A small hopeful story about art, and the 20th Century in eastern Europe; with the help of Polish painter Alfons Kułakowski (1927-2020). #Thread

Alfons was born in 1927 in Osiczyn near Berdychiv in todays Ukraine. In the early 1930s, his family, like so many others from the region were forcibly relocated by Soviet authorities first to Siberia and then to Kazakhstan.

In 1945, Alfons was admitted to the second year of the painting school in Alma-Ata (Almaty today). In 1953 he moved to Samara, and three years later he was admitted to the Union of Artists of the USSR.

Over the next decades he kept painting, but mostly had other jobs to support himself and his family, which by now was spread all over the Soviet Union and other countries.

After the end of the Cold War, like many other Polish families that had been forcefully moved all over the USSR, he went to live in Poland and settled in Witoszów near Iława in northern Poland, and started to paint prolifically again, mainly colourful naive landscapes.

In 2009, he was invited to exhibit at the Palace of Nations in Brussels. By then, his house in Witoszów had been filled with over 6,000 paintings and other artworks; his life's work, brought safely through decades and to Poland from the far end of the former Soviet Union.

While Alfons was in Brussels, his house, and his life's work, burned down.

After that, the then 72-year old artist mainly just shrugged, picked up his brush and started painting more. He said that he "accepted the great loss and drew from it a kind of inspiration for further artistic searches."