Another Promised Land: Polish Women Painters in Paris

mela_muter_portret_forum_.jpg, default, Mela Muter, 1966, Paris, photo: Keystone Pictures USA/Zuma Press/Forum

Women never had it easy in the world of art. During times when some male artists would proclaim their disdain for women artists without any inhibitions, being a woman in the art world demanded resilience. The biographies of Polish women who made a name for themselves as painters almost always share one element – Paris.

To Paris

In the first decades of the 20th century, no artist needed special encouragement to move to the city on the Seine. Before being surpassed by New York City after World War Two, the capital of France also had been the capital of the entire artistic world. Creators from the most distant corners of Europe and from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean were drawn there like moths to a flame. As with 21st-century Berlin, every other inhabitant of Paris seemed to be an artist. Some of them were attracted by the legend of the impressionists and their successors. Others sought proximity to older masterpieces in the collections of Parisian museums.

The influx of artists into Paris at the end of the 19th century constituted what art historian André Warnod termed the ‘École de Paris’ in 1925. Montparnasse, the district most popular with artists, was still a suburb on the Left Bank and remained scattered with pastureland and farmland as early as the first decade of the 20th century. Olga Bonańska, Pablo Picasso, and Lew Trocki all came to call Montparnasse home. It was also there that Gertrude Stein ran her famous salon – if the mind and heart of contemporary art were contained by one private interior, it would certainly be this one. It was already in the interwar period that Montparnasse turned from a suburb into one of the symbols of Paris and one of the most popular locations within the city. It’s mostly here that Polish female artists would settle. According to the newest research by Ewa Bobrowska, the number of those who stayed in Paris at some point between 1890 and 1918 is over 160!

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Mela Muter, 'Panorama of the City', © the National Museum in Warsaw

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The Academies

What attracted Polish women to European centres of art was not only the promise of a career but simply the opportunity to obtain education. Women were first admitted to Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Art in 1904. It took another decade for the Kraków Academy of Fine Art to open its doors to women. In the second half of the 19th century, the most active Polish artistic colony appeared in Munich, but the local academy only admitted men. No wonder that the Munich circle ended up being a hyper-masculine group relishing scenes from historical battles, hunts, and realistic scenes from the January Uprising. Józef Brandt’s studio was symbolic of the Munich circle at the time – it was so full of historical paraphernalia that it looked like an armoury.

Olga Boznańska briefly settled in Munich, although from the very beginning she gazed longingly towards Paris. Her father, however, frightened by the prospect of lax morals in the French metropolis, refused to send her. Zofia Stryjeńska, in turn, attempted to circumvent the limitations of Munich. She borrowed her brother’s clothes and signed up for the local academy as Tadeusz von Grzymała. Her cover was blown after a year.

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Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, 'Self Portrait' (unfinished), 1892, oil on canvas, from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, photo: National Museum in Warsaw. Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, 'Self-portrait', 1887, oil on canvas, photo: National Museum, Kraków

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The only arts education available to women in Poland were in private schools: Wojciech Gerson’s Drawing Class; Miłosz Kotarbiński’s School of Drawing and Painting in Warsaw; and Adrian Baraniecki’s Advanced Courses for Women, the so-called ‘Baraneum’ in Kraków. It was here that Boznańska, Mela Muter, Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, and Aniela Pająkówna first polished their skills prior to leaving the country. The education offered by these schools, however, was limited. Boznańska was bored to death during her one-year course in Baraneum, copying plaster sculptures and drawings from academic textbooks over and over again.

Paris was an entirely different story. While the state-owned École des Beaux-Arts remained just as conservative as schools in other countries, the highest quality of education was offered elsewhere. Female students were admitted with open arms to the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi, both prestigious private institutions. The founder of the latter, the sculptor Filippo Colarossi, deliberately posited himself in opposition to École des Beaux-Arts. Not only did the school admit women (that’s where, for instance, Camille Claudel got her education), but the curriculum promoted new artistic currents instead of encouraging students to continuously make copies of old masters.

In Paris, a private art school was as easy to encounter as a café. Aside from the most famous ones, there were about twenty of them around the city. One, the Academié Vitti, was located in the same building where Boznańska happened to live. Making use of the convenient location, the artist started to teach there in 1908. Among her female students, there were two fellow Poles.

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Olga Boznańska, 'Interior of the Parisian Studio', 1908, photo: National Museum in Kraków

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The issue of money

Private, however, also meant costly. That’s the lesson Anna Bilińska learned during her decade spent in Paris, when she constantly went hungry. At some point, the founder of Academié Julian, waived her tuition to keep the talented student at his institution. As Józef Chełmoński recollects:

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I saw her work on empty stomach, obtaining information in the studios of Julien, Fleury and others. […] She was a powerful soul, gifted with endless enthusiasm and the love of real art. It’s for art that she would renounce all comfort, often forgetting even about her own rudimentary needs.

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The myth of a starving artist is an overused cliché, but that doesn’t change the fact that many Polish female artists struggled to make ends meet in the city on the Seine, even if their art had its admirers. Not only did private courses cost quite a lot, but the cost of living in the French capital, even outside the city centre, was much higher than in Poland. Even such certain assets as real estate didn’t guarantee financial peace. Boznańska’s source of steady income was from letting the flats in her family townhouse on Wolska Street in Warsaw. After two floods, she was reluctant to pay for renovations and agreed only when pressured by the lodgers, who were threatened by the possibility of rotten ceiling balks falling on their heads. When the government of the newly independent Poland issued legislation that lowered all rent, Boznańska’s finances felt the difference acutely, especially as the cost of rent on Montparnasse changed in the opposite direction. The painter’s case wasn’t made any better by her generosity and naivete. Her notoriously indebted friends and neighbours sensed her weakness, as did penny-pinching customers, who sponged off the artist by convincing her to sell her paintings for as low a price as possible. Like how predators can smell even a drop of blood, they smelled the painter’s influx of funds from afar, leaping towards their prey, asking for yet another loan.

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Portrait of Olga Boznańska, photograph, Munich, 1898, photo: National Museum in Kraków. Olga Boznańska, 'Self-portrait', 1906, Paris, photo: National Museum in Kraków

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The studio on Boulevard Montparnasse where Boznańska spent over three decades was grey from cigarette smoke, with garlands of spiderwebs, and shared with mice, canaries, a parrot, and a dog. While Boznańska’s studio provided little space due to the clutter, Bilińska’s apartment was the opposite – a perfectly organised shoebox. Each square centimetre of the artist’s space was utilized. In a letter to Wojciech Grabowski, the painter recounts:

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The room I’ve got is tiny – merely 2.5 metre long and 2 metres wide. Hence, to paint my still life, I need to have a method. First, I needed to fold down my bed, which gave me almost a square metre of free space. I sat alone by the wall on a fallen over small stool with paint on a piece of cardboard on the iron oven on my left-hand side; on the right, in front of the bed, because I sat very low, also paint and a paintbrush […]. In front of me there was the canvas and my object, both the same distance from me because of the lack of space.

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Selected Works by Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz – Image Gallery

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Thumbnail — Mela Muter, 'Galeries Dalmau', 1911, photo: East News

Meanwhile, Mela Muter was much better off – in the 1920s she became famous, and thus financially stable. In 1928 she moved to a villa designed for her by Auguste Perret, one of the precursors of modernist architecture. Aniela Pająkówna’s easy start was ensured by her patrons – Helena and Mieczysław Pawlikowski – who generously supported her when she came to Paris in 1886. As a result, she could allow herself visits to the theatre and the opera, and trips around France. Also, a moment to catch her breath. In December 1889, she wrote to Helena Pawlikowska:

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An unpleasant time, makes me prone to melancholy, this week I’m only working from 8 to 12. […] I’m so out of practice and it causes me so much misery – I’m bound to suffer a terrible breakdown for a few more weeks ahead.

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Trans. AP

Pająkówna started to work more intensely when disappointment struck – her portrait of a girl, which was supposed to be a huge breakthrough in her career and which she sent to Salon 1890 was rejected. Paris served Pająkówna such brutal treatment that a year later, right after she finished her studies, the artist returned to her homeland.

Dark matter of the art world

The Polish women artists all hungered for success. Mela Muter and Anna Bilińska single-handedly cut out and collected all the press mentions about themselves. Boznańska’s agency did it for her until the artist stopped paying them. Bilińska was keen on celebrating even the tiniest accomplishments. After all, she worked nearly nonstop – from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the academy, at least 3 hours at home in the evenings and, if she could find the time and money, during additional classes and courses.

Like Mela Muter, Bilińska eagerly engaged the motif of mother and child, though she approached the topic more broadly. She wanted to create a series devoted to women in different life situations – not according to the contemporaneous tradition of ‘the three stages of a woman’s life’, focused on the body and setting the standard for physical attractiveness, but something more realistic, even educational. ‘[I]f I […] managed to aid at least one woman with her dilemmas, show her a way – that would make me unspeakably happy,’ she declared.

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Nina Aleksandrowicz, 'Hat with Flowers', circa 1924, Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts, photo: National Museum, Kraków

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Bilińska also planned to help female artists in a more tangible way, by implementing the solutions she had seen in Paris in her own new art school, which she wanted to establish in Warsaw. Sadly, her goal was confounded by heart disease, but the same idea was shared by other artists, such as Tola Certowicz, Blanka Mercere, and Maria Niedzielska. After their own struggle to obtain an art education, they intuitively understood what the art historian Linda Nochlin describes in her text Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?:

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But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education […].

Selected Paintings by Olga Boznańska – Image Gallery

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Bilińska, Boznańska, Muter, and Pająkówna were only a fraction of the Parisian colony of Polish women artists from the late 19th and early 20th century. There were a few others who achieved success: Alicja Halicka experimented with cubism and became a friend of key representatives of interwar avant-garde; Irena Hassenberg painted landscapes; and Alicja Hohermann created cubism-inspired, decorative portraits. Over a hundred of these female artists constitute what we would now call the ‘dark matter’ of the artistic world – a mass of anonymous art school graduates who never managed to find success, and on whose shoulders there rested a few bright stars. In this regard, turn-of-the-century Paris was no different from other promised lands.

Originally written in Polish, translated by AP, Dec 2021

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