He used to come every three months. A handsome, gray-haired gentleman with a youthful sparkle in his eye, a charming smile, and a large leather briefcase.
From that briefcase, carefully, almost ceremoniously, he was taking out drawings signed “Butenko pinxit,” and a moment later, the air in the room was full of sighs of awe or bursts of laughter, or both at once. The pictures were filled with figures drawn in bold strokes, characters we all grew up with (or raised others on), even if some of us didn’t realize it. Just as they were for the past 60 years, yet always surprising. Drawn by the hand of an artist with the experience of a master and the imagination of a child, a man brave enough to make jokes and turn things upside down, and skilled with the craft and intuition that made those jokes always work.
Although he became a regular collaborator of Przekrój rather late, he immediately held the rank of a Master. Master, thank you for supporting us with your talent and experience. You are one of the giants on whose shoulders we build the form of this magazine.
All the articles we handed over to the Master were in their final versions, because Bohdan Butenko liked to pick a single sentence from the text and illustrate only that sentence. If the text had been edited later, the illustration would lose its meaning. Sometimes his drawings provoked controversy and raised questions about what they meant, but at the same time, they worked like a hook that caught the reader’s attention, and–even if not at first glance–helped bring out additional meanings from the text.
We used to have our little rituals. Bohdan Butenko always sat in the corner of the same blue velvet sofa and accompanied us as we worked on the page layouts with his illustrations. He watched our monitors with tension as we placed his drawings in the text. That tension faded the moment it became clear the pictures were exactly in the requested format (they always were!). Then conversation and storytelling could begin. That was when we learned that Rembrandt used only a few pigments, that San Marino has formally been at war with Sweden for several hundred years–a war that was declared but never actually fought, and yet neither a truce nor a peace treaty has ever been concluded. And about the Methuselah tree of New Zealand, growing at the very edge of the North Island, from which the souls of deceased Māori leap straight into the Southern Ocean to begin their journey to the afterlife, to the mythical Hawaiki.
Surely you are resting now, Master, in the meadows of some Hawaiki for great artists–perhaps together with Matejko, whose indirect pupil you were, in your own words: “I am an indirect pupil of Matejko. For Mehoffer was Matejko’s pupil, Szancer was Mehoffer’s–and I, in turn, was Szancer’s.”
Did you arrive there on a whale?
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