Inner Portraits by Stanislav Szukalski

A new edition with never-before-published work

A collection of Stanslav Szukalski's portraiture works, including essays and background on many of the artworks. Pre-orders ship free in the U.S.!

Inner Portraits provides a major survey of Szukalski's work as draftsman, painter, and sculptor. This is a new edition: upgraded, expanded, and newly re-designed. Many images and texts in this edition have never been published before.

Stanislav Szukalski (1893 1987) was an artist, anthropologist, and member of Chicago's artistic elite during the 1920s who spent his last years in obscurity. Today he is remembered for his political and scientific views and his brilliant sculptures.

Highly regarded in both the US and Poland between the World Wars, he lapsed into obscurity, living and working “America’s Cultural Siberia” (Southern California) until comic art collector Glenn Bray rediscovered him in 1973.

Szukalski is now the subject of the critically acclaimed 2018 Netflix documentary Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski directed by Irek Dobrowolski and produced by Leonard DiCaprio.

Stanislav Szukalski (1893-1987) was one of the great sculptors of the 20th Century. Due to geopolitical upheavals in his native land, Poland, a large proportion of his work was destroyed. Yet thanks to the efforts of a group of dedicated art patrons, art critics, and personal acquaintances, the work of Szukalski is being re-evaluated and actually shown to the public.

“[Szukalski] was like a caryatid struggling to keep his ideas above the surface of the rising deluge. A flood of political disaster, a capricious tide of artistic dogma overwhelmed his creations and submerged them in a sea of dark obscurity. . . . His ideas almost died with him, nearly rode out on the horse they rode in on.

“[He] loved to sculpt hands; his ingenuity can be measured in the manifold ways that he used them to express his ideas. . . . The hands are the artist-creator passing ideas to us that glow and shimmer when compared to the dull, mordant concepts that have gained acceptance in the present day. . . . It is prankish that he is still so unknown.”

— Leonardo & George DiCaprio