Contemporary Polish Painting [antikvár]

I. ART AND HISTORY In July 1944 the Union of Polish Artists was reactivated in Lublin. By October of the same year the first painting exhibition in liberated Poland had opened. These events took place at a time when hard fighting was going on in the rest of the country. The resumption of artistic activity practically on the front lines and the inauguration of a program aimed at creating an organizational framework for the future development of art can be recognized today as efforts imbued with symbolic significance. They foreshadowed the active participation of artists in reconstructing the country and testified to the vital force of art, which had survived the darkness of the occupation in spite of painful losses within the ranks of the artists themselves. Without recounting these facts It is almost impossible to fully understand the history of contemporary Polish art, particularly that of its initial period of coming to terms with the nightmare of the war. Some conceived of this task as a moral and social obligation to depict the tragedy. Others consciously avoided taking up themes within the area of national martyrdom, a fact which can be explained as a result of the natural need for stabilization at the time. The same historical events created two extremely diverse forms of reaction: an expressive art passing judgment on recent history as well as a postimpressionist offshoot representing optimism and the joy of living. History-oriented art has its own rich tradition in Poland. Rather than looking too far back into the past, let us examine the period which is closest to us chronologically, the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At that time painting employing symbols, allegory, and metaphor developed alongside realistic art. Neoromanticism, as the "Young Poland" period can be described more generally (though it was strongly tied to Western European fin-de-siecle art), had a slightly different character in Poland. To a great extent, it developed on the basis of his-torico-philosophical reflections of a visionary character. These elements are expressed with particular clarity in the works of the painter and poet Stanlstaw Wyspianski, whose creations include two monumental stained-glass windows: Polonia (1894) and Casimir the Great (1900—02). We can also find these elements in several of Jacek Malczewski's symbolic canvases. His Melancholy, painted in 1894, was a moralistic parable depicting the fate of the Polish nation. In Witold Wojtkiewicz's works an expres-