywood vendent des pailettes' in: Le Temps, Geneva 29 December 1999, p. 37
'The Nazis by Piotr Uklanski', New York Arts Magazine, January 2000, p. 70
Steven Heller, 'Snazi Nazis', The New York Times Book Review, 12 March 2000, p. 22
Massimiliano Gioni, 'Touch Me I'm Sick: Portraits of Power', Flash Art, Milan May-June 2001, no. 218, pp. 108-113
Michael Kimmelman, 'Jewish Museum Show Looks Nazis in the Face and Creates a Fuss', The New York Times, 29 January 2002, pp. E1-2
Sarah Boxer, 'Man Behind a Museum Tempest; A Curator Defends His Show Explaining Nazi Imagery', The New York Times, 24 February 2002
Robert Atkins, 'Bringing Nazi Symbols to the Jewish Museum', ARTnews, New York March 2002, pp. 46-48
Michael Kimmelman, 'Evil, the Nazis and Shock Value', The New York Times, 15 March 2002, pp. E33-35
Leslie Cahmi, 'Peering Under the Skin of Monsters', The New York Times, 17 March 2002, pp. 36-39
'The Banality of Evil', Flash Art, Milan May-June 2002, p. 70
Linda Nochlin, 'Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/ Recent Art', ArtForum, New York Summer 2002, no. 10, pp. 167-168 and p. 202
Charles Labelle, 'Mirroring Evil', Frieze, London June-August 2002, pp. 107-8
Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, et al., 'Piotr Uklanski, The Nazis', Charley 02, Dijon Autumn 2002, n.p.
Kate Bush, 'Once Upon A Time in the East: The Art of Piotr Uklanski', ArtForum, November 2002
Exhibition Catalogue, Basel, Kunsthalle, Piotr Uklański: Earth Wind and Fire, 2004, pp.122-3, illustration of detail of another example in colour, and pp.124 illustration of detail of another example in colour on the cover of The Warsaw Voice, 3 December 2000
Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern; Hamburg, Kunsthalle; Ottowa, The National Gallery of Canada, Pop Life: Art in a Material World, p. 56 and pp. 164-5, illustration in detail and installation of another example in colour

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer in the original and the illustration fails to convey fully the high-gloss finish of the photos in the original. This work is in very good condition.
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Piotr Uklanski's most renowned and significant work to date, The Nazis affords an encyclopaedic survey of the wildly divergent cinematic interpretations and treatments of the history of war in the Twentieth Century. From the determinedly epic to the effusively sentimental; the overtly heroic to the outright comic, this extraordinary document of and response to twentieth-century filmmaking issues an incredibly powerful analysis of the conflicting perspectives of directors, producers, actors, cinematographers and stylists that compiled this canon of "War Films" for more than six decades. In its truly monumental scale and the brilliantly glossy chromatic terms of its manufacture, The Nazis lucidly and succinctly reveals the dependence upon film in later twentieth-century western societies to inform our emotional and psychological responses to the Past. In their enormous sum, these 164 closely-cropped, hyper-familiar faces broadcast an urgent admission of a fundamental failing inherent to the most popular art form of our era. By the very means of its stellar celebrity, this definitive roll-call of male film actors demonstrates how populist cinema, potentially subtitled "Hollywood", is manifestly unable to represent the most tectonic events of humankind's recent history with authenticity or accuracy precisely because if its dependence upon the agents of fame and top-billing movie stars.

While the propagandist Desperate Journey (1942), starring Errol Flyn and Ronald Reagan, understandably marketed the necessity of adopting a heroic stand against the threat of Fascism, produced as it was in the year following the United States' declaration of war on Nazi Germany; Jürgen Prochnow, in the highly stylised and avowedly authentic Das Boot (1981) of almost forty years later, represents a German submarine captain completely disillusioned with the purpose of the war that he is fighting and almost longingly empathetic for his depth-charging Royal Navy adversaries. Uklanski narrates the full gamut of War Films made in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps the epoch most casually ready to colour historical accuracy with liberal artistic licence. From the consummately debonair Gregory Peck and David Niven scaling Greek cliff tops in the explosive adventure The Guns of Navarone (1961); to Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson's tough-guy machismo fuelling the glorification of violence in The Dirty Dozen (1967); to Clint Eastwood's fashionable late '60s hairstyle somehow being shoehorned into the espionage thriller Where Eagles Dare (1968), celebrated War Films of this decade said as much about the political and cultural climates of the time as they did about the Second World War adventures they invented. This liberal approach to documenting the Past was heightened even further in the 1970s, in films such as the marauding concoction The Eagle has Landed (1976) and the near science-fiction fantasy Escape to Athena (1979), which respectively star Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and Roger Moore who, though each famous for their distinctive vocal inflections, all don somewhat incongruous German accents. Uklanski shows caricatures from Michael Byrne in Steven Spielberg's comic-book tale Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989) to Ralph Fienne's incarnation of evil in the same director's Schindler's List (1993). There are the comedic legends Peter Sellers, Eric Idle and Michael Palin, whose curling lips in half-smile admit us to the joke of their Wehrmacht uniforms; and a full cast of actors - William Shatner, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Frank Sinatra, George Peppard - whose indifferent adoption of their Nazi garb suggests a certain difficulty in empathising with their role, suggesting for them it could have been just another day on set.

As indicated above, we recognise Uklanski's portraits primarily as actors rather than film characters: they are Harrison Ford, Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton before General Vogel, Colonel Steiner or Captain Henrich Lehmann-Willenbrock. Enveloped in this enormous hanging-sculpture collage we are struck by the players who have also been Hans Solo, James Bond and Captain Kirk, and only secondarily by the implications of their military insignia and apparatus. This cognitive distinction embodies the conceptual project underlying Uklanski's remarkable work: exaggerated familiarity nullifies the potentiality of the evil that is so endemic to Nazi imagery. In this way Uklanski advances the enquiry of Andy Warhol's infamous replication and multiplication, and echoes that artist's famous comment made in relation to his 'Death and Disaster' series that "when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect" (the artist interviewed by Gene Swenson in: Art News, November 1963). The widely reported notoriety of Uklanski's The Nazis has been largely focused on the controversy of explicitly associating Nazi imagery with the glamour and matinee idol good looks of these male stars. Yet much of that commentary omits the many more sophisticated layers of the artist's chosen imagery. For example, a great proportion of the characters depicted are in fact agents of Allied forces impersonating Nazis behind enemy lines; Hollywood etiquette determining that such wholesome icons as Flynn, Reagan, Peck and Eastwood could never really play the bad guy. Furthermore, Nazi characters portrayed by Caine, Duvall and Moore are singularly defined by their rebellion against their evil regime. Certainly those personalities that do typify the essence of Nazi war crimes, such as Fiennes in concentration camp commandant mode or Donald Pleasance as Himmler, incite vivid terror and disgust. However, in the context of Uklanski's work these punctuations of evil more effectively assert the radically variant depictions of history by the cinema, and reinforce the power of the work to invite us to re-evaluate fundamentally the means by which we are informed of the Past.