At the beginning of World War II, Abakanowicz, then a young girl, witnessed German tanks enter her family’s estate. At one point, a drunken soldier burst into her house and, in Abakanowicz’s presence, shot off her mother’s arm. In 1944, the family was forced to flee the advance of the Soviet army and ended up in Warsaw, where the artist still lives and works. As a teenager, Abakanowicz worked as a nursing assistant in a makeshift hospital caring for the wounded while also finishing her high school education. Her family lost everything during the war and had to hide their aristocratic roots when the nobility became the enemy in postwar Communist Poland. Abakanowicz remembered, “…we, as family, lost our identity. We were deprived of our social position and…thrown out of society. We were punished for being rich. So I had to hide my background. I had to lie. I had to invent.”[1]
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There, she often played in the nearby forest, an experience that later influenced the materials she uses in her work. Her family had both Tartar and aristocratic roots (the term Tartar has a complex history but in this case the artist's father was a descendant of Abaqa Khan, a thirteenth-century Il-khan of Persia). Explain Abaqa Khan, Il-khan, and Ghengis
There, she often played in the nearby forest, an experience that later influenced the materials she uses in her work. Her family had both Tartar and aristocratic roots (the term Tartar has a complex history but in this case the artist's father was a descendant of Abaqa Khan, a thirteenth-century Il-khan of Persia). Explain Abaqa Khan, Il-khan, and Ghengis