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Jacek Malczewski: The Polish Painter-Poet. (1854-1929)

Author(s): Tadeusz SzydowskiSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 10, No. 29 (Dec., 1931), pp. 274-284Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202665

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JACEK MALCZEWSKITHE POLISH PAINTER-POET.(I854-I929)

POLISHcontemporary painting is not yet well known andconsequently not adequately appreciated in other countries ofEurope. The period of its greatest development falls in the lastdecades of the i9th and the beginning of the 2oth centuries, i.e., ata time when Poland was divided among three neighbouringstates.Polish artists did not appear in international exhibitions as auniform national group, but were always included in the groups ofthose countries which held sway over the part of Poland whencethey came. Not till the first years of the present century did thePolish association of artists " Sztuka " (" Art ") succeed inorganisinga series of independent exhibitions in many of the greatcities of Europe. (Amongthese there was one exhibition in Londonin I906.) This activity was interrupted by the War and onlyrecently,.in I927, it was resumed by a new society, Towarzystwcoszerzenia sztuki polskiej ws'rodobcych,whose exclusive aim is toorganise exhibitions of Polish art abroad. Unfortunately, owingto the very difficultpost-War economic conditions, this Society hasnot yet been able to widen the scope of its activities. It is truethat under its auspices several exhibitions have been organisedalready,but all these were on rather a small scale and, showing onlycurrent artistic productions,were limited for the most part to onesmall branch, e.g., the exhibition of graphic art in London in I930.There have as yet been no retrospective exhibitions which mightserve to illustrate comprehensively and convincingly the fulldevelopment of Polish painting. Unfortunately, too, there exist noillustrated monographs in foreign languages on the subject; it isdifficultto fill in immediately the gaps caused by the long period ofsuppression during which free cultural development was hampered.

All these factors are a sufficientexplanation of the reasonswhypublications dealing with contemporary painting either do notmention Poland at all, or give but brief and often misleadinginformation. Yet Polish painting at the end of the Igth and atthe beginning of the 20th centuries occupies an important place bythe side of other nations. Owing to outstanding talent its generalartistic standardis high. It is rich in its variety of schools and its274

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Awk

"THE VICIOUS CIRCLE." I897.

A SELF-PORTRAIT. 1901.

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" THE END OF A RHAPSODY." I9I I. "A Bo

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JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 275lines of development, and is, moreover, characterised by a verydistinct individuality.The great development of Polish painting in that period is allthe more astonishing when we recall the inauspicious conditionsunder which it took place. The governments of the partitioningpowers strove to extinguish all efforts to establish any intellectualand cultural connections between the three partitions. Thestrength of the nation was exhausted in the fights for the recoveryofindependence. Afterthe suppressionof the risings,the sheerstrugglefor materialexistence became intensified; as also the effort to retainthe language and to raise the general level of culture. Under suchcircumstances art appeared a luxury. The impoverished nationcould not give its artists sufficient material support. The majorityof the artists were forced to seek their education,and often to earntheir living, abroad. The fact that, in spite of all these difficulties,Polish artists succeeded in following the lead of Western Europeinto all realms of artistic life proves the creative vitality of thenation.The conditions of material existence necessarily left their markon Art by evoking in it echoes of the nation's spiritual experiencesand aspirations, its tragic struggles and calamities. Art waswelcomed so long as it served to uphold the national spirit. Itssubjects had perforce to be Polish. The greatest talent thatappeared during that period in Poland, Jan Matejko (I838-I893),portrayedin his pictures the ancient history of independentPoland,her days of power and fame, and also the days of her weakness anddownfall; he glorifiedher virtues, but also laid bare to the eyes ofthe nation her sins and failures. His object was to put heart intothe people and at the same time to induce them to meditate uponthe past and learn a lesson therefrom. Those historiosophic,apostolic leanings, it is true, often lowered the artistic value of hispaintings, but they are, nevertheless, characterised by a greatplastic vigour and that striking realism in the re-creation of naturewhich makes them, without any doubt, belong to the mostcharacteristic and most prominent examples of historical paintingin Europe. After I870 there arose a reaction against this kind ofpainting, especially as, among the followers of Matejko, artists notpossessedof his talent and his psychic predisposition,it degeneratedinto a mere portrayal of affected poses and gestures, a staginessof historical costume and decoration, intermixed with superficialhistorical and archaeological rudition. The new school advocatedhomely themes, the re-creation of every-day contemporary life,

S 2

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276 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.representationof " genre " scenes of town and country life, and ofPolish landscape.

Since, for centuries past, the one predominant passion of thePolish people as a whole had been horses, painters representingthese with their riders and harness, or cavalcades, achieved greatpopularity. In these scenes, full of movement and life, Polishpainting undoubtedly gained considerablemastery and reached anoutstanding style of its own. Artists who were followers of thisrealisticschool opposedto the artificialityof the " historical" schoolthe love of Polish soil and Polish tradition, showing forth the beautyof nature in the land and the picturesquenessand charm of life asmanifested in its various phases. The most brilliant representativeof this school of painting was Jozef Chelmo'nski,whose picturesachieved great success in the Paris Salons.However, towards the end of the century, the vogue both forhistorical and " genre" subjects gave place, owing principally tothe motto "l'Art pour l'Art," to a treatment of nature onimpressionist lines. French impressionism was, however, neverslavishly imitated; on the contrary its methods were adapted inmany individual ways, as were many other intellectual stimulievolved from the luxuriant development of artistic life in WesternEurope.Among a successionof eminent artists of this period, which wasone of particularly intensive artistic activity, Jacek Malczewskistands out by reason of his originality. Two years have now passedsince his death, and time allows us to look back with a certainperspective,as it were,overthe wholefield of his artisticachievement.To an artistic world under the influenceof impressionisttechnique,having for its aim the reproductionof colour and light phenomenaand the conjuring up of an illusion of unlimited depth plunged inlight by means of an almost exclusive use of splashes of colour, toa world in which plastic, concrete outlines and autonomouscomposition no longer had their place-Malczewski introduced alinear form with all the attendant qualities resulting from thisdifferent visual attitude. To Art, which had come to disregardcompletely the subject as such, using it only as a backgroundonwhich to develop the technique and the problems of the brush, heopposedhis own creative conception,a conceptionwholly permeatedby thoughts expressive of spiritual experiences, feelings andreflections. While others steeped themselves in purely visualimpressions, Malczewski,no less susceptible to the charm of colourand to variety of form of nature, yearned to express himself as a

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JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 277human being, deeply sensitive to the fortunes and misfortunes ofman and mankind.

Naturally, he did not stand utterly alone in his views. Duringthe course of the Igth century there had appeared all over Europeartists with similar tendencies, idealists, poets, philosophers andmystics, who used the " language of the brush" to express abstractideas, even though it was not always possible to render these clearlyby such means. It suffices here to mention the Pre-Raphaelites.Malczewski s attuned to them spiritually; he is connected with themby his ideals and conceptions, though he is perhaps even nearer toG. F. Watts. We may trace in him some traits in common withBoecklin or Hodler, with Segantini or Puvis de Chavannes. Yet, inactual fact, we may note that he owed nothing to any of them. Hewas an independent artist, uninfluenced by any one school, and hestrove unceasingly for the most sincereexpressionof those thoughtswhich inspired and absorbed him, for those things which were thevery essence of his soul. He was for ever seeking the most artisticform in which to enfold them, a form which should be a logicaloutcome of his own feeling and ability and of a longlife madeperfectby effort and final achievement.Malczewski had a deeply emotional and meditative nature.A solitary dreamer,since the days of his youth there had developedin him an intense idealism tinged with melancholv. He watchedintently the noisy turmoil of life, and his highly-sensitive natureabsorbed more of its sorrow and suffering than of its joy and peace.Inclined to poetic exaltation, he essayed to express the sadness ofhis soul in elegiacverse, and during his life he wrote quite creditablepoems, but without any higher artistic ambitions. Consequentlysuch a nature as his excluded the possibility of a mere painter'sattitude, pure and simple: the eager eyes, ever joyfully seeking,that passionate desire to re-create all that should come within thesphere of their vision. With Malczewski, all external impressionswere absorbed into his inmost self and transformed into spiritualexperiences, into visions of his own ever creative imagination. Heis not a type of painter who strives to reproducenature and reality,but rather a visionary seekingto express his state of mind by meansof images borrowed from nature.It is interesting to follow the slow, gradualand yet uninterrupteddevelopment of the individual elements in the creative work ofMalczewski. Early in his youth he realised the necessity for entireindependence of view, for a stand against any outside influences, andmoreover,the avoidance of all ready-made formulas and technique.

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278 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.Obviously, such entire reliance on the strength of his own personalitycreated difficulties and delayed the fulfilment of the style which hemade his own.He studied in Matejko's school, but, among the artists of thatperiod,he was one of the fewwho-even in theiryouth-did not painta single historical picture. Nor did the vogue of realism which wasjust then developingfind a disciplein Malczewski. The imaginationof the young man was stirred by the works of great poets. In hispictures he illustrated those scenes which had most impressedhimduring his reading of theirpoems. He longedto embodyin concreteshape on monumental friezes the figuresof heroic characters. Buta year's sojournat the Itcole des Beaux Arts did not point the wayto a realisation of this dream; there was too much routine andacademic stagnation in relation to the new movements in Frenchpainting, which were developing elsewhere very strongly. At thattime Malczewski was too young and too inexperienced to hold hisown in this turmoil of artistic arguments and in the chaos of ideasabout art which were then rampant; nor was he able to find thenecessary help and guidance in the masterpieces of the AncientMasters. It is characteristic that Greek sculpture aroused hisgreatest enthusiasm and strengthened his leaning towards idealiseddrawing. Lack of material means interrupted his artisticwanderings. Malczewski returned to Cracow,where he remainedduring the rest of his life, except for short journeys, a brief sojournin Italy and several months spent in Munich.Therebegan the long and toilsome process,leading up to the everincreasing mastery of the technique of the brushwhich was essentialto him for the expression of those poetic and fantastic conceptionsthat had been germinating in the artist's brainsince his early youth.He strove resolutely and exclusively for figure composition. Hissubjects were the outcome of fantasy, but their execution was to bebased on the strictest study of the rules of nature. Educated duringthe period of sober, objective naturalism, he had no use for mistyundefinedshapes and forms, nor forunrestricted reedomof colouring.He put aside all conventional technique. Faithful treatment of thetruth of nature was for him one of the cardinal laws. He realisedthat if he wished to transform the world of natural phenomenaand use it for his own ends, in order to create out of its fundamentalelements new conceptions of his own, it was imperative to gain amastery over it. ContemplatingNature with a deep love, he sensedher mysterious poetry and he could see beneath the external maskof a humancountenance the hidden and innermost depths of the soul.

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JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 279For he held that only a penetrating study of this outside mask wouldyield to him the mystery of the soul. In the first period of hiscreative work, Malczewski's art was based on a scrupulous andfaithful descriptionof nature. Laterhe passedon to a morecompre-hensive and individual interpretationof it. The simplificationandstylisation which characterise his later work are based on histhorough knowledge of nature and her works.The subjects of many of his earlier pictures are taken from thesad experiences of contemporary Polish life. He belonged toa generation which had grown up in the discouragement anddepressionthat had followedthe failureof the risingin I863. A newmotto had been proclaimed, setting forth the necessity for a saneadaptation to tragichistoricalneed, a call for the abandonmentof allaspirations to a recovery of independence and for the concentrationof all forces on " positive " work, and for the salvaging of nationalculture. Malczewskibelongedto those who had not forsworntheirromantic dreams, for these were the very essence of his soul. Yetin accordwith his generationhe bent beneath the conviction that allheroiceffortswerehopeless, since all heroic endeavour must needs becrushed beneath the heel of brutal oppression. Endowed witha rather melancholy disposition, which was intensified by the sadatmosphereof a nation in mourning, the young artist called up tohis imagination the figures of those defenders of freedom who hadbeen driven into exile and crushed by forced labour in far-awaySiberia. Pictures took shape from his brush which were not basedon observation of facts. Malczewski had never been to Siberia.But from the very depth of his feelingsand from the vividness of hisimagination there arose visions of what the spiritual suffering of theprisoners,separated for ever from their country and their families,must inevitably be. He always made a particular study of theexpressionof the faces of the heroes of his imagination; he strove toimpress thereon the stamp of melancholy, brooding, sadness,despondency and resignation. These vivid expressions of thecountenances were emphasised by the passive calmness of thefigures, portrayinga dull apathy, an almost painful numbness. Alldetails were accurately inserted, all being faithfully copied from life.Yet the fruit of all this care and study was infinitely more than amere composition laboriously evolved in the studio. Malczewski'scanvases are pregnant with deep and sincere feeling, and pulsatingwith the vibrant poetry of sorrow; andbehind, as a background, isthe ever increasingsubtle charm of his artistic technique.Simultaneouslvwith the creation of his pictures on " Siberian"

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280 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.subjects, Malczewskipainted anotherseries, full of nymphs, harpies,chimeras, satyrs, fauns and such-like fantastic or allegoricalfigures.He who would seek to express strong feelings and deep thoughtsand arouse like sentiments in others must inevitably use a languageof symbols. And, surely, in a certain measure, it was pre-destinedthat Malczewski should speak to the world of art in this tongue.To a sensitive and contemplativenaturelike his, howlogicalit was toperceivein the figureof the exiled prisoner n bondage, portrayed onhis canvas, a symbol of Life's sufferings and tragic coercion. Itfollowed therefore that the gallery of Siberianmartyrs was replacedby symbolical figures,and fauns and satyrs constituted still furthermetaphors in this pictorial language.The crucial problem on which the efforts of the artist wereusually centred was that of evolving some plastic formula withwhich to express that tragic struggle of the human soul betweenthe ideals of its endeavour and its helpless inability to attain tothem, owing to the overwhelming temptations of life; between thedesirefor sacrifice demandedby its exalted longingsand the alluringand sensual pleasures of a carefree joy of living. The struggle tookplace in his very soul. It caused desperate efforts, failures, gaverise to doubt, to those moments of doubt in which one is consciousofthe great chasm, the glaring disproportionbetween one's ideals ofcreative work and the result of one's efforts for their fulfilment; thelowering of one's standards by compromises with life and itsconditions; that surrender in face of the adversities visited onman by a malicious fate. That maliciousfate which indeed appearssometimes to be a very part of man's nature or the symbol of thecombined forces of adversity which he encounters in life,Malczewski personified in the figure of a demon, a winged womanwith huge tiger-like hips and predatory ferocious paws. There isa series of paintings where this fantastic creature appears to clingwith sensuous joy to the figure of the artist, who is bent under theburden of his endeavour. This demon is portrayed as sucking outman's strength from his youth up; it is his inseparable companionthrough life; it arouses in him unattainable desires, dazzles himwith the beauty of illusive and misleading phantoms. Death alonebrings release from the suffering of life, gives peace, contentmentand solace, places a gentle and soothing hand on the fevered brow.Malczewskiportrayed death in the shape of a young and beautifulwoman, who appearswhen the weary traveller comes to the end ofhis journeyings and, smiling and radiant, leads him into the peaceof the Great Beyond.

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JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 28IIn the course of a long and very intense struggle with thetechnique of painting, Malczewski achieved for his poetic ideas ever

clearer and more significant expression. Among his best and mostcharacteristicworksis his " ViciousCircle,"a canvas of considerabledimensions-painted between I895 and I897. We see in it, whirlinground the painter's ladder, a series of fantastic figures. At the topof the ladder sits a small painter's apprentice holding in his handa long varnish brush with which he had been tracing stencils onwalls. The figures swarming round the deeply pensive boy areaccentuated by the difference in light and colour; one group isplunged in the bright rainbow tints and a brilliant radiance andthe other in cold and subduedtones; on one side thereleap laughingand joyous figuresin a bacchic frenzy; on the other side the figuresare writhing in pain. It is easily grasped that the first enjoy thedelights of life in a carefree and heedless fashion, while the othersare suffering under the persecution of fate, in the struggle for idealsagainst hostile forces. The vision spread out before the eyes of theboy is meant to represent that enchanted circle within which his lifewill probably roll: the " vicious circle " out of which he will findescape difficult. He will join one group, then the other; the impulsesand strivings of both will contend with each other in his soul. Thestronger his human experiences and sufferings, the greater artistand creator he will become; he will ultimately cast the artisan'sstencil away.This seems to be the leading idea of the painting, whose detailsmay be interpreted in different ways. Various figures by theirgestures and accessories are to make that thought more evidentand precise. As always, when symbolic art attempts to representa more complicatedidea, it runs the risk of being misunderstoodbythe spectator. Yet, owing to the clear pictorial treatment of thewhole, the intrinsic conception of the " Vicious Circle" stirs one'simagination. The movement of that circle of figures whirling in theair is caught with convincing power, with a lightness and a facilityof pattern; the drawing and colour are worked out boldly and aresubordinated to the general harmony of tone and lighting. Therules of the realistic school of painting, at the time of whose greatestvogue Malczewski was himself developing, have been strictlyobservedhere in spite of a certain discrepancy with the real aim ofthe artist, namely, the symbolic idea of the picture.During the next phase of his creative work, following closelyuponthe " ViciousCircle,"Malczewski reed himself from those bondsof his earliertechnique which had still hampered him, that is, from

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282 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.a too accurate reproduction of nature. Developing a wider andmore individual grip, he finally achieved his own particular andoriginal artistic form. This was always based on very faithfuldrawing, carried out by a sure and firm hand. He mastered alldifficulties in presenting every movement and foreshortening t intothe plane of the picture, thus solving his problems of descriptionenergetically and expressively. With a fundamentally linearpresentation of figures, with the differentiation of their individualsilhouettes, there comes an ever fuller and more plastic modelling,and, further, a planear, relief-like conception of the whole; thecomposition being clearly divided in planes one behind the other,while the foregroundon which the main subject is concentrated,retains its predominance. Following these ideas, the constructionof Malczewski'spaintingsachievesa great simplicity and conciseness;it forms a self-contained tectonic unit, although its componentparts keep their independence, their particular character, theindividuality of their shapes and their colour.Of course Malczewskidid not evolve this form at once in a fullyconsciousand consistent fashionand on a largescale. He developedit gradually and he improved it chiefly in smaller compositions,where he put together only two or three figures or parts of figures-and sometimes only heads and fragments of hands. He found thesesufficientfor the expressionof some poetic conception-the sugges-tion of a symbolic meaning which we can read best in the expressionof the faces and in the gesture of the hands. He gave the featuresa touch of strangeness and mystery; he caught in them glimmersoffugitive and subtle moods. In grouping together heads of con-trasting types and expressing contrasting psychic feelings, hecreates wonderful " songs without words" which seem to unveilthe hidden depths of human souls.In the postures and movements of the figures in Malczewski'scanvases there is much solemn concentration. In their hieraticgrouping they seem to carry some message of fundamentaland vitalsignificance-which is also suggested by the titles: " The PoisonedWell," " Journey's End," " The End of the Rhapsody," " TheSource of Life," etc. In his endeavour to present his thought moreclearly, the artist surroundshis real figures with fantastic creatures,and he endows them all with various emblems and symbolicaccessories.- As a background for his figures, Malczewski usually presentsa landscapeakin in its atmosphere to the figure-theme. It is some-times a sunnyspringlandscape; more often one full of autumn melan-

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JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 283choly; momentsbefore a storm,gales, or the deadwhite silenceof thewinter. The landscape is transformed according to the artist'semotional attitude to his favourite motifs of nature; usually areminiscenceof his childhood as seen through the eyes of nostalgia;it is consistent in its linear pattern and general characterwith thefigureswhich thus seem to arise out of that particularfragment ofnature. Observingnature with the keen intuition of a painter anda poet-enamoured with her beauty, he discovered in it peculiarcharms, and he transformed it in his landscape-backgrounds intoa land of fantastic fairy tales.

Malczewski,who had a deep insight into., he human soul andstrove to put the maximum of expression into the faces hepainted, has done a number of portraits, all of them striking in thetreatment of physiognomy. He did not, however, feel hamperedby the laws of absolute faithfulness to his models; he did not alwaysrender the realistic truth, but transformed it in his own way. Heinterpreted the characters of the people he portrayed by makingthem converse with some fantastic figure and by supplementingthe whole with symbolic objects. He also painted a whole series ofself-portraits in various costumes and with puzzling accessories.His work was a long personal confession. His religious paintingstoo were parables. He used his own person as a model for thefigureof Christ; he saw himself tempted by Satan, talking with thePharisees, the Magdalene,the Woman of Samaria, the UnbelievingThomas.The artistic heritage of Malczewskiis very rich. In his laterlife he createdratherfeverishly,andnot all his worksare of the samehigh artistic standard. Yet we can always choose a few score ofthem, in whichthe emotionalconceptionwas expressedharmoniouslyand with perfect beauty. He was not a genius, but he possessed apeculiarly sincere and original talent, striving with unceasing efforttoward the regionsof pure high art.The reason why he did not reach the highest summits and whyhe did not create monumental masterpieces, is to be found in theconditions of life in which fate had placed him. Separated fromthe great artistic centres, from great museums of masterpieces ofancient centuries, he was condemnedto rely exclusively on his ownresources. The path he followed led him in a direction parallel tothe great highway of the main contemporaryschools of painting.He sought for it a long time, and when he did at last achieve his ownstyle, he lacked the necessary vitality to develop it to its ultimatelimits.

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284 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.One might say that he created for himself a very great impedi-ment by persistently trying to express abstract ideas, transcending

the limits of painting. But Art arises from a too complicatedsubstratum of the human psychology for it to be divided into hardand fast sections. In the case of Malczewski,internal experiencewas that very material, constituted the very impulse that drovehim to artistic activity. To have given up expressing it throughaccessible media would have meant to him an atrophy of the verynerve of creativeness.And, moreover, the canvases of the painter give us a betteranswer. They are unquestionably sincere and they appeal to usdirectly by their power,dignity, and candour. They representto usin an expressive manner many subtle secrets of the human mind,many of its sufferings and longings, its sorrows and joys. Theyproclaimmuch truth about man in his-search for an answer to theriddle of his fate, and above all they tell much of Polish sorrowsand yearnings. Owing to its very personal and prominentlynational character, the work of Malczewski will remain in thehistory of Art as a very interesting and valuable document.

TADEUSZSZYDLOWSKI.