‘La Pologne rêvée’ at the Fondation de l’Hermitage introduces Swiss audiences to Polish art of the late 19th and early 20th century, but it can also surprise Polish visitors, offering a perspective that gently shifts away from textbook narratives.

‘A Dream of Poland: 100 Masterpieces from the National Museum in Warsaw’ at the Fondation de l’Hermitage, Lausanne

hermitage_2025_vernissage_la-pologne-revee_photomathildaolmi_008_web.jpg, default, ‘A Dream of Poland: 100 Masterpieces from the National Museum in Warsaw’ in Lausanne. Photo: Mathilda Olmi / Adam Mickiewicz Institute

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It is a curious experience to cross the Alps only to find oneself face to face with works we normally have just down the street, pieces so familiar to us from the permanent collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. But as Miłosz once wrote in Visions from San Francisco Bay (Widzenia nad zatoką San Francisco), ‘few are those who have preserved freshness of admiration’ – even the most remarkable landscapes eventually fade when looked at too often. The same is true of painting and of the late 19th century in particular, that ‘happy hour’ in the history of Polish art, to borrow Maria Poprzęcka’s phrase.

After centuries during which Polish painting lagged behind the European mainstream, the generation of Jan Matejko – and especially his students, such as Stanisław Wyspiański and Józef Mehoffer – sparked an exceptionally lush flowering. Even the interwar avant-garde artists, who distanced themselves from their Young Poland predecessors, could not escape acknowledging them as a point of reference.

The exhibition La Pologne rêvée (A Dream of Poland), showing one hundred works from the National Museum in Warsaw in the intimate surroundings of the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne, creates an opportunity to look afresh at the most canonical artists, from Matejko, Olga Boznańska and Wojciech Weiss to Zofia Stryjeńska. But it also presents a somewhat different picture of Young Poland, juxtaposing the familiar with works pulled from storage that may surprise even Polish viewers.

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‘A Dream of Poland: 100 Masterpieces from the National Museum in Warsaw’ in Lausanne. Photo: Mathilda Olmi / Adam Mickiewicz Institute

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Curated by Agnieszka Lajus and Agnieszka Bagińska, the director of the National Museum in Warsaw and the curator of its Polish art collection up to 1914, the exhibition offers a familiar narrative with unexpected tweaks. Organized in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, it takes over the entirety of an institution that is devoted exclusively to temporary shows but that by virtue of its location is set against the background of 19th-century Swiss painting, well known to the local public. To see this context fully, however, one must travel to the other side of the country – to the Kunstmuseum Basel.

There, the permanent collection includes a broad representation of two Swiss masters of symbolism: Arnold Böcklin and Ferdinand Hodler. Böcklin, who preferred mythological motifs while rejecting academic conventions in favour of unrestrained expression, suffered the misfortune of being appropriated by German nationalists. As a Swiss painter who had spent much of his life in Italy, he was nonetheless branded a ‘Germanic’ artist to such an extent that Hitler himself owned eleven of his pieces. Hodler was spared such entanglements; his melodramatic pictures, with their trembling outlines, oversaturated colours and figures pasted onto shallow stage sets, found a place in the European canon – though maybe not its first rank.

French post-impressionists had a strong influence on Swiss art at the turn of the century as well. Artists such as Cuno Amiet, Max Buri, Giovanni Giacometti and Ernest Biéler set the tone of the time, combining liberated colour and line with everyday motifs, often drawn from rural life in Alpine valleys. If Polish painters of the era turned to folk subjects as a reservoir of ‘Polishness’ in defiance of partition politics and post-uprising repression, Swiss artists were building their own cultural identity in the decades following the creation of the federal state in 1848.

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‘A Dream of Poland: 100 Masterpieces from the National Museum in Warsaw’ in Lausanne. Photo: Mathilda Olmi / Adam Mickiewicz Institute

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While Poles looked to Napoleon as the promise of regaining independence lost only recently, for the citizens of the Helvetic Republic, created after the 1798 uprising, Bonaparte was the one who cemented their subordination to France. The following years brought an armed peasant march on Zurich, several uprisings and finally a civil war in 1847, driven by tensions between Calvinist liberals and conservative Catholics, tensions fanned by the neighbouring powers of France and Austria.

The situation of artists from a state that officially did not exist was certainly unique, but, within the political frictions of the 19th century, its identity-driven character was not so unusual. Placing Polish works into this broader European context is one of the great strengths of the Lausanne exhibition, achieved not through direct comparison but through the precise selection of pieces from the Warsaw museum’s collection.

The exhibition opens with a section titled Soul of the Nation, which, despite its lofty name, turns out to be surprisingly grounded. This is Poland shown through tangible symbols and concrete events. We see Stanisław Wyspiański’s view of Wawel Cathedral or Leon Wyczółkowski’s depiction of Queen Jadwiga’s tomb, but not straw effigies coming to life or long-dead monarchs climbing out of their sarcophagi. Even Jacek Malczewski – though he returns at the end of the show with his fully dreamlike late works – appears here almost as a realist, showing Polish exile to Siberia, in this case filtered through Juliusz Słowacki’s Anhelli. Spirits and phantoms are largely restrained, emerging only in Witold Pruszkowski’s All Souls’ Day (Zaduszki).

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‘A Dream of Poland: 100 Masterpieces from the National Museum in Warsaw’ in Lausanne. Photo: Mathilda Olmi / Adam Mickiewicz Institute

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In the next gallery, History and Imagery, the change of focus is even clearer. Here, inevitably, we find Matejko – but not the painter-philosopher of history, the creator of monumental multi-figure canvases illustrating the perspective of Kraków’s conservative ‘Stańczyk’ faction. Instead, we encounter Sigismund Augustus with Barbara at the Radziwiłł Court in Vilnius (Zygmunt August z Barbarą na dworze radziwiłłowskim w Wilnie), a small painting from the period Kazimierz Wyka described as ‘patriotic-bourgeois.’ At this time Matejko was still under the influence of Paul Delaroche, the French painter of historical-genre scenes who was more interested in intimate moments and emotional tension than in spectacular events, the author of works resembling stills from a costume period drama. Yet even here, in this nocturnal meeting of the king and his future second wife, we see the beginnings of Matejko’s mature style and his tendency toward allegory: the lute, the swans, the shooting star and Queen Bona’s portrait all foreshadow the couple’s tragic fate – a painterly equivalent not of Chekhov’s gun but of an entire arsenal of symbolic props.

In Slavic Magic, local folklore assumes forms that resonate with Hodler’s symbolism, particularly in Marian Wawrzeniecki’s visions of Slavic groves with their tremulous art nouveau lines and flat, illustrative compositions that are closely aligned with broader, transnational currents. Yet the central role in the exhibition belongs to landscape, unfolded across three chapters: from Władysław Podkowiński’s luminist, impressionist canvases, through Julian Fałat’s Japanese-inspired snow scenes and Stanisław Witkiewicz’s exalted Tatra views, to the symbolist landscapes of Ferdynand Ruszczyc and Henryk Szczygliński. Here, stripped of staffage, the shared formal concerns across borders become all the more apparent: Michalina Krzyżanowska’s Two Lakes (Dwa jeziora), shown in Switzerland, unexpectedly recalls Hodler’s views of Lake Geneva.

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‘A Dream of Poland: 100 Masterpieces from the National Museum in Warsaw’ in Lausanne. Photo: Mathilda Olmi / Adam Mickiewicz Institute

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The final chapters bring folk themes – so central to national identity – to the forefront. At one end stands Włodzimierz Tetmajer with his rustic scenes from Bronowice, at the other Zofia Stryjeńska with her Slavic fantasies. But the most compelling works fall in between. The curators have avoided folkloristic idealization; instead we find Wyczółkowski’s earthy, melancholic portrait of an old fisherman and, at the heart of the Peasants and the Land section, Stanisław Lentz’s little-known Shepherd Boy (Pastuszek).

The subject was a favourite of the Munich school painters, yet Lentz’s version is far removed from the sentimental imagery of Stanisław Witkiewicz’s shepherdess or even Józef Chełmoński’s Indian Summer (Babie lato), once scandalous for the girl’s ostentatiously dirty feet. Though painterly less refined than those two, Lentz’s portrait strikes a powerful chord through its raw immediacy. The boy’s torn, grimy clothes are one thing; his sad, distrustful gaze tells of the poverty and harshness of peasant life as forcefully as many written pages of social history. In Fryderyk Pautsch’s Fiddler – Symbolic Scene Against Landscape (Skrzypek – scena symboliczna na tle pejzażu), by contrast, the departure from idyllic fantasy leads in the opposite direction: against the backdrop of the artist’s more conventional Hutsul scenes, the painting stands out through its Munch-like stylization, compositionally close to the Norwegian’s Anxiety painted fifteen years earlier. Here the femme fatale of Young Poland takes the form of a Hutsul girl, who, despite the misogynistic cliché, asserts a presence and subjecthood absent from the usual rustic idealizations.

While rooted in the realities of partition-era struggles for identity, the Lausanne exhibition does not weave sweeping narratives of national art. Instead, it introduces subtle shifts of emphasis, enabling familiar works to be seen in a new setting that is formally and thematically aligned with Swiss (and broader European) 19th-century upheavals and revaluations. It shows, in passing, that, despite the political circumstances, this truly was a ‘happy hour’ for Polish painting and that, however overexposed Young Poland may seem, it still rewards a fresh gaze.

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