Jacek Malczewski: The Polish Painter-Poet.

(1854-1929)
Author(s): Tadeusz Szydłowski
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 10, No. 29 (Dec., 1931), pp. 274-284
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of
Slavonic and East European Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202665
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 JACEK MALCZEWSKI
THE POLISH PAINTER-POET.

(I854-I929)
POLISH contemporary painting is not yet well known and
consequently not adequately appreciated in other countries of
Europe. The period of its greatest development falls in the last
decades of the i9th and the beginning of the 2oth centuries, i.e., at
a time when Poland was divided among three neighbouring states.
Polish artists did not appear in international exhibitions as a
uniform national group, but were always included in the groups of
those countries which held sway over the part of Poland whence
they came. Not till the first years of the present century did the
Polish association of artists " Sztuka " (" Art ") succeed in
organising a series of independent exhibitions in many of the great
cities of Europe. (Among these there was one exhibition in London
in I906.) This activity was interrupted by the War and only
recently,. in I927, it was resumed by a new society, Towarzystwco
szerzenia sztuki polskiej ws'rodobcych, whose exclusive aim is to
organise exhibitions of Polish art abroad. Unfortunately, owing
to the very difficult post-War economic conditions, this Society has
not yet been able to widen the scope of its activities. It is true
that under its auspices several exhibitions have been organised
already, but all these were on rather a small scale and, showing only
current artistic productions, were limited for the most part to one
small branch, e.g., the exhibition of graphic art in London in I930.
There have as yet been no retrospective exhibitions which might
serve to illustrate comprehensively and convincingly the full
development of Polish painting. Unfortunately, too, there exist no
illustrated monographs in foreign languages on the subject; it is
difficult to fill in immediately the gaps caused by the long period of
suppression during which free cultural development was hampered.
All these factors are a sufficient explanation of the reasons why
publications dealing with contemporary painting either do not
mention Poland at all, or give but brief and often misleading
information. Yet Polish painting at the end of the Igth and at
the beginning of the 20th centuries occupies an important place by
the side of other nations. Owing to outstanding talent its general
artistic standard is high. It is rich in its variety of schools and its
274
Awk

"THE VICIOUS CIRCLE." I897.

A SELF-PORTRAIT. 1901.
" THE END OF A RHAPSODY." I9I I. "A BoY
 JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 275
lines of development, and is, moreover, characterised by a very
distinct individuality.
The great development of Polish painting in that period is all
the more astonishing when we recall the inauspicious conditions
under which it took place. The governments of the partitioning
powers strove to extinguish all efforts to establish any intellectual
and cultural connections between the three partitions. The
strength of the nation was exhausted in the fights for the recovery of
independence. After the suppressionof the risings,the sheer struggle
for material existence became intensified; as also the effort to retain
the language and to raise the general level of culture. Under such
circumstances art appeared a luxury. The impoverished nation
could not give its artists sufficient material support. The majority
of the artists were forced to seek their education, and often to earn
their living, abroad. The fact that, in spite of all these difficulties,
Polish artists succeeded in following the lead of Western Europe
into all realms of artistic life proves the creative vitality of the
nation.
The conditions of material existence necessarily left their mark
on Art by evoking in it echoes of the nation's spiritual experiences
and aspirations, its tragic struggles and calamities. Art was
welcomed so long as it served to uphold the national spirit. Its
subjects had perforce to be Polish. The greatest talent that
appeared during that period in Poland, Jan Matejko (I838-I893),
portrayed in his pictures the ancient history of independent Poland,
her days of power and fame, and also the days of her weakness and
downfall; he glorified her virtues, but also laid bare to the eyes of
the nation her sins and failures. His object was to put heart into
the people and at the same time to induce them to meditate upon
the past and learn a lesson therefrom. Those historiosophic,
apostolic leanings, it is true, often lowered the artistic value of his
paintings, but they are, nevertheless, characterised by a great
plastic vigour and that striking realism in the re-creation of nature
which makes them, without any doubt, belong to the most
characteristic and most prominent examples of historical painting
in Europe. After I870 there arose a reaction against this kind of
painting, especially as, among the followers of Matejko, artists not
possessed of his talent and his psychic predisposition,it degenerated
into a mere portrayal of affected poses and gestures, a staginess
of historical costume and decoration, intermixed with superficial
historical and archaeologicalerudition. The new school advocated
homely themes, the re-creation of every-day contemporary life,
S 2
 276 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

representation of " genre " scenes of town and country life, and of
Polish landscape.
Since, for centuries past, the one predominant passion of the
Polish people as a whole had been horses, painters representing
these with their riders and harness, or cavalcades, achieved great
popularity. In these scenes, full of movement and life, Polish
painting undoubtedly gained considerable mastery and reached an
outstanding style of its own. Artists who were followers of this
realistic school opposed to the artificiality of the " historical " school
the love of Polish soil and Polish tradition, showing forth the beauty
of nature in the land and the picturesqueness and charm of life as
manifested in its various phases. The most brilliant representative
of this school of painting was Jozef Chelmo'nski,whose pictures
achieved great success in the Paris Salons.
However, towards the end of the century, the vogue both for
historical and " genre " subjects gave place, owing principally to
the motto " l'Art pour l'Art," to a treatment of nature on
impressionist lines. French impressionism was, however, never
slavishly imitated; on the contrary its methods were adapted in
many individual ways, as were many other intellectual stimuli
evolved from the luxuriant development of artistic life in Western
Europe.
Among a succession of eminent artists of this period, which was
one of particularly intensive artistic activity, Jacek Malczewski
stands out by reason of his originality. Two years have now passed
since his death, and time allows us to look back with a certain
perspective, as it were, over the whole field of his artistic achievement.
To an artistic world under the influence of impressionist technique,
having for its aim the reproduction of colour and light phenomena
and the conjuring up of an illusion of unlimited depth plunged in
light by means of an almost exclusive use of splashes of colour, to
a world in which plastic, concrete outlines and autonomous
composition no longer had their place-Malczewski introduced a
linear form with all the attendant qualities resulting from this
different visual attitude. To Art, which had come to disregard
completely the subject as such, using it only as a background on
which to develop the technique and the problems of the brush, he
opposed his own creative conception, a conception wholly permeated
by thoughts expressive of spiritual experiences, feelings and
reflections. While others steeped themselves in purely visual
impressions, Malczewski,no less susceptible to the charm of colour
and to variety of form of nature, yearned to express himself as a
 JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 277

human being, deeply sensitive to the fortunes and misfortunes of

man and mankind.
Naturally, he did not stand utterly alone in his views. During
the course of the Igth century there had appeared all over Europe
artists with similar tendencies, idealists, poets, philosophers and
mystics, who used the " language of the brush " to express abstract
ideas, even though it was not always possible to render these clearly
by such means. It suffices here to mention the Pre-Raphaelites.
Malczewskiis attuned to them spiritually; he is connected with them
by his ideals and conceptions, though he is perhaps even nearer to
G. F. Watts. We may trace in him some traits in common with
Boecklin or Hodler, with Segantini or Puvis de Chavannes. Yet, in
actual fact, we may note that he owed nothing to any of them. He
was an independent artist, uninfluenced by any one school, and he
strove unceasingly for the most sincere expression of those thoughts
which inspired and absorbed him, for those things which were the
very essence of his soul. He was for ever seeking the most artistic
form in which to enfold them, a form which should be a logical
outcome of his own feeling and ability and of a long life made perfect
by effort and final achievement.
Malczewski had a deeply emotional and meditative nature.
A solitary dreamer,since the days of his youth there had developed
in him an intense idealism tinged with melancholv. He watched
intently the noisy turmoil of life, and his highly-sensitive nature
absorbed more of its sorrow and sufferingthan of its joy and peace.
Inclined to poetic exaltation, he essayed to express the sadness of
his soul in elegiac verse, and during his life he wrote quite creditable
poems, but without any higher artistic ambitions. Consequently
such a nature as his excluded the possibility of a mere painter's
attitude, pure and simple: the eager eyes, ever joyfully seeking,
that passionate desire to re-create all that should come within the
sphere of their vision. With Malczewski, all external impressions
were absorbed into his inmost self and transformed into spiritual
experiences, into visions of his own ever creative imagination. He
is not a type of painter who strives to reproducenature and reality,
but rather a visionary seeking to express his state of mind by means
of images borrowed from nature.
It is interesting to follow the slow, gradual and yet uninterrupted
development of the individual elements in the creative work of
Malczewski. Early in his youth he realised the necessity for entire
independenceof view, for a stand against any outside influences, and
moreover, the avoidance of all ready-made formulas and technique.
278 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.
Obviously, such entire reliance on the strength of his own personality
created difficulties and delayed the fulfilment of the style which he
made his own.
He studied in Matejko's school, but, among the artists of that
period, he was one of the few who-even in their youth-did not paint
a single historical picture. Nor did the vogue of realism which was
just then developing find a disciple in Malczewski. The imagination
of the young man was stirred by the works of great poets. In his
pictures he illustrated those scenes which had most impressed him
during his reading of their poems. He longed to embody in concrete
shape on monumental friezes the figures of heroic characters. But
a year's sojourn at the Itcole des Beaux Arts did not point the way
to a realisation of this dream; there was too much routine and
academic stagnation in relation to the new movements in French
painting, which were developing elsewhere very strongly. At that
time Malczewskiwas too young and too inexperienced to hold his
own in this turmoil of artistic arguments and in the chaos of ideas
about art which were then rampant; nor was he able to find the
necessary help and guidance in the masterpieces of the Ancient
Masters. It is characteristic that Greek sculpture aroused his
greatest enthusiasm and strengthened his leaning towards idealised
drawing. Lack of material means interrupted his artistic
wanderings. Malczewski returned to Cracow, where he remained
during the rest of his life, except for short journeys, a brief sojourn
in Italy and several months spent in Munich.
There began the long and toilsome process, leading up to the ever
increasingmastery of the technique of the brush which was essential
to him for the expression of those poetic and fantastic conceptions
that had been germinatingin the artist's brain since his early youth.
He strove resolutely and exclusively for figure composition. His
subjects were the outcome of fantasy, but their execution was to be
based on the strictest study of the rules of nature. Educated during
the period of sober, objective naturalism, he had no use for misty
undefinedshapes and forms, nor for unrestrictedfreedomof colouring.
He put aside all conventional technique. Faithful treatment of the
truth of nature was for him one of the cardinal laws. He realised
that if he wished to transform the world of natural phenomena
and use it for his own ends, in order to create out of its fundamental
elements new conceptions of his own, it was imperative to gain a
mastery over it. ContemplatingNature with a deep love, he sensed
her mysterious poetry and he could see beneath the external mask
of a human countenance the hidden and innermost depths of the soul.
 JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 279
For he held that only a penetrating study of this outside mask would
yield to him the mystery of the soul. In the first period of his
creative work, Malczewski's art was based on a scrupulous and
faithful descriptionof nature. Later he passed on to a more compre-
hensive and individual interpretation of it. The simplification and
stylisation which characterise his later work are based on his
thorough knowledge of nature and her works.
The subjects of many of his earlier pictures are taken from the
sad experiences of contemporary Polish life. He belonged to
a generation which had grown up in the discouragement and
depressionthat had followed the failure of the rising in I863. A new
motto had been proclaimed, setting forth the necessity for a sane
adaptation to tragic historical need, a call for the abandonmentof all
aspirations to a recovery of independence and for the concentration
of all forces on " positive " work, and for the salvaging of national
culture. Malczewskibelonged to those who had not forsworntheir
romantic dreams, for these were the very essence of his soul. Yet
in accord with his generation he bent beneath the conviction that all
heroic effortswere hopeless, since all heroic endeavour must needs be
crushed beneath the heel of brutal oppression. Endowed with
a rather melancholy disposition, which was intensified by the sad
atmosphere of a nation in mourning, the young artist called up to
his imagination the figures of those defenders of freedom who had
been driven into exile and crushed by forced labour in far-away
Siberia. Pictures took shape from his brush which were not based
on observation of facts. Malczewski had never been to Siberia.
But from the very depth of his feelings and from the vividness of his
imagination there arose visions of what the spiritual sufferingof the
prisoners,separated for ever from their country and their families,
must inevitably be. He always made a particular study of the
expression of the faces of the heroes of his imagination; he strove to
impress thereon the stamp of melancholy, brooding, sadness,
despondency and resignation. These vivid expressions of the
countenances were emphasised by the passive calmness of the
figures, portraying a dull apathy, an almost painful numbness. All
details were accurately inserted, all being faithfully copied from life.
Yet the fruit of all this care and study was infinitely more than a
mere composition laboriously evolved in the studio. Malczewski's
canvases are pregnant with deep and sincere feeling, and pulsating
with the vibrant poetry of sorrow; and behind, as a background, is
the ever increasing subtle charm of his artistic technique.
Simultaneouslv with the creation of his pictures on " Siberian"
280 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.
subjects, Malczewskipainted another series, full of nymphs, harpies,
chimeras, satyrs, fauns and such-like fantastic or allegoricalfigures.
He who would seek to express strong feelings and deep thoughts
and arouse like sentiments in others must inevitably use a language
of symbols. And, surely, in a certain measure, it was pre-destined
that Malczewski should speak to the world of art in this tongue.
To a sensitive and contemplative nature like his, how logical it was to
perceive in the figure of the exiled prisonerin bondage, portrayed on
his canvas, a symbol of Life's sufferings and tragic coercion. It
followed therefore that the gallery of Siberian martyrs was replaced
by symbolical figures, and fauns and satyrs constituted still further
metaphors in this pictorial language.
The crucial problem on which the efforts of the artist were
usually centred was that of evolving some plastic formula with
which to express that tragic struggle of the human soul between
the ideals of its endeavour and its helpless inability to attain to
them, owing to the overwhelming temptations of life; between the
desire for sacrificedemanded by its exalted longings and the alluring
and sensual pleasures of a carefreejoy of living. The struggle took
place in his very soul. It caused desperate efforts, failures, gave
rise to doubt, to those moments of doubt in which one is conscious of
the great chasm, the glaring disproportion between one's ideals of
creative work and the result of one's efforts for their fulfilment; the
lowering of one's standards by compromises with life and its
conditions; that surrender in face of the adversities visited on
man by a malicious fate. That malicious fate which indeed appears
sometimes to be a very part of man's nature or the symbol of the
combined forces of adversity which he encounters in life,
Malczewski personified in the figure of a demon, a winged woman
with huge tiger-like hips and predatory ferocious paws. There is
a series of paintings where this fantastic creature appears to cling
with sensuous joy to the figure of the artist, who is bent under the
burden of his endeavour. This demon is portrayed as sucking out
man's strength from his youth up; it is his inseparable companion
through life; it arouses in him unattainable desires, dazzles him
with the beauty of illusive and misleading phantoms. Death alone
brings release from the suffering of life, gives peace, contentment
and solace, places a gentle and soothing hand on the fevered brow.
Malczewski portrayed death in the shape of a young and beautiful
woman, who appears when the weary traveller comes to the end of
his journeyings and, smiling and radiant, leads him into the peace
of the Great Beyond.
 JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 28I

In the course of a long and very intense struggle with the

technique of painting, Malczewskiachieved for his poetic ideas ever
clearer and more significant expression. Among his best and most
characteristicworks is his " Vicious Circle,"a canvas of considerable
dimensions-painted between I895 and I897. We see in it, whirling
round the painter's ladder, a series of fantastic figures. At the top
of the ladder sits a small painter's apprentice holding in his hand
a long varnish brush with which he had been tracing stencils on
walls. The figures swarming round the deeply pensive boy are
accentuated by the difference in light and colour; one group is
plunged in the bright rainbow tints and a brilliant radiance and
the other in cold and subdued tones; on one side there leap laughing
and joyous figures in a bacchic frenzy; on the other side the figures
are writhing in pain. It is easily grasped that the first enjoy the
delights of life in a carefree and heedless fashion, while the others
are suffering under the persecution of fate, in the struggle for ideals
against hostile forces. The vision spread out before the eyes of the
boy is meant to represent that enchanted circle within which his life
will probably roll: the " vicious circle " out of which he will find
escape difficult. He will join one group, then the other; the impulses
and strivings of both will contend with each other in his soul. The
stronger his human experiences and sufferings, the greater artist
and creator he will become; he will ultimately cast the artisan's
stencil away.
This seems to be the leading idea of the painting, whose details
may be interpreted in different ways. Various figures by their
gestures and accessories are to make that thought more evident
and precise. As always, when symbolic art attempts to represent
a more complicated idea, it runs the risk of being misunderstoodby
the spectator. Yet, owing to the clear pictorial treatment of the
whole, the intrinsic conception of the " Vicious Circle" stirs one's
imagination. The movement of that circle of figureswhirling in the
air is caught with convincing power, with a lightness and a facility
of pattern; the drawing and colour are worked out boldly and are
subordinated to the general harmony of tone and lighting. The
rules of the realistic school of painting, at the time of whose greatest
vogue Malczewski was himself developing, have been strictly
observed here in spite of a certain discrepancy with the real aim of
the artist, namely, the symbolic idea of the picture.
During the next phase of his creative work, following closely
upon the " Vicious Circle,"Malczewskifreedhimself from those bonds
of his earlier technique which had still hampered him, that is, from
282 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

a too accurate reproduction of nature. Developing a wider and

more individual grip, he finally achieved his own particular and
original artistic form. This was always based on very faithful
drawing, carried out by a sure and firm hand. He mastered all
difficulties in presenting every movement and foreshorteningit into
the plane of the picture, thus solving his problems of description
energetically and expressively. With a fundamentally linear
presentation of figures, with the differentiation of their individual
silhouettes, there comes an ever fuller and more plastic modelling,
and, further, a planear, relief-like conception of the whole; the
composition being clearly divided in planes one behind the other,
while the foreground on which the main subject is concentrated,
retains its predominance. Following these ideas, the construction
of Malczewski'spaintings achieves a great simplicity and conciseness;
it forms a self-contained tectonic unit, although its component
parts keep their independence, their particular character, the
individuality of their shapes and their colour.
Of course Malczewskidid not evolve this form at once in a fully
conscious and consistent fashion and on a large scale. He developed
it 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 these
sufficient for the expression of some poetic conception-the sugges-
tion of a symbolic meaning which we can read best in the expression
of the faces and in the gesture of the hands. He gave the features
a touch of strangeness and mystery; he caught in them glimmers of
fugitive and subtle moods. In grouping together heads of con-
trasting types and expressing contrasting psychic feelings, he
creates wonderful " songs without words " which seem to unveil
the hidden depths of human souls.
In the postures and movements of the figures in Malczewski's
canvases there is much solemn concentration. In their hieratic
grouping they seem to carry some message of fundamental and vital
significance-which is also suggested by the titles: " The Poisoned
Well," " Journey's End," " The End of the Rhapsody," " The
Source of Life," etc. In his endeavour to present his thought more
clearly, the artist surroundshis real figures with fantastic creatures,
and he endows them all with various emblems and symbolic
accessories.
- As a background for his figures, Malczewski usually presents
a landscape akin in its atmosphere to the figure-theme. It is some-
times a sunnyspringlandscape; more often one full of autumn melan-
 JACEK MALCZEWSKI. 283
choly; moments before a storm, gales, or the dead white silence of the
winter. The landscape is transformed according to the artist's
emotional attitude to his favourite motifs of nature; usually a
reminiscence of his childhood as seen through the eyes of nostalgia;
it is consistent in its linear pattern and general character with the
figures which thus seem to arise out of that particular fragment of
nature. Observing nature with the keen intuition of a painter and
a poet-enamoured with her beauty, he discovered in it peculiar
charms, and he transformed it in his landscape-backgrounds into
a land of fantastic fairy tales.
Malczewski, who had a deep insight into.,the human soul and
strove to put the maximum of expression into the faces he
painted, has done a number of portraits, all of them striking in the
treatment of physiognomy. He did not, however, feel hampered
by the laws of absolute faithfulness to his models; he did not always
render the realistic truth, but transformed it in his own way. He
interpreted the characters of the people he portrayed by making
them converse with some fantastic figure and by supplementing
the whole with symbolic objects. He also painted a whole series of
self-portraits in various costumes and with puzzling accessories.
His work was a long personal confession. His religious paintings
too were parables. He used his own person as a model for the
figure of Christ; he saw himself tempted by Satan, talking with the
Pharisees, the Magdalene, the Woman of Samaria, the Unbelieving
Thomas.
The artistic heritage of Malczewski is very rich. In his later
life he created rather feverishly, and not all his works are of the same
high artistic standard. Yet we can always choose a few score of
them, in which the emotional conception was expressedharmoniously
and with perfect beauty. He was not a genius, but he possessed a
peculiarly sincere and original talent, striving with unceasing effort
toward the regions of pure high art.
The reason why he did not reach the highest summits and why
he did not create monumental masterpieces, is to be found in the
conditions of life in which fate had placed him. Separated from
the great artistic centres, from great museums of masterpieces of
ancient centuries, he was condemned to rely exclusively on his own
resources. The path he followed led him in a direction parallel to
the great highway of the main contemporary schools of painting.
He sought for it a long time, and when he did at last achieve his own
style, he lacked the necessary vitality to develop it to its ultimate
limits.
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 complicated
substratum of the human psychology for it to be divided into hard
and fast sections. In the case of Malczewski, internal experience
was that very material, constituted the very impulse that drove
him to artistic activity. To have given up expressing it through
accessible media would have meant to him an atrophy of the very
nerve of creativeness.
And, moreover, the canvases of the painter give us a better
answer. They are unquestionably sincere and they appeal to us
directly by their power, dignity, and candour. They represent to us
in an expressive manner many subtle secrets of the human mind,
many of its sufferings and longings, its sorrows and joys. They
proclaim much truth about man in his-search for an answer to the
riddle of his fate, and above all they tell much of Polish sorrows
and yearnings. Owing to its very personal and prominently
national character, the work of Malczewski will remain in the
history of Art as a very interesting and valuable document.
TADEUSZSZYDLOWSKI.