Rafal Malczewski

Rafal Malczewski, Auto na tle pejzażu zimowego, 1930

 

Rafal Malczewski (1892-1965) was born in Kraków, Poland, as son of the famous painter Jacek Malczewski and his wife Mary Gralewski. After graduating from high school in Kraków, Malczewski studied philosophy, architecture, and agronomy in Vienna between 1910 and 1915. His father, then  a professor at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts, introduced him to painting. Between 1917 and 1939 Malczewski lived in Zakopane, where he was a member of the artistic and intellectual elite concentrated around the painter Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and composer Karol Szymanowski. He was a keen mountaineer and a great skier. In 1917, while climbing in the Tatra mountains, his companion was killed, and Malczewski spent all night tied to the hook waiting for rescue assistance. 

Rafal Malczewski, Jesién, 1926

Malczewski joined the Podhale Arts Society, which promoted the idea of seeking out foundations for Polish art in the local folk culture. He designed productions for the Formist Theatre which began operating in Zakopane in 1925, creating scenery for the plays of Witkiewicz and Strindberg. Malczewski first exhibited his works in public in 1924 in Warsaw. Other exhibitions followed in many Polish cities. During the interwar period Malczewski gained considerable fame as a painter, presenting his work at the Biennale in Venice in 1932, in Berlin, Helsinki, Los Angeles, Moscow, and New York. He won a gold medal for his painting Spring in the Mountains (below) at the World Exhibition of Art and Technology in Paris in 1937.  

 Rafal Malczewski, Spring in the Mountains, 1937

Landscapes dominate Malczewski's oeuvre. His early works were influenced by the Symbolist art of his father. In the second half of the 1920s he was inspired by Cubism and Futurism. His landscapes primarily depicted the Tatra Mountains and the surrounding hills of the Podhale region. Frequent subjects included sleepy towns and empty landscapes, which often were supplemented with the technical achievements of contemporary civilization. Malczewski painted sparsely populated train stations, telegraph lines, and railroad tracks in numerous variations. Clouds, snow-covered peaks, fields, streams, and the crystal clarity of the atmosphere give his paintings a metaphysical dimension.

Rafal Malczewski, Kamieniolom, 1927

Between 1927 and 1929 Malczewski created a series of paintings depicting the landscapes of Yugoslavia and the French Riviera. In 1934 and 1935 he resided in Upper Silesia and recorded his impressions of this area in a series of dark, gloomy landscapes that reflect the industrial character of Black Silesia. These contrast starkly with his sun-saturated, green-glowing hilly landscapes of the Beskid Mountains. In his images of Silesia Malczewski depicted steel mills, mines and coal hills - nature being destroyed by industry. The realistic observation and emotional charge inherent in these works brings them very close to the German "New Objectivity" movement.

Rafal Malczewski, Pejzaż górski, 1928 

In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II and the German occupation of Poland, Malczewski fled to Paris. One year later, he went to Brazil, where he spent almost two years creating watercolor views of Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba, and landscape paintings of Parana. Malczewski then moved on to the United States, where he lived in New York among other places. Finally, in 1942, he settled in Montreal, traveling extensively in Canada and the United States in search of subjects to paint. 

Rafal Malczewski, Pejzaż przedwiosenny (Snop światla), 1926

 

The Canadian National Railways and the Pacific National Railways commissioned Malczewski to create a series of watercolors advertising the companies. In December 1942, he had his first Canadian exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Art. In 1944, he exhibited in Washington's prestigious Corcoran Gallery. Only in 1959 Malczewski visited Poland again. A stroke suffered in 1957 resulted in partial paralysis, forcing him to give up painting. Rafal Malczewski died at a hospital in Montreal in 1965.

Zygmunt Waliszewski

 Zygmunt Waliszewski, Self-Portrait, 1929

Zygmunt Waliszewski (1897-1936) was born in Saint Petersburg to the Polish family of an engineer. In 1907 his parents moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, where Waliszewski spent his childhood. In Tbilisi he began his artistic education in the School of Drawing and Painting. The work Waliszewski did while in Tbilisi (1917-1921) was influenced by French painting of the time - significant amounts of which he saw in various private collections - and by the art of the Russian avant-garde. 

 Zygmunt Waliszewski, Hamak, 1917

During World War I Waliszewski fought in the ranks of the Russian Army, returning to Tbilisi in 1917. He visited Moscow several times and became acquainted with the art of the Mir Isskustva (The World of Art Movement). In the early 1920s, Waliszewski departed for Poland, and settled in Kraków. Between 1921 and 1924 he studied at Krakow's Academy of Fine Arts in the studios of Wojciech Weiss and Jozef Pankiewicz. 

Zygmunt Waliszewski, Pejzaż zimowy z chatą, 1924

Waliszewski went to Paris in 1924 where he continued his studies in painting under the guidance of Pankiewicz. During his stay in Paris Waliszewski contracted the non-curable Buerger's disease and lost both his legs. 

Zygmunt Waliszewski, Wyspa miłości, 1935

In 1931 he returned to Poland, residing in Warsaw and Kraków. During this time Waliszewski designed scenery and posters, created book illustrations, drew and painted caricatures. He also composed fantastic, Comedia dell'arte inspired scenes and numerous variations on the motif of Don Quixote. Despite his deadly illness, he died in 1936, Waliszewski filled his paintings with humor, comic situations and irony. You can see more of his works here.

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1930

Son of a painter and critic, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was born in Warsaw and educated at home by his father, a painter and critic. In 1890, the family moved to Zakopane (in Austrian Poland). At the age of six, Ignacy began to play the piano, paint, and to write his own plays. In 1893, aged only eight, he wrote his first work, Karaluchy (The Cockroaches), which was printed by him on a small personal press. As an adolescent, he developed close friendships with the future mathematician Leon Chwistek, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, and the composer Karol Szymanowski. In 1901, he made his first trip to St. Petersburg and a year later he wrote his first philosophical essays "On Dualism". He obtained his matura (school certificate) in Lwów, wrote many more philosophical treatises and studied foreign languages and literatures.

 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1916

It was in 1904 that Witkiewicz travelled for the first time to Vienna, Munich and Italy, and on his return in 1905 - against his father's wishes - he tried to enrol at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Eventually, he gave up the course and returned to Zakopane. One year later, he was in Vienna again, saw the Gauguin exhibition, which fired his imagination and inspired him to study under Slewinski, one of Gauguin's former pupils. As a result, from 1908, he began to paint "monsters"; his style became more individual as he then visited Paris and saw the Fauves and the early Cubists. During 1910-11, he produced the extraordinary novel The 622 Demises of Bung, or the Demonic Woman, which was only published in 1972. Witkacy spent the years up to the outbreak of the First World War travelling through Europe. Following a crisis in Witkiewicz's personal life due to the suicide of his fiancée Jadwiga Janczewska, he was invited by Malinowski to act as draftsman and photographer on a 1914 expedition to Oceania, a venture that was interrupted by the onset of World War I.

 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Composition, 1922

When the war began, he returned to Europe to enlist in the Tsarist Army in Petersburg as a citizen of the Russian Empire. This move deeply hurt his anti-Russian father. From 1915, Witkacy was an officer in the elite Pavlovsky regiment, and was wounded at the front. As a disabled officer, Witkacy started to experiment with drugs, and was drawn into the drunken parties of the clique surrounding Rasputin. When the revolution toppled the Tsar in 1917, he was elected political commissar of his regiment, thus receiving an insider's view of the changes and violence that accompanied revolutionary upheaval. After the armistice, Witkacy returned to Poland and made a conscious decision to become an artist. Consequently, in 1920 alone, he wrote ten plays, followed by another fifteen over the next five years. Exhibiting his paintings, however, brought him greater success than the performance of his plays. In 1925, he abandoned compositional painting to earn his living as a portrait painter, due to his financial situation becoming parlous. 

 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Self-Portrait, 1927

He continued his controlled experiments with various drugs (morphine, cocaine, peyote, etc.), also painting and writing under their influence. With several friends, he organised an experimental theatre group (Teatr Formistów- the Formists Theatre), where he staged some of his plays. He began to write a second novel, Pozegnanie jesieni (Farewell to Autumn), which was published in 1927, immediately followed by a third, Nienasycenie (Insatiability, 1930). The result of his deliberations on the potential of drugs in the creative process, Nikotyna, alkohol, peyotl, morfin, eter, was published in 1932.

In the latter half of the 1930s, Witkacy concentrated on writing articles about philosophy and theatre. As the international situation worsened, he became subject to recurrent fits of depression, and grew obsessed with the idea of suicide. When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, he and his close friend, Czeslawa Korzeniowska, left Warsaw and fled eastwards with the other refugees. He committed suicide on the 18th of September, when he learned that Soviet troops were advancing from the East. Korzeniowska survived their mutual suicide pact.

 Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Portrait of Maria Nawrocka, 1925

In the postwar period, Communist Poland's Ministry of Culture decided to exhume Witkiewicz's body, move it to Zakopane, and give it a solemn funeral. This was carried out according to plan, though no one was allowed to open the coffin that had been delivered by the Soviet authorities. In 1994, the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art ordered the exhumation of the presumed grave of Witkiewicz in Zakopane. Genetic tests on the remaining bones proved that the body had belonged to an unknown woman — a final absurdist joke, fifty years after the publication of Witkiewicz's last novel. You can see more of his works here in my Flickr set.

Jankel Adler

 Jankel Adler, Portrait of a Man, 1923

Jankel Adler (1895-1949) was born as the seventh of ten children near Lodz, Poland. He grew up among hassic Jews surrounding the textile city of Lodz, influenced greatly by its Polish, German and Jewish population. Adler started an apprenticeship as an engraver with his uncle in Belgrade in 1912, after which he traveled through the Balkan countries. During World War I, as a "suspicious foreigner" Adler commenced his studies with Professor Gustav Wiethüchter at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Barmen, Germany.

Jankel Adler,  Seated Woman, 1928

After his studies he spent time in Poland, Berlin and Paris. In 1922, Jankel Adler moved to Düsseldorf. There he became a teacher at the Academy of Arts, and became acquainted with Paul Klee, who influenced his work. Both artists belonged to the artists group "Junges Rheinland". He also befriended the painter Anton Räderscheidt, a leading figure of the New Objectivity. 

 Anom., Jankel Adler (standing) with Anton Räderscheidt, 1920s

A painting by Adler received a gold medal at the exhibition “German Art Düsseldorf” in 1928.  In 1931 Adler moved into a studio at the Düsseldorf academy, which he abandoned in 1933 when leaving Germany upon friends' advice, after he had published together with other left-wing artists and intellectuals an "urgent appeal" against the Nazi policy and for communism during the campaigns for the parliamentary "elections" in February 1933. 

Jankel Adler, The Mutilated, 1942. The Mutilated was painted in London during heavy bombing and reflected, he said, his admiration for "the behaviour of Londoners under great stress and suffering, only then could humanity be seen at its best".

In that year, two of his pictures were displayed by the Nazis at the Mannheimer Arts Center as examples of degenerate art. Paintings of him and Marc Chagall were pulled on a hand-cart through the streets and publicly jeered at (see my article Chagall and Germany). Adler now left Germany, staying in Paris, where he regarded his exile consciously as political resistance against the fascist regime in Germany. In the years that followed, he made numerous journeys to Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Soviet Union. In 1937, twenty-five of his works were seized from public collections by the Nazis and four were shown in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich.

 Jankel Adler, Two Figures, 1944

When World War II broke out in 1939, Jankel Adler volunteered for the Polish army. Two years later, however, he was dismissed due to his bad health. Jankel Adler moved to Scotland and shortly after to London. During the 1940s a number of respectable exhibitions of Adler's works took place in London, Paris and New York. In 1949 Jankel Adler died in Albourne near London with the bitter knowledge that none of his nine brothers and sisters had survived the Holocaust.