Xawery Dunikowski - Postwar Period

Postwar Period

By the time he had returned to his normal life and recovered from his illness, Dunikowski was seventy years old and had started to create larger art to coincide with many of his Auschwitz themed drawings and sculptures. His postwar interests started to drift toward architecture and tying it further into sculpture, and public monuments, most notably the Monument to the Liberation of the Region of Warmia and Mazury and the Revolutionary Effort, located in Olsztyn and at Góra Świętej Anny. Dunikowski also lived to see his works on display in his hometown of Kraków, exhibitions in Warsaw, and further exhibitions that reached all the way to Moscow and Venice by the early-to-mid 1950s. In 1955, Dunikowski was the subject of a documentary themed around his workshop titled Idę do słońca (I am Going to the Sun), but took little interest in the film itself or the director, Andrzej Wajda. Featured in the documentary was another famous sculpture series by Dunikowski, Kobiety brzemienne (Pregnant Women).

In the same year Dunikowski became a professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, leaving Kraków permanently, and also held a professorship at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Wrocław.

In 1964, at the age of ninety, Xawery Dunikowski died, leaving behind a legacy of art including some of his more famous sculptures, Macierzyństwo (Motherhood, 1900), Skupienie (Concentration), Fatum (Fate, 1904), Dante, sculpture series including the Women of Nieborow and the Jesuits' Circle, along with many illustrations, portraits, and other works. Considered to be the best 20th century Polish sculptor, Dunikowski is buried in the Alley of the Meritorious in Powazki Cemetery, Warsaw; his tomb sculpture was created by a former pupil, Barbara Zbrożyna.