… but she often attended his lectures, and listened to his conversations with other professors and students [at the Warsaw Academy] on a range of issues related to modern art. She was inspired by his fresh and open attitude to art, his nonhierarchical approach to the applied arts, and his enthusiasm for his students. Abakanowicz came into closer contact with Soltan after her graduation, when he granted her permission to use studio space at the academy and encouraged her to submit her painted fabrics to interior and industrial design shows in the mid-1950s. His integrationalist philosophy, which tried to destroy the traditional division between ‘art’ and ‘craft,’ helped convince Abakanowicz that her textile work belonged within the language of contemporary art.”

UD’s late father-in-law, Jerzy Soltan, was an important influence on the sculptor Magda Abakanowicz.

UD smiled and remembered the many books about her in his Cambridge house when she read this article from The Daily Princetonian:

The nine-foot headless guardians of McCormick Hall have vanished. The collection of statues by 79-year-old Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, titled “Big Figures,” has been on loan to the University Art Museum for the past five years and was taken down this summer.

“We were sad to see the work go,” art museum director James Steward said in an e-mail. “It was a great piece to have for that length of time, and now we have a new opportunity to site something there that makes dynamic use of the space.”

… “Big Figures” — which is made up of 20 unique, bronze, headless, armless, backless, hollow human forms that each weigh 600 pounds — is only one work in a series of metal headless figures done by the artist, according to Abakanowicz’ website. In total, she has created more than 1,000 figures, which are displayed in museums and private collections in Italy, Australia, Venezuela, Japan and Israel, among other nations.

… The disappearance of the bronze statues has elicited a mixed response from students.

“I find it difficult to give good directions this year,” Rivka Cohen ’12 said. “I can’t say things like ‘Walk straight until you pass the extraordinarily disturbing visages of potentially modern art. When you’re level with the leftmost column of the giant, headless bodies, turn right.’ ”

… “They always seemed sinister and depressing to me,” [Avital] Hazony said. “It would be nice if [the art museum] had something as striking, but more positive, instead, since it is such a central location.”

Abakanowicz said she intended for “Big Figures” to be unsettling, though.

“It happened to me to live in times which were extraordinary by their various forms of collective hate and adulation,” Abakanowicz told the Princeton Weekly Bulletin in 2004, when the figures were originally installed.

“Marchers and parades worshipped leaders, great and good, who turned out to be mass murderers,” explained Abakanowicz, who lived through the occupation of Poland during World War II and the Soviet regime. “I was obsessed by the image of the crowd, manipulated like a brainless organism and acting like a brainless organism. I began to cast human bodies in burlap to finish in bronze, headless and shell-like. They constitute a sign of lasting anxiety.’’…