Title of Product:

Jacek Malczewski- the artist of the Polish Romanticism’s echoes and the thematic visionary explorations

Image of the product:

Name of Author(s): Irena Kossowska

Name of Producer: Net periodic: “culture.pl”

Language/s of Product: Polish

Website of the product: www.culture.pl/pl/culture/artykuly/os_malczewski_jacek

Target Group: General audience

Overall Evaluation: excellent

Availability of community:
Newsgroup

Objectives & Structure:
Aspects to consider:
- The Website presents the artist who insisted on the cyclic elaborations of themes and figures
- Students learn to read out the pictures’ potential settled down in their mirroring the reality and the themes’ arriving to the encompassing complexity
- The scale and tones of the Polish Symbolism, the Polish artistic presumption of dualism, canvas of allegorical realism, adjusting the speaking aloud dramatic symbols and oppositions
- Possibility of constructing an index of the artist through his masterpieces’ themes and cycles. Metaphors, antinomies, dancing figures, circles, figures’ and transparencies’ passing borders could be good initiative to dramatise and bring to revival the artist’s exceptionality

Description of contents:
Jacek Malczewski (154-1929) was a painter and drawer. He was the initiator of the Symbolism in the epoch of Young Poland. He gave the resurrection to the remained within the national consciousness romantic tradition and its dynamic, charismatic wings. He is beyond all doubts one of the most eminent Polish painters, whereas taking into consideration all the history. The biggest influence on his attitudes and personality was put by his father Julian, who imposed on him the ideas of the between nations Messiah’s effigy of Poland and the transcendental mirroring patriotism, mostly transparent by means of the extremely suggestive and historically by mission and response engaged Polish literature of the Romanticism’s period. The Art by Malczewski was concentrated around a few subjects, consequently developed through various mirrors and angles of inspection, distinguished by conversions and diversely plotted together. Malczewski was multiplying versions and nuances of a given motive, and the visions of a central characters or illuminations were expressed within the series, cycles dedicated to the focused main artistically elaborated plots.Malczewski was revealing the national sacrifices within the cycle dedicated to the Polish insurrections speaking aloud about our national aspirations and efforts leading to the dreamt national salvation. They were seen as the stages one by one, and they were to express all the aspects of the national consciousness and hardship in the crucial linkage of acts and manifestations- moments of prayers, heroism, bowing over the dead bodies of the insurrections’ participants, etc. The poetic tale “Anhelli” by Juliusz Slowacki was one of the sources of the conceptions spreading wide the Polish national alert exposed by the unlimited language of art. The narrow waist of colours was dominated by brown, grey and green accents, what resulted in the visible nostalgic effect of the constituted scenes- spatially overcrowded, likewise inspected by the cut cadre selections, Sometimes, that very raw reality of the captives and national victims reaches the additional syntax of eschatology (e.g. in pictures: “Washing Legs”, or “The Christmas Eve in Siberia”). The symbolic iconography by Malczewski was overwhelmed by the death’s obsession- presented allegorically within the plot of Thanatos, however in an exceptional, innovatory way. The figures of Eros and Thanatos were strictly bounded stigmatically to each other in the effigy of a young woman keeping a scythe. The spirit and the matter were completed each other in the person’s wide wings and the sensual shapes of her tasty body. The death was presented in the full decorative vigour, presenting itself as the mythological aura of the universal gate of transcendentalism (“Thanatos”, “Thanatos I”, “Thanaos II”). “The Mistaken Circle” presented the dancing persons- a part of them is seen in the light, others are in the shadow. The dualism of the picture is prolonged to the actions and mediums consciously undertaken by the artist. On one hand, persons are very real by means of the concentrated, soberly speaking plastic form of his canvas. On the other hand, the are not real because of the alienated communication in the course of the disillusioned action and the space’s disorder. Simultaneously- the level historic drama, instincts’ inspection seem to be very objective and they make the audience be conscious about the antinomy of the pain and the joy. In his picture- manifest “Melancholy. Prologue. Seeing. The Last Century in Poland” Malczewski links undaunted imagination with the historical of the locked treasury of the national epopee condemned to defeat. The inset meta world of recognition is the stuffy workroom of the artist.

Evaluation and Comments:

Description of how the website can be used with the students::
- The Website suggests the students the identity’s settlements of the artist’s space, the mysteries of his individual thematic absorption.

Comments::
- The students catch the artist’s ideas together with the signs of their grounds set on the collectively shared spirit and aura.

Evaluation Date: 01.09.2008.

Name of teacher: Michał Seroczyński

Name of School: CKU Sopot

Country: Poland

Subjects Taught: Fine Arts