At number 25 on rue Surcouf in Paris, there is a building whose treasure is a stained glass window created from sheets of tinted polyester. The same place is associated with the publication of a Polish translation of the Apocalypse by a Nobel Prize winner. There are more points of contact - the Polish roots, the Centre for Dialogue and the Pallottine figure driving everything, who dealt with Heidegger's aesthetics in his doctorate.

Father Józef Sadzik's activities in Paris
Father Jozef Sadzik (1933-1980), a Pallottine, learned and studied in several places in Poland, Switzerland - Freiburg and Germany - Munich. After his doctorate, he was sent to France, to Paris. He founded one of the most distinguished Polish publishing houses outside the country, Editions du Dialogue (1966), which published around 150 different publications. He also managed the Centre du Dialogue in Paris (1973). This place was dedicated to Poles in exile, culture, meetings, discussions.

"Józek's activities transcended the group framework. What he accomplished was something unique. After all, the whole intellectual Poland passed through the Pallottine House. He set the environment in motion," recalled his friend Jan Lebenstein.

Jan Lebenstein's collaboration with the Pallottines
In 1972 Fr Józef Sadzik persuaded Jan Lebenstein to design and make a stained-glass window in a meeting room (and at the same time a chapel), in a building belonging to the Pallottines, located at 25 Rue Surcouf in Paris. A little later, he proposed to the artist to create graphics for the latest translation of the Apocalypse, which he managed to persuade Czesław Miłosz himself to do.

Describing this peculiar incident, Konstanty Jeleński remarked: "The culture-creating power of personal relationships is underestimated today, and yet, thanks to the agreement of these three friends, a work was created as if in anticipation of the moment when it would become the imperative of history to find a form of the necessary dialogue between Polish art and the Catholic Church".

Jan Lebenstein collaborated with the Pallottines on many occasions and was an important part of the community they created. In one of his statements he admitted: "In 1973 Józek [Sadzik] drove me to make stained glass. He took me by the ears and said I had four weeks to get everything done. It was very nice because he always brought wine so that I would make it to the morning. I used to spend days and nights with you [the Pallottines]".

The fruit of the work was a stained glass window created not of glass but of polyester. Art historian Professor Andrzej Pieńkos believes that the technique was introduced to the artist by Alina Szapocznikow.

Apocalypse - stained glass by Jan Lebenstein

. Lebenstein divided his stained glass vertically into standing rectangles, while horizontally into three zones. The top one presents illustrations inspired by the writings of the Apocalypse, the middle one depicts the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appearing in the text, depicted in the artist's specific style, and the lowest one gives the impression of a bordering - it is a green space.

Describing the artist's work, Andrzej Pieńkos admits that 'this large painting contains obvious, though only allusive, references to apocalyptic iconography. [...] The visual concept of this work is in keeping with Lebenstein's explorations in painting and drawing at the time. [...] To a greater extent than in painting and graphics, however, Lebenstein returned in the Parisian stained glass to the experience of informel [shapeless art], making use of the specificity of the matter in which he worked. For the painting was personally made by the artist from a plastic mass, polyester [...]. Perhaps because of this, it is devoid of the mannered literalism that characterised his 'bestiary' in graphic art at the time. Probably for this reason, the only stained glass window in Lebenstein's oeuvre is not taken into account at all in the history of this technique; in fact, it only seemingly belongs there (after all, it was not created in glass). But it deserves a place in it for both technological and iconographic reasons. It is one of the most extraordinary works of religious art of the second half of the 20th century".

A fragment of this stained glass window was also reproduced on the artist's tombstone in Warsaw's Powązki cemetery - on the tombstone there is a relief of an apocalyptic Lamb. The Lamb is a vision emerging from the Book, and is accompanied by twenty-four old men and four creatures, which can also be seen in Lebenstein's stained glass. So are the four horsemen and other representations chosen by the artist.

Lebenstein's illustrations to the Apocalypse translated by Czesław Miłosz
Jan Lebenstein admitted that the Apocalypse was a difficult opponent. A text, on the one hand, that makes it impossible to know it fully, and on the other, so universal and illustrative that it can accompany everyone. "Every person can identify their life with it," the artist explained in one of his interviews.

The struggle with the Apocalypse did not end in the Pallottine chapel. The artist created a series of drawings illustrating the Polish translation by Czesław Miłosz. The Nobel Prize winner, lawyer, poet, prose writer, translator and lecturer lived in a house 'overlooking San Francisco Bay' while translating the Apocalypse into Polish. He found himself there in 1960, when, for political reasons, he emigrated from Poland, via Paris, to the United States, where he was invited to become a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California.

The first edition of the Apocalypse in his translation was published by Editions du Dialogue (1986), reissues appeared by the Catholic University of Lublin (1990), and by Wydawnictwo Literackie (1998). All three versions contained illustrations by Jan Lebenstein, which are originally gouaches and pastels, now in the collection of the Museum of the Archdiocese of Warsaw in Warsaw.

The illustrations to the Apocalypse were created by Jan Lebenstein in his own style. Delicate in line, they depict 'upturned', deformed figures - so characteristic of Lebenstein - in simple colours. They speak with content and a strong emotional charge, becoming an excellent platform for reflection. Among the illustrations one can find the horsemen of the Apocalypse rushing ahead, clad in the robes of twenty-four old men and the Lamb reigning over them, including also four winged figures, one of whom - according to the Apocalypse account - resembles a lion, another an ox, a third an eagle and the fourth has a human face. Also illustrated is a pregnant woman and a seven-headed dragon.