The cover for Witold Gombrowicz’s Yvonne, Princess of Burgundia with illustrations by Tadeusz Kantor

A metaphoric space in which human- and animal-shaped forms clash with mechanism-like constructions is highly emotional. In one of his texts Kantor wrote: “1947. A decisive year. Decisions become radical. The concept of the human being so far assumed to be the only credible one has disappeared. (…) Afresh, I began the cycle of creation from scratch. Perhaps this time it’ll be successful! It was not an expression of an avant-garde revolt profaning the traditional image of the human being. This act of deforming classical beauty was not an aesthetic one. It was the war and the days of the ‘masters of the world’ that made me distrust my previous image, finely shaped, a species superior to all other, allegedly inferior ones. It was a revelation – these almost holy features may hide a b e a s t!”.