4 December 2009 – 7 February 2010




Works by Jacek Malczewski from the Collections of the National Museum in Warsaw

Curator of the exhibition: Elżbieta Charazińska

In 2009, for the 80th anniversary of Jacek Malczewski’s death, the National Museum in Warsaw presents an exhibition containing artist’s own collection. The Polish Painting Gallery exhibits permanently only a selection of 20 most outstanding oil paintings (including interchangeably 5–7 private deposits), whereas the museum’s collection gathers 130 paintings and oil sketches as well as a set of ca. 1000 drawings (pencil, ink, crayon), watercolours and nine sketchbooks.

Both by its content and form, Malczewski’s painting still fascinates subsequent generations of public and enjoys undiminished interest of museum’s public and the collectors.

The title of the exhibition, highlighting the totality of Malczewski’s œuvre, makes also a reference to the triptych My Life which we have in our collections.

The selection of works at the exhibition – ca. 100 paintings and oil sketches as well as 150 drawings and watercolours will be presented in three sequences:
– Reminiscence of Youth (titles come from consecutive paintings) – early works confronted with the late ones both with reference to real reminiscences and depicting subjects and motives outlined at the beginning of his artistic path;
– Tribute to Art and Muse – symbolic works from the mature period;
– Empty Manor – late works with metaphysical significance and exhibited rarely or for the first time.

Œuvre by Jacek Malczewski occupies a special place during the Young Poland period. His symbolical painting contains all motives and subjects typical for the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and surprises with unbridled invention in transforming them. Important, leading subjects of his art were: national theme, art and the artist issues and eschatology. During almost fifty years of his artistic activity he developed his program motives into series, adding to recognized symbols his own ones, changing their meaning through the context of different compositions. It is a man with his old dilemma concerning the mystery of existence – birth, life and death – that lies in the centre of his art. He described a human destiny using antinomies of love and death, as well as metamorphoses of nature – symbolists’ favourites. A woman played an important role in his artistic imagination. She symbolized lost Homeland – Polonia, disguised into the form of a fantastic chimera or a harp assaulting the artist, a statue-like messenger of death Thanathos, or of his more homemade variant – a healthy-looking girl with a scythe.

Malczewski’s education in classical tradition of Latin culture, his strong rooting in the history of his country, and the religion he got accustomed with in his house, had a crucial influence on forming his personality. The artist freely drew on rich iconography of ancient and Christian art, introducing theirs symbols into his own artistic language. He also liked to make references to the world of native tales and legends, as well as to the poetry of Polish romantics. In his painting the interpretations of literary fairy-tale-like motives were never literal; he treated sources as an impulse to a free play of the imagination. He consciously mixed fantasy with reality, which is particularly striking in his portraits. By placing symbols in extended backgrounds he was offering a key to the reading of the psychological images of his models. He peopled landscapes of his childhood homeland and his later life with creatures from mythology, yet, sort of domesticated ones.

Œuvre by Malczewski is multi-faceted, as the artist himself, who used to feverously register his image in hundreds of self-portraits, having recourses also to crypto-self-portraits. The artist eagerly changed his costume – he showed himself disguised in a fool’s costume, a prisoner’s coat, a knight’s armour, represented himself as Christ, Tobias, Ezekiel, St Francis or the artist-slave of art. The phenomenon of Malczewski’s art is also based on the contrast between realistic form and symbolic content. Its significance is accentuated with an almost sculptural modelling of figures, the way of framing or the structure of planes, as well as magic code of colours, frequently based on unexpected colours’ dissonances.

translated by Anna Kiełczewska

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The National Museum in Warsaw
Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie
Aleje Jerozolimskie 3, 00-495 Warszawa
Director: prof. Piotr Piotrowski
tel. (+48 22) 621 10 31, 629 30 93
fax (+48 22) 622 85 59
www.mnw.art.pl