The Case of the Missing Medallions

Something always gets lost when you move, right?

That’s what happened to the Marie Curie medallion when Lockwood Library moved to the North Campus in the 1970s. In fact, all four medallions that were created for UB by stained glass artisan Jozef Mazur disappeared.

Then, in 2007, UB alumnus and historian Gregory Witul spotted the Curie medallion on eBay and alerted the curator of UB’s Polish Collection. On learning of the situation, the seller donated the medallion back to the university. But there are still three more at large, so keep an eye out.

The Curie medallion was one of four that Mazur, a Buffalo-born artist who completed more than 50 stained-glass projects in his hometown alone and many more in churches around the country, designed in 1955 portraying famous Poles — including Copernicus and Chopin — for UB’s Polish Room in the original Lockwood Library on the South Campus. The building now is Abbott Hall, home of the Health Sciences Library.  

The medallions decorated a paned window; Mazur also painted four stained-glass plates that are part of a chandelier that has remained intact and currently hangs in the Polish Room in Lockwood Library on the North Campus.

While stained glass is typically used in churches to depict angels and saints, “in the cathedral of learning that is the university, they chose to make Marie Curie a saint,” says Witul, BA ’05, of the woman who, with her husband Pierre, discovered radium and polonium, and coined the term “radioactivity.”

“They” refers to the Polish Arts Club of Buffalo, which commissioned the medallions. To portray Curie, Mazur combined elements from two stained-glass styles popular in Buffalo at the time: Gothic Revival (indicated by the use of primary colors) and Munich Pictorial (finely drawn faces, hair and clothing).

Curie, born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, and her husband won a Nobel Prize for physics, and she was awarded a second one for chemistry. Her curiosity and bravery while studying one of the most dangerous elements on the planet led to the radiation therapy we still use today to fight cancer.

Unfortunately, it also caused her death at 66, as safety measures for handling radium had not yet been developed.

The Curie medallion and the chandelier can be viewed, by appointment, in the Polish Room, 517 Lockwood Library. Those interested should contact Molly Poremski, subject librarian for the Polish Room, at 645-7750 or poremski@buffalo.edu.

The Curie medallion is displayed in a locked exhibit case, “given its past track record,” Poremski says. The chandelier also can be seen from the street, through the large picture window on the fifth floor of the library along Putnam Way at Clemens Hall.