Domenico GNOLI

In February 1968 Domenico Gnoli and his wife travelled to several countries in Eastern Europe, visiting Prague, Warsaw, Moscow and Leningrad, on a commission to produce drawings for Holiday magazine. Warsaw was not actually meant to be on the itinerary, as the artist noted in a letter to Ted Riley: ‘So here we are en route…Very excited indeed and ready for action…I know I was not supposed to go to Warsaw and Leningrad but I find it so silly given the fact that W. is on our route and the other only one and half hours from Moscow ($18 the air fare) that I just decided to go. If Holiday is not interested I’ll pay for it myself.’ Gnoli spent two days in Warsaw, staying at the Hotel Europejski, and during his walks around the city the artist was particularly impressed by how the buildings of the old city had been carefully reconstructed following the destruction of the Second World War.

As the artist recalled of Warsaw, in a sort of travel diary written in early March, soon after his return to Rome: ‘The whole city has been rebuilt stone by stone, house by house…The huge modern buildings reflect on one side the hurry with which they have been juxtaposed against the ruins and on the other the influence Russian and more lately Western architecture. But particularly marked by the Stalinist era is the gigantic building of Science and Culture, megalomaniac mountain of stone inspired from the firsts [sic] American sky scrapers seen through the ingenuity of the Tartars and the rhetoric of Moscow.’  

The monumental Palace of Culture and Science in the centre of Warsaw, designed by the Russian architect Lev Rudnev, rises to a height of 237 metres and was, at the time of its completion in 1955, the second tallest building in Europe and the eighth tallest in the world. The building contains an exhibition centre, concert hall, cinemas and theatres, two museums, offices, a university and a public swimming pool. 

This large sheet was one of five drawings of Warsaw used to illustrate an article by Edith Templeton entitled ‘Warsaw and Peace’, published in Holiday magazine in September 1968. In the words of one of Gnoli’s fellow artists and admirers, the English illustrator Paul Hogarth, ‘Gnoli’s imaginative reportage of Warsaw for Holiday remains one of the more remarkable examples of contemporary topographical reporting.’ Another drawing by Gnoli from this Warsaw trip, an overhead view of the Old Town Market Place used as a double-page spread illustration in Holiday magazine, shared the same provenance as the present sheet and was recently acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The first owner of this drawing was the magazine editor and art director Frank Zachary (1914-2015), the picture editor and art director of Holiday magazine between 1951 and 1964.