An Arcadia Among Spoil Heaps: Rafał Malczewski’s Modern Pastoral

pogodne_zycie-fot-mnw.jpg, default, Rafał Malczewski, ‘Pogodne Życie’ (Cheerful Life), from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, An Arcadia Among Spoil Heaps: Rafał Malczewski’s Modern Pastoral

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Popular in the culture of ancient Rome and resurrected by early modern painters, the pastoral was based on an idealised image of country life. Nowadays, it’s been revived, in a way, in TikTok videos of the ‘cottagecore’ kind. Still, sentimental images with shepherds among Arcadian scenery can hardly be encountered in the art of the last few decades. The last time the pastoral constituted a common artistic motif was during the interwar period. Nevertheless, one of the contemporaneous artists adapted it into a unique, modern form.

A bird’s eye view over a Podhale landscape. Bathed in the warm light of a summer sun, a Highlander watches over a flock of sheep. Nearby, a horse pulling a wagon heads towards a country house as a group of women bends over a balk, standing close next to each other. The 1927 painting Pogodne Życie (Cheerful Life) by Rafał Malczewski can almost be seen as a textbook example of pastoral art. Here’s a vision of a happy village life, flowing in harmony with the biological rhythm of nature, indifferent to historical turmoils, political earthquakes, or technological progress. However, among the works of the painter with close ties to Zakopane, it constitutes more of a departure from the norm.

A brush of modernity

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Rafał Malczewski, ‘Wiosna (Deszcz)’ (Spring [Rain]), photo: Tatra Museum in Zakopane

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Stanisław Potępa, the first monographer of Malczewski junior, wrote: ‘Rafał’s place among interwar painters was a separate one. He was a real outsider, wandering somewhere around the margins of more or less clearly specified currents of Polish interwar art.’ While the researcher does his best to extricate the subtle links between the oeuvre of the father and the son, the younger Malczewski was by no means a direct continuator of the work of the older, the author of Melancholia. Interwar criticism considered him almost a prime example of an artist following not in a famous parent’s footsteps but rather pursuing his own, completely distinct path.

Anyway, despite his artistic lineage, Rafał Malczewski was pretty much self-taught. He didn’t complete higher education of any sort – although he briefly studied philosophy in Vienna, he never even had as much as a brush with the Academy of Fine Arts. His father wasn’t particularly interested in his son’s artistic education – all he did was give him some sparse advice. As a result, in texts more favourable to the artist, critics would mention the naive stylisation of his artworks, while the less approving ones would pinpoint their technical shortcomings. Potępa assessed his art as ‘half-learned, affected by not more than a brush of modernity’. Not more than a brush perhaps, but a brush not just of anybody or anything. For Malczewski’s newly-forming sensibility, it was not consistent education that was of key importance but rather his encounters with the works of several prominent figures. In Vienna, it was Egon Schiele; in Zakopane, Witkacy.

Torn between the end of Polish painting, which was being diagnosed at the time, and the search for artists close to his theoretical principles, what Witkacy noticed in Malczewski’s art – similarly as in that of Ludomir Slendziński or Bronisław Wojciech Linke – was ‘reality magnified’. The influence of Witkacy’s sensibility can even be observed in the titles of Malczewski’s early paintings, such as Scena Figuralna z Różowym Jamnikiem (Figural Scene with a Pink Daschund) or I Pofrunęła Aptekarzowa (And So Flew the Pharmacist’s Wife). Formally, however, Malczewski took a different route. His post-impressionist studies of landscapes and small-town genre scenes were influenced mostly by the flourishing at the time Formist movement, only subjected to light geometrisation and expressive overdrawing. Simultaneously, in the spirit close to that of so-called New Objectivity – not just German but also Swiss and Austrian, as practised by artists such as Rudolf Wacker – Malczewski didn’t break up form but rather exaggerated it up to minute details, a solution that Witkacy, averse to the officially circulating terminology, would refer to as hyperrealism. Metaphysical mud

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Wacław Borowski, ‘Nad Wodą’ (By the Water), from the collection of the Upper Silesia Museum in Bytom

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What’s meant to emerge out of the aforementioned exaggeration, according to Witkacy’s principles, is the metaphysical lining of reality. The landscape paintings coming from under Malczewski’s brush in the 1920s are were characterised by a distorted, dramatised perspective, unreal light sharply outlining the masses of buildings and at the same time falling softly on mountain slopes, as well as a diagonal, theatrical composition of frames and exaggerated, bright, at times even candy-like colour schemes. However, it’s not just nature and villages scattered around mountainsides that these landscape paintings depict.

What the artist felt particular affinity towards were trains and railway stations. His, however, weren’t depictions as if straight from the works of Turner or 19th-century American photographers, in which the grandeur of the landscape clashes with the peculiar grandeur of modern technology. Neither did the artist relish speed and mechanistic aesthetics in the spirit of Futurism. Rather, what characterises these works is stillness, schematisation, small scale. In the 1930s, on the pages of the Plastyka (Fine Arts) magazine, Malczewski himself wrote that he was interested in: ‘railroads rather than trunk lines, the single-track ones, tiny stations and railway stops, small towns, puddles and roads covered in mud'.

A frame with a small-town square recurs in its several versions, always with the same motif at the heart of the composition – a monument with a man reading and a muse holding a wreath in her outspread arms. These seemingly picturesque scenes of small-town idyll hold certain ambiguity, however. Potępa noticed in them ‘provincial vegetation of small-town >>high society<< and their dreams of greatness symbolised by the monument’. They constitute a visual reflection of the obsession with commonness and all things tacky, recurring especially in the literature of the time, in the works of Schulz, Tuwim, and Gałczyński, a Skamander-like mild intoxication with modern ‘barbarity’.

In the aforementioned text, Malczewski himself described his fascination with railway as ambiguous:

These days, I am not as keen on it, and neither do I value it as much as a means of transportation; I do not wish to become a railway clerk, and I do not advertise our railway industry. Still, I am somehow attracted to this world, at the same time feeling something akin to disgust towards it.

This sort of ambivalence would then become a constantly recurring refrain in the artist’s works. Warm humour and bitter satire, idealisation and gloomy, dramatic style would intertwine in individual paintings, at other times appearing adjacent to each other within larger series.

Uhlans & horsepower

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Rafał Malczewski, ‘Auto na Tle Zimowego Pejzażu’ (Automobile with a Winter Landscape), from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw

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In Malczewski’s art, emblems of modernity generally tend to be ambiguous. The automobile, which for Marinetti was ‘more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’, becomes a cause of a tragic accident in the expressive painting Zbrodnie Automobilowe (Automobile Crimes), clearly created still under the influence of the Formists. In a technologically backward country, churned up with partition lines and lifting itself up from non-existence, the attitude to industrial civilisation tends to be that of devotion, almost endowed with magical thinking. In one of his futurist poems, Tytus Czyżewski wrote:

Man birthed and unleashed a machine, which will one day kill him or surpass him. / We will build machines – travel to the stars to watch the sun.

Technology perceived as one of the elements evoked admiration, but also, as elements do, could wreak havoc. Simultaneously, however, Malczewski would paint idyllic scenes with sport automobiles speeding through mountain landscapes. Their bright, distinctive, spindly forms contrast with Post-Impressionist sceneries of slopes covered with grass and soft snow. Malczewski applied contrast between the two elements in the paintings while at the same time modernising the artistic motif of sledges or horse carriages speeding through country byways, a theme known, for instance, from Józef Chełmoński’s famous ‘threes’ and ‘fours’. Significantly, one of the idyllic scenes with automobile is said to have been inspired not only by mountain car-and-motorbike races, organised from 1927 to 1941 by Kraków Automobile Society under the Tatras, but also by the history of a tragic accident which took place two months prior to the 1930 race. It resulted in the death of the poet Julian Ejsmond, whose car fell off a corner and crashed as he was returning from Morskie Oko.

Similarly does the painter actualize – not without irony – another cliché in his ‘railway paintings,’ such as Wschód Księżyca (Moonrise). Here’s an idyllic scene among an atmospheric evening landscape. It includes all the obligatory elements – lovers embracing against a picturesque background. There’s something more, though – an enormous silhouette of a locomotive filling tightly the centre of the canvas, almost as if blowing the painting apart. The boy’s shepherd’s attire, in turn, is replaced by a train driver’s uniform. As Stanisław Potępa observed, it’s basically an ironic take on the mushy postcard motif popularised by Wojciech Kossak through his painting Koń, Ułan i Dziewczyna (Girl and Uhlan with a Horse). Malczewski replaced the uhlan with a train driver and the steed with the iron colossus of an engine.

The discreet charm of old coal pits

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Eugeniusz Zak ‘Romans Pasterski (Sielanka)’ (Shepherd’s Affair [Pastoral]), from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw

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Malczewski, then, toyed consciously with the pastoral convention, reanimated during the interwar period in its more formulaic form by artists representing contemporaneous classicism, lined with a light Post-Cubist and at times folk stylisation. Among them were mostly members of the Rytm Association, such as Eugeniusz Zak and Wacław Borowski. Zak’s almost postcard-like, Arcadian scenes are located among hilltops, rocks, and sometimes exotic trees, in completely imaginary settings, neither domestic nor Italian not Provençal. As Stefania Zahorska wrote back then, it’s ‘a deindividualized world, symbols with no name, an embodiment of a dream of some vegetative life, whose only denominator is all-encompassing harmony’.

Despite all the syncretism of attitudes typical for a group devoid of common objectives, Rytm members were accused of getting to caught up with their sophisticated vision and losing all contact with the reality of modern world, ‘with modern life bustling every day in the streets,’ as Mieczysław Wallis wrote in 1936. While Malczewski was equally cautious when it came to incorporating avant-garde influences into his art, he did go a step further in that regard. He idealised and created fiction, but his was strongly entrenched in the reality of the new, industrialized landscape. In his paintings, the dissonance between Arcadian idyll and fascination with modernity, industry, speed, and noise is transformed into coexistence, and the choice between the former and the latter turns out to be an inherently false duality. The two forces – natural landscapes and industrial civilisation – intertwine with one another.

The achievements of the industrial era encroach on the landscape of forests and meadows, while the broad natural perspective calms, in a way, the element of technological advancements. Railway ceases to be something akin to a mythological beast puffing out steam, turning instead into a boxy string of almost toy-like carriages, calmly rolling between Tatra peaks. Juxtaposed with their massifs, the train’s speed becomes much less impressive. Wallis emphasised the Rytm artists’ detachment from modernity more than enough, asking:

What does Zak’s >>Sielanka<< (Idyll) have in common with the submarine, Roguski’s >>Madonna<< with Einstein’s theory, Skoczylas’ artworks with Poland’s new national aspirations?

Admittedly, among Malczewski’s paintings we will find neither submarines nor Einstein, but we will most definitely encounter images closer to everyday experience, such as those of railway tracks, factories, or pipelines biting into natural landscapes. While he didn’t directly continue on his father’s artistic path, he didn’t, as befits Jacek Malczewski’s son, baulk at the question of Polishness.

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Rafał Malczewski, ‘Brzask Rodzącej Się Polski’ (Dawn of Nascent Poland), from the collection of the National Museum in Kielce

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From mid-1930s on, the artist would redirect his focus from Tatra peaks to similarly soaring massifs, namely the silhouettes of chimneys and blast furnaces, mines and factory halls. He would travel around Silesia and the Central Industrial Instinct, stay as a guest with Emil Zegadłowicz, who in his Pieśni o Śląsku (Songs of Silesia) praised the beauty of industrial landscape. While industrial sceneries had occasionally appeared in painting before, for instance in Karol Hiller’s works representing Łódź, Malczewski paved the way in that regard. Just as in his Tatra landscapes he would capture a wide variety of imageries, ranging from bucolic to dramatic, so would he diversify the tone of his industrial scenes. Occasionally cool and scrupulous like the New Objectivists, at other times he would follow American painters of the Charles Demuth sort in depicting the lyricism and beauty of industrial constructions. At still other times, he would reach directly for the idyllic convention, partly tenderly, partly ironically locating it among a scenery that’s far form Arcadian, as he did in Sielanka przy Hałdzie Cynkowej (Pastoral with a Zinc Spoil Heap).

Admittedly, one may question the ‘completely non-propaganda function’ of Malczewski’s paintings that Dorota Folga-Januszewska wrote about, especially taking into consideration some of his works, such as his depiction of a high voltage line endowed with the pompous title of Dawn of Nascent Poland. Still, the painter did indeed create in, as the scholar put it, ‘a distinct genre, almost unknown in Polish art – industrial magic landscape’. For the artist, whose tendency to cross the boundaries of formal naïveté was occasionally pointed out, it was the formally sophisticated pastoral in the style of Zak that must’ve seemed naive during the times when even uninhabited stretches of land had been cut up either by roads and railway tracks or by high voltage lines and telephone cables.

In the eyes of Wacław Husarski, an art critic and Malczewski’s contemporary, the latter’s industrial pastorals are scenes ‘for a refined aesthete almost repulsive: a poetic sea shore reprehensibly desecrated by a railway line and motley boxes of carriages; a picturesque valley where the new economy spread itself out crudely with its prose of drying underwear […].’ However, as noted by Husarski, Malczewski was the first Polish painter to notice ‘charm, beauty, and poetry where one normally sees nothing save for banality’.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

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