Book Review: Silent Rebels

Silent Rebels. Polish Symbolism Around 1900, Edited by Roger Diederen. Hirmer

When Silent Rebels was published to accompany an exhibit at the Kunsthalle München of the greatest “Young Poland” painters working around 1900, director Roger Diederen commented on the insularity of German art, particularly the lacuna concerning the art of his country’s Eastern neighbor. However, the embarrassment for this absence must be shared, for an opaque post-war cataract also shielded inconvenient Polish art from the scrutiny of many in the myopic Western art establishment until the inexplicable rise of Ewa Juszkiewicz at Gagosian drew embarrassing attention to one of the country’s least interesting contemporary artists. But unlike Juszkiewicz’ tediously repetitive clichés, the artists of Silent Rebels were bright, and brilliant, and transcended the boundaries of time to bring youthful vigor and refreshing insight to representational painting, still resonant, still relevant, still as exciting as they were a hundred and twenty-five years ago.

In 1900, Polish artists were stateless – since 1795 the country had been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and did not gain full independence until the end of the first world war. In 1900, Polish artists had to be careful not to offend the scrutiny of the occupying Russian Empire. In Germany the Jugendreform movement had introduced the fundamental priorities of democratic progressives among German youth, and these ideas soon interested young artists in Kraków, who began producing paintings of the landscape as the home of the sublime and the mother of health and well-being, of the innocence and energy of children as a model for a new kind of adult behavior, and the myth and melancholy of symbolism as themes of artistic importance. But their innovations were set against the achievements of painters like Jan Matejko, who is the first subject of Agniszka Baginska’s essay on duty and freedom, which opens the book. History painter Matejko was esteemed as a prince of painting, and after he exhibited The Battle of Grunwald at the World’s Fair in Paris and won a gold medal he received a scepter from the Mayor of Kraków as a sign of his rule over art. Matejko’s Battle was a nationalist statement, for the fight was a Polish victory, and the mayor’s award acknowledged the guide and hand he offered to a nation without its own government. Kraków was a free city then, ruled with a loose and relatively liberal hand by its Austrian overlords, and had a reputation as the center of Polish independence.

Nevertheless, Matejko worked within an island of artistic liberty surrounded by a sea of Russian censorship drowning creativity in the rest of the country – in Warsaw the University’s Fine Art Department was closed down after the repression of the November Uprising of 1831, and only a safe school of benign landscape painting survived. Art exhibits were banned in 1848. A thaw slowly followed, and in 1860, a Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts was founded, and a Museum of Fine Arts showing European old masters opened briefly in 1862, but was only open for brief periods of a few years at a time until being closed in 1875. Consequently, Kraków was a magnetic vortex for revolutionary ideas in all things artistic, and inevitably attracted young painters with a penchant for novelty.

The generation of painters that followed Matejko drew upon his magnificent patriotic histories, emulating him with dramatic new ideas. In 1895, Matejko’s student Jacek Malczewski’s spectacular Melancholy literally raised the complexities of multiple figure composition from the canvas of the artist painted in the deep background, and spun them with dimension-twisting and vertiginous flair. It was an extraordinary and unprecedented painting which was far ahead of its time. The picture begins a series of superb paintings of remarkable quality, including Malczewski’s The Artist and the Muse, and Inspiration of the Painter where his extravagant figurative skill was combined with the yearning and passion of youthful desire, and only surpassed by the spectacle and allegory of his dramatic Vicious Circle, an emulation of the baroque paintings decorating Catholic churches in lavish extravagance. Baginska speculates intelligently on the relationship between the painting and Nietzsche’s idea of the cyclical process of the eternal return.

The diaspora of emigrants who fled from the occupying Russian and Prussian forces took young Polish painters to the great centers of European art. In her second essay, Baginska describes members of the network that connected the contemporary cultural currents that were disseminated by conversation and in magazines. By the end of the nineteenth century, Polish artists living abroad exhibited their work in Warsaw and Kraków, transmitting the ideas of Munich, Paris, and Saint Petersburg to their audiences in their homeland. Adam Chmielozski and Aleksander Giermyski were inspired by the moody nocturnes of Arnold Böcklin, applying the Gothic romance and darkness of their sensibility to locations ordinarily favored to the point of conventional cliché by the pastel palettes of impressionism. By 1908, the floral, birds and insect motifs of art nouveau had arrived from Munich and were embraced with the passion they deserved by the students of the Warsaw School of Fine Arts, who created elemental costumes for the annual “Young Art” balls, and their professor Kazimierz Stabrowski captured delightful portraits of participants.

Urzula Kozakowska-Zaucha’s essay on depictions of nature by Young Poland painters introduces the landscape with its own soul, burdened with poetic imagery and brimming with the magical mysteries of existence. Albert Godetzky contributes an intriguing chapter about Polish paintings of childhood, which were the preoccupation of European artists with an interest in the youth movements which had emerged at the end of the century. Children were symbols of “innocence, purity, incorruptibility, new beginnings, the life force, religious piety, the natural world, and, above all, springtime, its potential, and its inherent duality of transience as well as hope,” but some painters, like Witold Wojtkiewicz, used children to contrast with the opposing forces of darkness that stood against the light-filled themes of the bright and vernal season. Readers intrigued by Wojtkiewicz’s spooky but often crude modernism may learn more of him from an essay by Agnieszka Rosales Rodriguez, who says his work was “saturated with poetic ambiguity and decadent deceitfulness, it exposes illusions, probes into the dark realms of childhood imagination and into the disturbing states of the subconscious, the abysses of madness and delusion, of dreams and fantasies, the world of the theatre, the circus and the masquerade.” Wojtkiewicz’s Two Children is the best of his work included in the book.

Nerina Santorius focuses on myths in Polish paintings of the turn of the century, another theme which dominated European art in the period, regardless of geography. As an enthusiastic allegory-shaper, Malczewski dominates again with his superb In a Billow of Dust, in which the personification of Poland has abandoned her children, and with his Art in the Village of Gentry, a painting of a muddy manor courtyard set before a kitchen building, where a young faun plays a flute to comfort (or enchant) a sad peasant girl among a flock of black turkeys. Santorius is an imaginative writer, who teases meaning from the symbols and compositions with skill, and shines again with her study of writings by Stanislaw Przybyszewski. She opens with a melodramatic account of the notorious artist Wladyslaw Podkowiński, who slashed his own scandalous painting of a nude and ecstatic woman straddling a black stallion while it was exhibited at the Zachęta Art Society, Warsaw. Podkowiński said he felt the sound of the tear was like a scream when he inflicted the cut, and he imagined the revealed stretcher bars as the bones of his unrequited love. Santorius shines again, reminding readers of the importance of “Eros and Thanatos, the decadent fascination with destruction and downfall, the revelation of hidden desires and dreams, the question of the pathology of intoxication.” Soon she is deep into the life and work of “the most decadent of the decadents” considering Przybyszewski’s accounts of Chopin and Nietzsche, his role as a bridge between Germany and Poland, and as a critical leader within Polish culture.

Plenty of color plates guide readers into the art of the period, and some leap from the page as refreshing reminders of the narratives of art history that were poorly treated in the twentieth century. But Malczewski is the star. Malczewski’s Death is a tragic and melancholy icon of the blessing of mortality in the face of suffering. His Polish Hamlet – Portrait of Aleksander Wielopolski is a dramatic triple of Polish maidens in chains, while the subject of the painting shelters the vain hope of peace. Wielopolski was the most powerful man in Poland under the authority of the Russian Emperor. Malczewski’s Derwid is a superb portrait in profile of a bearded elder in the spell of calm transcendence, hands raised in submission to the mighty forces of golden sunshine and the blessing of harvest. It is inexcusable that a master as impressive as Malczewski should be so poorly known outside his own country.

Excellent.

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