Formation Of Polish Art-Scene In Early 1900s
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Perhaps no nation in Europe has suffered more the indignities of marginalization than Poland. Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, the three principal owners that had partitioned Poland among themselves and saw in their respective Polish territories little more than conscripts for their armies, peasants to till their lands, workers for tier emerging industries, and potential markets for their lesser goods. They denigrated the country's long and illustrious history and suppressed its political and cultural aspirations. After the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 120 years was partitioned out of existence, this separation had a profound effect on Polish culture, determining the character, shape, and resonance of its modernist art.
To understand its cultural production, one must understand that there were several "Poland's" each occupying borders different from those of today. Each area of 'partition' was a multinational province of the respective emperor-king with a cultural dispute in areas such as ethnic racial and religious lines in addition to national and linguistic ones.
The elemental bitterness of the Pole would also affect artistic relationships among the several modernist movements in the 1920s.
Throughout the 19th century, art in Poland was produced by Polish artists who spoke Polish and took seriously themes of their native history much of which was created in Cracow with commercial art space, Ars Gallery in 1904.
Jacek Malczewski, Melancholia, 1890-4 represents the state of contemporary Poland as much as it reveals the personal condition of the artist. The work of art derives from frustrated attempts among Poland's intelligentsia – historical and present – to secure national liberation.
Malczewski, like almost all Polish visual artists who belonged to Young Poland and Sztuka, drew heavily on the imagery of the nation's great 19th century romantic poets – Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, and Zygmut Krasinski and Jan Matejko.
Malczewski often invoked Polonia as an artistic muse. Painter's Inspiration shows that Polonia's influence in motivation him to paint led to profound melancholy, a din a self-portrait accompanied by his wife, he depicts himself wearing shackles and the Russian greatcoat as indications of his. Also, symbolically, Poland's subjection, while his wife is shown cradling a delicate spring primrose, the symbolic flower of the rebirth Polonia promises. That this painting was executed in 1905 is itself significant, for this was the year of the great insurrection against tsarist absolutism throughout the Russian empire.
In a sensual reversal of Malczewski's tumbling figures, Wojciech Weiss's nubile nude dancers move in a sinuous line into the depths of the scene, there to be transmuted into the libs of a soaring tree. The lush coloring and undulating movement impart a richly decorative effect that echoes the Jugendstil then popular in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, and familiar to the artist. Beneath this decorative display of twisting nudes is a distinctly Polish dimension, the viewer is invited to recognize the sacrifice of youth and youthful energy necessary for the tree of nationalism to grow. Such symbolic themes were current in the literature of Young Poland and appeared not infrequently in Weiss's work of the period.
Wyspianski's extensive work in pastel, particularly his portraiture demonstrates a mastery of the sinuous line and the decorative effects of polychromy, handled as if being worked in stained glass.
Around 1908 Sztuka'a preeminence among Polish art groups began to be challenged. Its exhibitions garnered increasingly negative reviews, any of which lamented the diminished energy and originality of the once-dynamic Society of Polish Artists. Although Sztuka managed to prolong its existence until 1936 by 1912, it had been eclipsed as a significant presence in the nation's culture by entirely new formations of emerging Polish modernists.
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Credit: S.A. Mansbach