Jan Chrzan was an active participant in Warsaw Uprising and this subject always had a unique place in his art. Only a small portion of these works survived wartime destruction; the majority are oils and tempera paintings recreated from memory after the war, or on the basis of sketches. His entire collection portaying the time of the Uprising includes over 200 works. Most of them belong currently to the Warsaw Uprising Museum.

The artist always believed that only the full exposure of the whole collection could demonstrate the real meaning of the Warsaw Uprising. That is why, despite many offers, Chrzan would never sell any of these works separately. As he himself said: These are heartfelt paintings; paintings illustrating my life as well as the lives and deaths of many of my friends, the victories and defeats of thousands of people. I don't know whether they are good or bad, it's not important. But no one will ever paint works like these again.

Jan Chrzan’s paintings of the Uprising can first be seen as an artistic study of human experience. Chrzan reveals to us the drama of war from the perspective of the individual. We see victorious and defeated insurgents. We witness the will to fight, heroism and determination, but also indescribable fatigue, pain and fear. On the one hand, fraternity, care for the wounded, eyes full of hope; on the other, despair at the death of loved ones, mass graves, and the devastation of defeat. We see a dilemma with no solution or historical moral; simply, human beings in life or death situations.

This is how Jan Chrzan remembers the period: Today, when I return to those times, those subjects, I remember scenes and situations as if they had happened yesterday. They were extreme situations. Each time we evacuated a hospital, we were faced with a tragic dilemma: whom should we save? The young or the old? Those who begged to be saved as they laid dying, or those who had a chance of survival? Soldiers or women? Mothers or sons? Those were terrible decisions: ruthless, irreversible, and always taken in the face of one's own death. I remember a scene when a woman begged to be saved along with her family. She offered me a bag full of jewelry. I took out a handful of rings and bracelets. Then I looked at the woman and asked her if she had anything to drink. She replied that she had a quarter flask of tea... I threw down the jewellery and took the flask so that my comrade and I could quench our thirst. I remember another scene when we were trying to save the wounded, under heavy fire. The sound of bullets rang out close by. I felt a heavy blow and was suddenly covered in warm blood. "God”, I thought, “I haven't said goodbye to my family!” And at that moment my friends arrived. They had shot a German, who had been firing at them from the scaffolding above me. He had hit me as he fell, covering my body with his blood…

Secondly, the richness of the Chrzan’s scenes of the Uprising lends a unique historical value to his work. Through these paintings, he reveals practically every aspect of the battle for Warsaw in 1944: the fighting in the streets, the construction of barricades, escape through sewers, offensives launched in various parts of the city centre, care for the wounded, rest and refuge in the ruins, the involvement of women and children, executions, fires, and the destruction.

Chrzan was not, however, interested in recreating details; for him, it was far more important to communicate the nature of the Uprising than to document the precise chronology or location of events. His works are neither chronicles nor photographs, nor even typical realist art, but above all a vivid illustration of the period seen from the perspective of the insurgent. When I paint scenes from the Uprising, I don't think I even feel like a painter, said Jan Chrzan. Or at least I feel more like a participant than a painter. I feel as if I'm actually part of the action, creating it, not observing it from the outside. I don't want my paintings to be a flashback, a sad and bitter memory, a souvenir for posterity; I want them to remain part of a real barricade.

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