All the Shades of Night: Nocturnes in Polish Painting

pruszkowski-na_zeslanie.jpg, full-width, ‘Into Exile in Siberia’ by Witold Pruszkowski, 1893, photo: Lviv Art Gallery / Wikipedia.org

#photography & visual arts

Atmospheric landscapes permeated with melancholy are everyone’s first association with nocturne painting. That’s only the beginning, however. Depictions of frolics and folk rituals, scenes involving extraordinary figures and quite commonplace objects which the evening light endows with an eerie quality – for centuries, nighttime has been a crucial source of inspiration for painters, who continue to capture its various aspects on canvas.

Nocturnes found a permanent spot in European painting as early as the High Renaissance. However, it was 19th century artists, from Romantics to Symbolists, who took a particular liking to nighttime. Indeed, the late 19th and early 20th centuries marked the golden age of nocturnal painting, especially in the Polish context. And it’s due not only to the multiplicity of the ways nighttime motifs were approached but also to pure statistics. According to the meticulous calculations of Aleksandra Melbechowska-Luty: ‘Even looking only at the exhibitions in Zachęta [National Gallery of Art] in the years 1860–1914, one can pick out around a hundred artists who were engaged with this subject.’

A nocturnal setting resonated particularly strongly with the sensitivity of Polish artists, both those who, interested in the landscape itself, sought in it a reflection of the states of the human soul, and those with a fondness for narrative elements interested in folklore, the history of the struggle for independence or the night life of large metropolises. Discussing the Polish painters of Munich, Stanisław Witkiewicz reports:

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The Germans would make unsophisticated jokes, claiming that the melancholy Polish soul expresses itself through the amount of black paint Poles use in their paintings. And indeed, Poles painted more of these sad autumn evenings, these melancholy grey hours, these gloomy, mysterious, eldritch nights than anyone else in those days.

Nighttime activities

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‘View of Łazienki Palace & Theatre by Moonlight’ by Zygmunt Vogel, 1795, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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The nocturne, however, wasn’t always associated with a wistful and melancholic mood. The nocturnes of the 18th century are mostly works highlighting the picturesque quality of the landscape bathed in silver moonlight: decorative, elegant and emanating calmness. This is well demonstrated by the example of Zygmunt Vogel’s watercolour and gouache painting Łazienki przy księżycu (Łazienki by Moonlight). Save for a different colour palette dominated by shades of grey, subtle azures and muted greens, the atmosphere of Vogel’s nighttime landscape doesn’t differ much from analogous landscapes depicted in broad daylight.

And the staffage is there, too. Since purely landscape nocturnes were still quite rare in Polish art of the period, the nighttime scenery includes a small crowd of strollers. To quote Melbechowska-Luty, ‘The distinctive atmosphere of this landscape evokes a sense of drowsiness, calm and quiet, unspoilt even by the nighttime fun of ladies and gallants strolling by the waterside and sailing their boats on the pond’.

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‘Night in Pompeii’ by Henryk Siemiradzki, 1881, private collection / AGRA ART auction house / public domain

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We encounter a similar atmosphere in the academic art of Henryk Siemiradzki. Noc w Pompejach (Night in Pompeii) is a work belonging to Siemiradzki’s group of paintings that present scenes from the daily lives of ancient Greeks and Romans. They are relatively numerous, yet they are overshadowed by his more famous compositions drawing from early Christian motifs.

For this academic painter, archaeological scrupulosity in depicting architectural details and details of dress was just as important as the atmosphere of the nighttime scene. A young man and a young woman sit among sarcophagi and mausoleums, leaning over a glow-worm and holding each other’s hands in a gesture of dextrarum iunctio, one evoking nuptial associations. The scene itself may be taking place in the evening, but the artist, following the rules of academicism, avoided presenting any element of the painting as being submerged in darkness. Delineation dominates over patches of colour, the palette is muted, but the night scenery is visible quite clearly.

Kupala nights

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‘St John’s Eve’ by Ferdynand Ruszczyc, 1898, photo: Częstochowa Museum

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The same artist employed different means of building atmosphere in his 1867 work Noc na Iwana Kupały (Night on the Eve of Ivan Kupala). The scene, located on a riverbank in the middle of the night, involves a group of young people gathered over a bonfire, most notably young girls in white shirts and colourful skirts, one of whom steadies herself to jump over the flames, a traditional element of midsummer night celebrations. The eerie mood is created by the use of tenebrism: the employment of sharp chiaroscuro to bring the human figures out from the background submerged in darkness.

This early painting belongs to a group of sentimental genre scenes depicted by young Semiradzki, which preceded his academism-influenced search for ideal classical beauty. During his studies in St Petersburg, the artist was fascinated by folkloric genre painting, including, for instance, the works of Konstantin Trutovsky. It’s this preoccupation that’s reflected in compositions such as Night on the Eve of Ivan Kupala.

Thumbnail — Zofia Stryjeńska, 'Children by a Campfire', photo: Artinfo.pl Sp. z o.o.

The midsummer night folk rituals painted by Siemiradzki in his youth were also an object of fascination for painters younger than he, who found a different mode of representing these traditions. In Ferdynand Ruszczyc’s Sobótki (St John’s Eve), which presents an analogous scene, expressive symbolism replaced the picturesque, sentimental quality characteristic for Siemiradzki. The landscape, presented from a bird’s-eye view, drowns in darkness out of which only tiny human figures emerge, illuminated by bonfire flames and marked merely by a few pronounced brushstrokes.

Kupala Night also constitutes a recurrent motif in Zofia Stryjeńska’s interwar paintings. Although her compositional works, such as Dzieci przy ognisku (Children by a Campfire), painted with gouache and tempera, bear a closer resemblance to those by Siemiradzki than to those by Ruszczyc, here a similar folk motif underwent a modernist stylisation. Stryjeńska composed the night scene with the use of vibrant, saturated colours and endowed the static image with a dynamic quality by employing geometrical, rhythmic forms.

Nature a hundred times larger

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‘Foehn Wind’ by Stanisław Witkiewicz, 1895, 93 x 142 cm, photo: National Museum in Kraków

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Landscape-only motifs gain a particularly dramatic quality in nighttime sceneries. For 19th century painters, the nocturne became a perfect tool for expressing sublimity and awe at the forces of nature. Discussing a painting by Józef Marszewski on the pages of Tygodnik Ilustrowany (The Illustrated Weekly), Ludwik Buszard wrote, ‘Nature, enormous under the gaze of the sun, is a hundred times larger when enveloped in the mysterious shadows of the night’.

Landscape paintings such as Marszewski’s Krajobraz nocny z wiatrakami (Nocturnal Landscape with Windmills) are still dominated by Romantic picturesqueness, which, with the development of realist painting in the 1870s, metamorphosed into an atmospheric quality combined with meticulous observation of light and weather effects. The atmosphere or mood, called Stimmung in German, became one of the most important categories in the painterly discourse, especially in the circles of painters living and studying in Munich.

In his writings, Stanisław Witkiewicz associated Stimmung landscapes with explicitly minor moods, claiming that with the onset of the night ‘all people experience a sort of psychic depression’, which he linked to the atavistic feeling of ‘the fear of danger always lurking for animals and primitive people in the shadows of the night’. Witkiewicz’s own art, however, went beyond such narrowly defined atmosphere, as demonstrated, for instance, by Wiatr halny (Foehn Wind), the most famous work in the oeuvre of the painter, critic and architect, as well as one of the most outstanding nocturnes in the history of Polish painting.

The painting, created within the first few years following the artist’s move to Zakopane, is the first attempt in the history of Polish painting to represent the eponymous phenomenon on canvas. The realistic landscape with a solitary spruce tree in a snowy Tatra clearing, bending under the press of the wind, still bears a resemblance to the Stimmung paintings of the ‘Munich group’. The expression of awe at the forces of nature, intertwined with the fear of elemental power, is just as important here as the naturalistic depiction of the landscape.

Witold Pruszkowski, in turn, employed the night landscape as a narrative tool, particularly in his works depicting the fate of Polish exiles in Siberia. While in the works of Artur Grottger, for instance, the night frequently served as a background for events related to pro-independence uprisings, Pruszkowski, an artist who straddled, as it were, the line between Romanticism and Symbolism, reversed these proportions by narrating history mostly through the landscape itself. His 1893 work Na zesłanie w Sybir (Into Exile in Siberia) depicts only the tiny, hunched-up figures of the marching exiles passing by the frontier post and into the snowy desert towards the horizon behind which the sun has already disappeared, leaving behind only a narrow shaft of blood-red light.

In dark alleys

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‘Louis Bridge in Munich’ by Aleksander Gierymski, 1896–97, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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Next to the landscapes depicting primeval nature, untamed by human activity, urban landscapes at night occupied an equally important place in the oeuvre of realist and Symbolist painters. The 1890s saw the creation of an entire series of nighttime panoramas of Munich, Paris and Rome painted by Aleksander Gierymski. In these works, the artist developed his interest in studying light and colour, which he had previously explored in his sunny landscapes.

Nighttime scenery caused painterly challenges to mount. Gierymski meticulously studied the effects of electric light illuminating streets, foggy air, the interpenetration of artificial light and fading natural light; he captured reflections on the wet surface of pavements, the play of shadows on sidewalks and buildings and the peculiar flattening of perspective in twilight. At the same time, Gierymski’s urban nocturnes tended to be far removed from the dark tones of the so-called ‘Munich sauces’ [a pejorative term for the dark colours Munich school artists often employed, trans.] stereotypically associated with Stimmung painting. Rather, they abounded in subtle hues of pink and azure gracing the sky after sunset, as, for example, in Most Ludwika w Monachium (Louis Bridge in Munich).

In the works of post-Impressionist painters, the social context would often pierce through the play of light and shadow. In the decadent perspective of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city at night figures as a sinkhole of depravity, moral downfall and rot, simultaneously tempting and repellent. Hence, urban nocturnal landscapes by artists such as Gustaw Gwozdecki, who was influenced by the writings of Stanisław Przybyszewski and the works of Edvard Munch, are peopled by prostitutes, thieves and sketchy characters of all sorts.

Another one of the most interesting instances of this tendency within the urban nocturne is Wojciech Weiss’s 1918 painting Złodzieje (Thieves). The artist, associated mostly with the Young Poland era and known for his earlier paintings, such as Melancholik (The Melancholic), remained active until his death in 1950. His works from the first decades of the 20th century are characterised by a great deal of variety both in subject matter and in style, from classicising compositions to works inspired by expressionism. Złodzieje belongs to the latter, with a setting composed of sharp, prismatically refracted geometric figures and small, black silhouettes of villains flashing in between.

Among the darkest, most stirring nocturnes in the history of Polish painting are the works of Erna Rosenstein, a surrealist associated with the Kraków Group before World War Two and active throughout the 20th century. The motif of a moonlit night and a knife recur in many of her paintings. Works such as Noc (Night) from 1993 seduce the viewer with their richness of textural effects while simultaneously evoking profound unease. The knife, levitating amidst a half-abstract landscape and represented with painstaking realism, isn’t just a random prop. The painting refers directly to the most traumatic event in the artist’s life: the murder of her parents during World War Two. Both of them were brutally killed by shmaltsovniks during an attempt at a nighttime escape, and their heads were cut off with a knife.

All the shades of darkness

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‘Nocturne – Swans in the Saxon Garden in Warsaw at Night’ by Józef Pankiewicz, 1893–94, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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The influence of French Impressionism is reflected, for instance, in the aforementioned nocturnes by Aleksander Gierymski. However, the most radical consequences of the Impressionist artistic formula are to be found in nighttime landscapes by Józef Pankiewicz. His 1892 work Rynek Starego Miasta w Warszawie nocą (Old Town Square in Warsaw at Night) reveals the author’s fascination with the oeuvre of Gierymski, an artist one generation older. Here, Pankiewicz studies the light effects of the gas lighting illuminating Warsaw’s Old Town, but the colour palette is decidedly more vibrant and closer to French Impressionism than in the work of Gierymski, whose paintings were texturally uniform and scrupulously built with layers of glaze.

Rafał Bujnowski, "Nokturn (Graboszyce)", 2012-2013, olej na płótnie, fot. dzięki uprzejmości Galerii Raster — ‘Nocturne (Graboszyce)’ by Rafał Bujnowski, 2012–13, oil on canvas, photo: courtesy of Raster Gallery

Two of Pankiewicz’s slightly later nocturnes are marked both by the influence of Impressionism and by symbolic purport: painted in the Saxon Garden in Warsaw, they were inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem about swans whose wings froze to the ice sheet of a lake. Nokturn – łabędzie w Ogrodzie Saskim w Warszawie nocą (Nocturne – Swans in the Saxon Garden in Warsaw at Night) is a composition nearly monochromatic and abstract. The canvas is submerged in blackness, interspersed only with yellowish reflexes on the lake sheet and three blurry greyish blots in which one can barely identify the eponymous birds.

In contemporary art, Rafał Bujnowski went a step further in using almost exclusively black to create an atmospheric nocturnal landscape. In a series of nighttime views of the artist’s hometown of Graboszyce, we see a lake, a line of trees in the distance, and sometimes human figures over the water. A pale moon occasionally appears in the sky, but at other times the artist uses only tarry black paint, constructing the scenery exclusively by means of fitting brushstrokes. Human figures and elements of landscape emerge from the uniform surface thanks to the reflections of light on the shiny parts of the painting and the appropriate trajectory of the brush.

To see the night anew

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‘Ford Ceska’ by Karol Palczak, 2019, Krzywcza, photo: https://karolpalczak.com

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Bujnowski’s black monochromes aren’t the only proof of the continued vitality of nocturnal motifs in contemporary Polish painting. In his works, Karol Palczak enters into a dialogue with the golden age of the genre. Drawing heavily on the 19th-century tradition of realist painting, the artist, born in the Bieszczady village of Krzywcza, nevertheless translates these rules into the contemporary context.

His painting Ford Ceska is an almost direct contemporary response to Józef Chełmoński’s Noc na Ukrainie zimą (Winter Night in Ukraine). The 1877 work depicts several horse carriages stopping by a manor house. We also see a pack of dogs near the waiting horses, but it’s the landscape itself that takes up the majority of the canvas. Chełmoński guides the eye of the viewer from the house, cropped by the picture frame, into the landscape; the viewer’s gaze follows the shoe prints and hoof prints visible in the snow and the traces of sleigh runners extending to the horizon.

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‘Behind the Curtain’ by Karolina Jabłońska, 2020, photo: Raster Gallery / rastergallery.com

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Palczak composed his 2019 painting analogically. This time, however, we see a fragment of a contemporary country home with the eponymous car parked outside. At the centre of the composition there’s a fragment of a yard covered with snow, illuminated by a shaft of light from the headlights. Footprints and traces of tyres are clearly visible in the sharp, cold light, and falling snowflakes glitter in the air.

Genre nocturnes, too, recur in contemporary painting, this time not in the form of folk rituals or imaginary scenes from the lives of ancient Romans but in the form of much more commonplace situations. During the pandemic-time lockdown, Karolina Jabłońska authored a series of melancholic paintings documenting the sense of isolation, depicting everyday scenes in nighttime scenery: hair-combing, sketching, somnambulistic moping around the room, or simply sleeping – all bathed in greenish-blue light, in a night illuminated by the moonlight and ubiquitous screens.

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‘Fridge’ by Tomasz Kręcicki, 2018, photo: courtesy of Stereo, Warsaw

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Tomasz Kręcicki, who forms the Kraków-based group Potencja together with Jabłońska and Cyryl Polaczek, turns to similar sceneries, though cropped slightly differently and more closely. While in Jabłońska’s works we concentrate mostly on the female figure endowed with the facial features of the artist herself, Kręcicki draws our attention to situations and objects: reaching for a pill illuminated by the pale, cold light of a smartphone screen or looking into the fridge in the middle of the night. We could say, then, that nowadays, just as in the 19th century, the nocturne is first and foremost a form of atmospheric painting, only now it’s the atmosphere related to nighttime snacking and scrolling through Instagram in bed rather than watching swans in the Saxon Garden.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

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