Stanisław Wyspiański: Between History & Mysticism

wyspianski autoportret 1902_6126740.jpg, small, Stanisław Wyspiański, Self-Portrait, 1902, photo: National Museum in Warsaw, Stanisław Wyspiański: Between History & Mysticism

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Looking at Kraków, he saw the essence of historical processes and the drama of the present day. He noticed the ghosts of the past haunting the nation’s psyche and longed for a new rhythm of life, a European breath, and artistic freedom, which he had experienced in Paris. Having grown up at the foot of Wawel Hill, where he could see the ancient walls from the window of his sculptor father’s studio, he felt inseparably connected to Kraków.

After returning from Paris in 1894, Wyspiański abandoned his recent interest in Impressionism. Reminiscences of French Luminism appeared only in two autumn views from the window of his studio on Zacisze Street, paintings that emphasised the contrast between orange foliage and blue shadows falling on Kraków’s buildings.

The colour tone of Widok na Mury Miejskie z Ulicy Zacisze (View of the City Walls from Zacisze Street) was entirely different, sombre, evoking sadness and weariness. The artist’s melancholy materialises here in the black contours of withered window-sill flowers and the outlines of two ghostly hands, as if painted on the glass by frost. These are the hands of ‘some Merlin’, a bard created by the artist in his imagination. This way of perceiving nature, transforming visual impressions into poetic metaphor, would become a defining feature of Wyspiański’s artistic work.

Kraków nocturnes

The painting Planty o Świcie (Planty at Dawn), (1894) also evokes a nostalgic atmosphere. The contours of the Wawel walls are blurred by the azure dawn, which consumes the light of a lonely street lamp dominated by the predatory branches of trees growing in Planty Park. The motif of ‘bars’ – branches obscuring the architectural structure – was adopted by Wyspiański and many other European symbolists from Japanese woodcuts, giving it a disturbing expression. Wawel and the Planty Avenue leading to it were a magical place for Wyspiański, an area that stimulated the imagination, intensified by the darkness of night.

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‘To understand Wyspiański’s works, one must comprehend the Night, which is not governed by the lights of Apollo. The night here, in Kraków, today. [...] Wyspiański found the matter of the Polish soul: Kraków night. [...] Wyspiański created the drama of Kraków’s nature and its dramatic landscape,’ wrote Stanisław Lack, an expert on Wyspiański’s oeuvre.

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Stanisław Wyspiański, The Straw-Wraps, 1898, pastel on paper, 69 x 107 cm, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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Lack’s interpretation, although generalised, most accurately captures the meaning of the eerie nocturne Chochoły (Straw-Wraps) (1898-1899), which Wyspiański initially titled Pałuby na Plantach Tańczące Krakowskich (Straw Men Dancing in the Planty). Under the influence of poetic imagination, the night view of Planty Park was transformed into the playwright’s vision. The scene features chochoły, bushes cloaked in straw, whose details are obscured by darkness. They become actors in a shadow theatre, drifting slowly across the mirror-like surface of the puddle as if in a lethargic dream. Their elongated reflections, like the synthesised tree trunks, emphasise the vertical rhythm of the composition, whose depth is closed by the silhouette of Wawel Hill. The branches of the trees in the foreground, hanging ominously over the unfolding mystery, resemble a stage curtain. The oscillation of meanings between the ‘theatricalisation’ of the landscape and its philosophical meaning, along with the accumulation of senses and associations, is a characteristic feature of Wyspiański’s symbolist approach.

The panpsychism of nature depicted here foreshadows the key scenes of The Wedding. It is to the rhythm of the melody played by Chochoł (Straw Man) that the procession of participants in the Bronowice wedding will wind its way, and it is Chochoł who will end up at the centre of the metaphorical image of Poles overwhelmed by helplessness and unable to take armed action. The collective memory of the nation has preserved the image of the Chochoł figure, a symbol in which the idea of death is paired with that of life, and the lifelessness of the straw shell fuels hopes for the rebirth of what it contains, for the rose bush to bloom again. The Chochoł symbol was one of the expressions of Wyspiański’s belief in renewal, which, like in the Eleusinian myth, occurs through death.

Views of the Kościuszko Mound

Chochoły was part of a long series of nocturnes that in Polish art were initiated by Artur Grottger’s patriotic cycles. The nocturnal backgrounds of the dramatic scenes in Lithuania and Wojna (War) inspired expressive luminism, a tendency typical of Poles to paint ‘twilight records’ reflecting the unique cultural situation and fate of a politically enslaved nation. Melancholic images of Kraków were painted by Wyczółkowski, Weiss, Szczygliński, and Mehoffer. They were crowned by a series of Widoki na Kopiec Kościuszki (Views of Kościuszko Mound) by Wyspiański, an artist who perceived the ‘dramatic landscape’ of Kraków, a city steeped in history, more profoundly than others.

Widoki na Kopiec is a series, or rather three series, of pastels created in December 1904 and January and February 1905, which depict a fragment of the outskirts of the city as seen from the artist’s studio window on Krowoderska Street. Feliks Manggha-Jasieński, a distinguished connoisseur of European art, captivated by Monet’s series of views of Rouen Cathedral, persuaded Wyspiański, who was already seriously ill at the time, to produce this set of paintings. Manggha considered the concept of capturing the same landscape motif under different weather conditions and varying lighting depending on the time of day – characteristic of impressionism – as the most convenient form of imaging for an artist confined within the walls of his studio.

While sketching views of the Mound, Wyspiański systematically noted the date and time when he created each pastel in his Raptularz (Raptularius). He also included precise details about the time of creation in the titles of nine Widoki na Kopiec Kościuszki, which were exhibited in March 1905 at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw. However, he gave the entire collection of exhibited works the collective title Kronika Kilku Dni (The Chronicle of Several Days), emphasising not so much the transient and fragmentary nature of individual visual impressions as the continuity of the artistic experience. This title accentuated the very process of ‘recording’ the landscape’s metamorphoses, emphasising the subjectivity of the artist-chronicler and his artistic experience spanning several days. The attempt to capture the impermanence of visual experiences was overwhelmed by psychological pressure during the creative process, resulting in the spiritual suffering of a sick man and the self-reflection of an artist who had woven his entire art with the fate of his nation.

The dominance of the artist’s inner focus over the observation of luministic transformations was illustrated by the words of the poem Nad Morskim Okiem (At Morskie Oko), which Wyspiański dedicated to Tadeusz Estreicher, who was staying in Zakopane. The poet’s confession reveals a painful sense of entrapment and isolation from the pulsating rhythm of nature. A ‘psychic reflex’ is cast over the scene with a ‘burial mound in the murky mist’ painted many times, transforming it into an expressionist landscape.

Wyspiański energises the space imagined in pastels, quickening the gaze’s descent into the depths by decisively sketching the diagonal lines of the railway tracks and the road running alongside the embankment. Against the backdrop of a flatly constructed patch of colour, sometimes glowing with an inner radiance and sometimes emanating a subdued light, he accentuated the line – sometimes soft and tangled like hieroglyphs, at other times sharp, predatory, and abruptly broken, or delicate, fading, interrupted by the artist’s trembling hand. Freeing itself in places from the function of reproducing natural forms, the contour becomes a graphic record of the artist’s mental states. Studies of luministic landscape metamorphoses were transformed into a reflection of Wyspiański’s experiences, becoming variations of the painter-poet’s inner vision. Existential experience was inextricably intertwined with the symbolic meanings evoked by the ‘burial mound’ looming in the distance, a miniaturised cone of the Kościuszko Mound, a monument to the national uprising.

The period during which Widoki na Kopiec Kościuszki was created was a historic moment when, amid the ongoing Russo-Japanese War and the proletarian revolution in Tsarist Russia, hope for regaining independence was reborn in Polish society, and the memory of national deeds gained a new significance. Although it is impossible to determine exactly to what extent the assessment of this new historical moment influenced Wyspiański’s mental state and artistic sensibility, certain meanings in Widoki na Kopiec Kościuszki can be linked to the message of literary works created at the turn of 1904 and 1905. In December 1904, landscape painting was combined with work on Hamlet and Powrót Odysa (The Return of Odysseus), and in February 1905, with writing a paraphrase of the hymn Veni Creator.

In both dramatic works, Wyspiański addressed the issue of action, even bloodshed, that could fundamentally change the tragic reality; both works also have a quality of self-reflection. The call to action echoes in the hymn Veni Creator, reflecting the poet’s deep and passionate involvement with the nation’s new historical experience. The current political situation heightened the remembrance of the Kościuszko Uprising, preserved across generations. Therefore, the persistently recurring motif of the Kościuszko Mound became the thematic ‘keystone’ of Wyspiański’s landscape series.

This optically insignificant ‘burial mound’ outlined on the horizon reflected the artist’s historical awareness and gained an expressive quality, similar to that of Mount Fuji in Hokusai’s works Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, which Feliks Jasieński had in his possession and which were therefore well known to the artist. In these woodcut series, the motif of the sacred mountain, which is the centre of religious and cultural life in Japan, is ‘decentralised’. It appears in the background, on the edges of the main composition, as if to prove its constant presence in the background of all artistic and non-artistic activities, its ongoing existence in both collective and individual consciousness.

Sacred space

Wyspiański pioneered the symbolism movement in Polish art in a way that was distinct from that of Jacek Malczewski. Between 1892 and 1894, while still in Paris, he made a cardboard model of a stained glass window titled Śluby Jana Kazimierza (The Vows of John Casimir), intended for the cathedral in Lviv (the project was never realised). This monumental painting became a manifestation of symbolism rooted in a historiosophical vision, synthesising and reinterpreting the Polish past. Morphologically, the stained glass design drew on medieval art, which inspired both the Romantics and the Neo-Romantics of the nineteenth century. The concept of a complex, vertically stacked composition encompassing the worldly dimension (the wedding of King John II Casimir in the cathedral) and the visionary dimension (a symbolic representation of the falling Polish diaspora, watched over by the Virgin Mary) was derived by Wyspiański from Gothic polychromes and stained glass windows. He became acquainted with their artistic form while collaborating with Matejko on the restoration of St. Mary’s Basilica in Kraków during 1890-1891.

In Kraków, Wyspiański created an innovative approach to decorative painting that was unprecedented in European art. He conveyed his vision of a sacred interior through a series of polychromes and stained glass windows designed between 1895 and 1897 for the Franciscan church. Although the planned iconographic programme was not entirely realised, the artist gave perfect visual form to the idea of the sacrum, which was born in his imagination during his ‘pilgrimage’ to the great cathedrals of Gothic Europe. This is where the modern concept of stained glass, rooted in the Middle Ages and also influenced by contemporary Parisian designs, crystallised. Wyspiański remembered the details of the cathedrals in Paris, Chartres, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, and Prague – structures he had studied carefully and sketched in 1890 with the aim of writing his doctoral thesis on Gothic architecture.

However, when designing stained glass windows for the Franciscan church, he went beyond the norms of medieval tradition. By breaking with the strict convention of dividing the stained glass fields into a series of small panels, he introduced an unconventional approach in Poland – treating the glass panes as a painting surface. This new understanding of monumental form in art was supported by Puvis de Chavannes, who created the overstylised frescoes decorating the Pantheon in Paris, as well as by the English Pre-Raphaelites, who revived the artistic conventions of the early Renaissance.

Wyspiański’s Franciscan polychrome was also astonishing in its originality. The artist adorned the church walls with motifs of flowers, herbs, and cereals, transforming it into a multicoloured ‘vestibule of paradise’. The plant forms, meticulously studied by Wyspiański in his Zielnik (Herbarium) during his excursions to the Kraków countryside, were transformed here into linear patterns. This microcosm reflected the Franciscan celebration of nature, as well as the belief, typical of symbolists, that every part of nature, even the tiniest, is permeated by a spiritual element. Poverty, humility, charity, religious zeal, and mysticism are the ideals that Wyspiański depicted in the stained glass windows and polychromes of the chancel. A stained glass window depicting the founder of the order, St. Francis of Assisi, and another stained glass window featuring Blessed Salomea, a Polish Franciscan nun, understood as its pendant, constitute the ideological core of this part of the iconographic programme, which pertains to the realm of worldly existence.

The synthetically rendered figures of both saints fade away among the plant shoots: Salome’s silhouette is encircled by an ornamental bordure woven from flowers, leaves, and stems, while the hieratic figure of St. Francis is trapped among the thorny branches of a rose bush. The ascetic figures of the saints bear witness to their complete renunciation of worldly possessions in favour of serving God. Both are depicted in a state of mystical ecstasy, captured at the moment of crossing the threshold of transcendence.

The idea of hierophany – a manifestation of the sacred – was depicted by Wyspiański on the wall of the chancel, showing the Virgin Mary with the Child being crowned by two wingless angels. The peasant features and Kraków costume of the Madonna reflect the artist’s faith in folk, understood as an enclave of spiritual purity and the cradle of religiosity. At the same time, the idea of the Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, who mystically watches over the nation, as shown in the design for the stained glass window Śluby Jana Kazimierza, is repeated here. The Franciscan Madonna is also the Apocalyptic Madonna, the ‘Lady clothed with the sun’, encircled by a fiery halo and a ‘wreath of twelve stars’, shielding the Child with a veil out of fear of Satan.

This depiction paraphrases the iconographic motif of the Virgin Mary, victorious and triumphant over the devil, sanctified by centuries of tradition, and transposes St John’s vision, which opens the Apocalypse and announces the Last Judgement. The image of the Madonna is complemented by that of Caritas, with love crowning the hierarchy of theological virtues depicted by two girls embracing each other. As an antithesis to divine love, there is an image of angels falling into the abyss, shot down by two archers with luminous arrows. In the presbytery, the artist also placed stained glass windows illustrating the elements of nature: air, water, and fire. Their fluid contours define abstract planes of colour, within which flower cups symbolising the primordial elements of the cosmic order are embedded.

The apocalyptic symbolism of the presbytery paintings was complemented by a monumental image of God the Father in the stained glass window of the western façade of the church, which was the ideological culmination of the iconographic programme of the church and, at the same time, a masterpiece of European sacred art. It is a powerful artistic equivalent of God’s Word, the biblical ‘Let there be.’ Here, Wyspiański matched the power of imagination of his predecessors, Raphael and Michelangelo, whose Vatican frescoes he studied carefully. He created an image of God full of creative will and power. God the Father appears as a multicoloured stream of light, ethereal, abstract and material at the same time, woven from strands of blue, pink, and yellow, intersected by lines whose dynamic movement reflects the flow of creative energy. With his lowered right hand, predatory in shape and pale, he subdues the zone of darkness and guides the chromatic waves.

The majestic head and the left hand raised in a powerful gesture radiate light, which is intensified by the physical light penetrating through the stained glass panes. Fiery flames emerging from the dark depths of the water, sublime spheres of blue, and heavy patches of brown symbolise the forces of nature brought into being, the primal elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth. Particles of cosmic primordial matter, embryos of star constellations and planets swirl above the water, as if shaken off God’s robe. Analysing Wyspiański’s stained glass window, researchers observed the progenitor of the figure of God the Father in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, where the angry Christ condemns sinful humanity.

In this interpretation, the act of creation depicted by Wyspiański transforms into the Last Judgment, with God the Father appearing as both the Creator of the world and its Judge, as ‘Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End’. By masterfully combining the symbolic content of individual elements within the iconographic programme, Wyspiański created a sacred space in the Franciscan church. This space is filled with light coloured by stained glass windows, reflected by polychromes, and absorbed by dark naves; a space of mystery joined by angels and saints.

Wawel stained glass windows

A new understanding of sacred art and monumental form was also reflected in Wyspiański’s designs for stained glass windows at Wawel Cathedral, which he produced between 1900 and 1902. The artist saw Wawel as a stronghold of Polish tradition and a centre of national culture. Together with Władysław Ekielski, he designed the reconstruction of Wawel Hill, giving the seat of Polish kings the status of a national Acropolis that housed the most important institutions for social life. He based his dramas on Wawel: Legenda I (Legend I), Legenda II (Legend II), Bolesław Śmiały (Bolesław the Bold), Skałka, Wyzwolenie (Liberation), and Akropolis (Acropolis).

However, in the poet’s opinion, this reliquary of national history imprisoned the will of Poles, burdened by the weight of the past. In his rhapsodic poems, Kazimierz Wielki (Casimir the Great), Bolesław Śmiały (Bolesław the Bold), Święty Stanisław (Saint Stanislaus), and Henryk Pobożny pod Legnicą (Henry the Pious at Legnica), Wyspiański attempted to liberate the present from the ghosts of the past. He expressed his conviction that the achievements of the builders of Polish statehood would restore independence in an eschatological perspective. He thus developed the symbolism of the stained glass windows designed for the cathedral, intended to form a grand gallery of historical and legendary figures, rulers, saints, and visionaries who had left their mark on the fate of the nation.

Casimir the Great, Saint Stanislaus, Henry the Pious, and Wanda are the first links in this chain, which was also meant to include images of Sigismund the Old, Sigismund Augustus, Blessed Kinga, Zawisza the Black, Władysław Jagiełło and his wife Jadwiga, Piast with his son, Casimir Jagiellon, Władysław Łokietek, and Wernyhora. However, the church hierarchy did not accept Wyspiański’s sketches, depicting the apparitions of kings and saints. They were striking in their powerful historiosophical vision, drawing on both the ideological legacy of Jan Matejko and the symbolism of Słowacki’s mystical works and Nietzschean philosophy.

From the philosophical theses of Król-Duch (King-Spirit), Wyspiański adopted the concept of palingenesis – the belief in the reincarnation of immortal spirits returning to earth to fulfil their destinies. According to the theory of metempsychosis professed by the great romantic, ‘guiding spirits’ retained the memory of their previous incarnations. They underwent biological and spiritual evolution, striving towards divine perfection. In Król-Duch, Słowacki’s philosophy of genesis was realised in chronological order, glorifying heroic, revolutionary deeds. The first Polish kings, Popiel, Mieszko, and Bolesław the Bold, were successive incarnations of the ‘spirit of the eternal revolutionary’. Following Słowacki, Wyspiański engaged in a discussion with Mickiewicz’s messianism, a philosophy affirming the martyrdom of the Polish nation, which was to save humanity through sacrifice and suffering. Adapting Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘will to power’, the poet called on the nation to break free from its painful reflection on the fall of the homeland.

Wyspiański’s stained glass designs embodied the idea of expressionist art, depicting traumatic experiences and breaking with the established canons of artistic beauty. In Kazimierz Wielki and Święty Stanisław, the artist borrowed characters from Matejko’s paintings but gave them a radically different form – the shape of grave remains, which he then brought to life in the verses of rhapsodies. The posthumous image of Casimir the Great was inspired by Matejko’s drawing showing the skull of the last Piast, unearthed during the restoration of the royal tomb in 1869, the year Wyspiański was born.

The artist also created a painting depicting the dark interior of the tomb that holds the ruler’s remains and insignia. Wyspiański’s contemporaries regarded his choice of this theme as a revival of Matejko’s titanic spirit in a new form, as a reinterpretation of Matejko’s philosophy of history. Wyspiański sought to depict the reburial of the royal remains at Wawel, surrounded by banners, candlelight, and incense smoke, in the lower part of the stained glass window. In the central panel, he depicted a jewel-encrusted crown, a monarch’s sceptre, and fragments of a royal cloak – attributes of former power, which the spirit of Casimir the Great was to regain upon returning to earth from the afterlife in order to revive the will of the Polish people and restore their longed-for freedom.

Wyspiański’s Święty Stanisław depicts the dried-up mummy of a bishop emerging from a coffin. The bishop was slain by Bolesław the Bold, a powerful yet morally corrupt and rebellious ruler. The dense rhythm of the layers cracking under the pressure of the coffin is complemented by the contours of the bishop’s crosier and processional cross. The head of the clergyman, severed by the royal sword, which in the original design of the stained glass window rested in a reliquary, is surrounded here by a halo of sanctity. Nearby lie the remains of a hand, raised as if in a gesture of curse, symbolising the fate of the saint, who died a martyr’s death but will rise from the dead to find the monarch turned to stone in the mountains along with his knights. The transfiguration of Saint Stanislaus, patron saint of the nation, occurs in a rhapsody.

Apollo (System Copernicus)

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A photograph of the "Apollo" stained-glass window designed by Stanisław Wyspiański, located in the Medical Society Building in Krakow. The image shows a dark interior where two rectangular windows are set into a wall. The main window on the right depicts the sun god Apollo tied to a lyre, his figure surrounded by swirling, concentric circles in various shades of blue and teal. His face is a vibrant reddish-orange, and his body is rendered in yellow and white tones. To the left, a smaller window features similar abstract, flowing patterns. In the foreground, a dark, decorative Art Nouveau railing with leaf and flower motifs is partially visible, adding to the atmospheric, somber lighting of the staircase.

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Wyspiański’s innovative approach to decorative art was also demonstrated in a secular interior at the Medical Society House on Radziwiłłowska Street in Kraków. The three-part stained glass window Apollo (System Copernicus) became an integral part of the overall design of the medical headquarters, which the artist created in 1904 at the request of Julian Nowak, a bacteriology professor at the Jagiellonian University and the newly elected president of the Society. The decorative works supervised by the artist – from wall polychromes and furniture to fabrics, chandeliers, and staircase balustrades – were innovative in Poland and exemplified a creative assimilation of the Arts and Crafts Movement principles.

The conviction that craftsmanship needed to be restored and granted a standing equal to that of ‘high art’ enabled Wyspiański to develop a concept of a modern interior that was both representative and functional, where every element of furnishings and decoration receives equal attention from the designer, who takes into account its purpose, the technique used, and the characteristics of the material from which it is to be crafted. Wyspiański’s genius, manifesting itself in multiple artistic disciplines, found its next incarnation here. The artist adapted ideas cherished by the English Pre-Raphaelites, who nostalgically looked back to the Middle Ages, and drew models of craftsmanship and technical perfection from that era.

At the headquarters of the Medical Society, Wyspiański gave these ideas a specific shape, drawing on the local guild tradition he had become familiar with while renovating several churches in Kraków. The artist also preserved the shapes of typical Polish plants in his memory, giving them artistic existence and a mark of individual style in the polychrome decoration of the Franciscan church. In the Medical Society House, chestnut leaves, lily calyxes, and geranium flowers were transformed into ornaments on the openwork staircase balustrade and motifs on the friezes and kilims decorating individual interiors.

The stained glass window titled Apollo (System Copernicus), placed on the staircase wall, became the ideological keystone of the decorative concept, metaphorically reflecting the essence and significance of natural sciences in the history of mankind. Nicolaus Copernicus was the patron of researchers studying natural phenomena. The stained glass window commissioned from Wyspiański was intended by the members of the Society to portray the image of the brilliant astronomer as vividly as Matejko’s portrait adorning the university hall. However, Wyspiański’s artistic vision exceeded the expectations of the founders. The artist created a symbol of Copernican thought and faith.

The Copernican revolution served as a starting point for him to develop a multi-layered symbolism that combined philosophical and religious categories of antiquity and Christianity. He placed the ‘stopped’ Sun at the centre of the ‘celestial system’, giving it, like the planets orbiting around it, the shape of an ancient deity. In light of the symbolism in the dramas Wyzwolenie and Akropolis, the figure of Apollo appears here as the incarnation of God descending to earth, the revelation of Christ the Saviour. Underlying this eschatological vision was the philosophical and religious syncretism that characterised Wyspiański and the entire turn-of-the-century era, which tended to combine opposing systems of thought into new, more universal wholes.

In his quest to capture the essence of Copernicus’s astronomical system and its philosophical implications, Wyspiański blended Plato’s axiom of cosmic harmony with Słowacki’s mysticism, Nietzschean philosophy, and Camille Flammarion’s astronomical theories. In Wyspiański’s understanding, Christ was the absolute towards which the spirits of the universe strove in their successive incarnations. In the stained glass window, the artist depicted the life-giving force of the sun’s rays as the salvific power of Christ descending to earth, who, like Słowacki’s ‘guiding spirits’, retained the memory of His previous incarnation, the ideal figure of Apollo. Apollo became the epitome of Wyspiański’s dialogue with European cultural tradition. First and foremost, however, this work was a testament to the artist’s creative genius and the realisation of the concept of a symbol accumulating associations and meanings, based on the expressive qualities of colour and line. The perfectly balanced and internally dynamic composition of the stained glass window reflects the constantly moving and fully harmonised structure of the cosmos.

Folklorism

Folk tales and legends ignited Wyspiański’s imagination when he was planning to illustrate Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances. The artist aimed to create a series of paintings, which would include Sezam (Sesame), Moczar (Topiel), and Pałac Lodowy (Ice Palace). Preserved to this day, Skarby Sezamu (Treasures of Sesame) (1897) is a large-format pastel composition, dark and mysterious, depicting a forest heartland reached by a little wanderer. Associated with Midsummer Night, the journey into the depths of the forest has been transformed here into an act of initiation into the mystery of nature. The artist developed his vision in the poem Legenda I (1897), based on the legend of King Krak of the Polans and his valiant daughter, Wanda. In his painting, Wyspiański transformed the forest thicket into an archaic clearcutting of national being; he blended the silhouettes of characters from Polish legends into the intertwining roots and branches. In the depths of the forest lie the figures of sleeping nymphs, who in the drama will enchant Wanda so that she can defend her people from the invasion of the Alemanni.

Wyspiański saw particular value in the landscape of the Polish countryside; for him, the cottages near Kraków were as much a part of his native tradition as the tombs of the rulers at Wawel. While in Paris, the artist embraced Gauguin’s fascination with primitive and archaic art, as well as the idea of cultural rebirth through a return to its original sources, to folklore and the Middle Ages. The affirmation of the folk descending from Piast lineage was reflected both in Wyspiański’s plays and in his drawings of farmsteads and cottage interiors. The artist’s faith in folk as the cradle of religiosity was reflected in his monumental Madonnas and personifications of Caritas. Portraying Wanda Siemaszkowa as the bride in The Wedding, Wyspiański depicted a handsome, sturdy peasant woman in Kraków costume, representing the archetype of a Polish peasant woman seen as the pillar of national identity. In many portraits of his wife, Teofila Pytko, the artist emphasised her coarse features and heavy build, while simultaneously portraying her dignity and pride in her peasant roots.

Images of the soul, portraits of faces

Stanisław Wyspiański, Motherhood, 1905, photo: press materials from the DESA Auction House

The human psyche was the essence of the portraits painted by Wyspiański. The look in the eyes, the tilt of the head, and a characteristic gesture are the constitutive features of these studies, where details indicating the profession, social status, or personal passion of the sitter have been omitted. The feelings of the artist, who captured the spiritual nature of his model, are conveyed through distinctive lines that are sometimes nervous and trembling, sometimes dynamic and decisive. The expression of the portraits is co-created by the tones of the colours, their intensity, and their harmony. Wyspiański’s self-portraits, ranging from a realistic drawing in 1890 to his last self-portrait in 1907, where nervous pencil strokes left a mark of death on the artist’s face, reveal much about the artist himself, about his psyche, and appearance, which changed with age.

What strikes us in them is Wyspiański’s penetrating gaze, which some see as showing excessive self-esteem, while others see it as a sign of remarkable sensitivity and an aptitude for perceiving what lies beneath the surface of phenomena and everyday events. The motif of wild vine shoots, already withered and bent, enhances the sense of sadness in Autoportret w Serdaku (Self-Portrait in a Jerkin) (1902) and in Portret Elizy Pareńskiej (Portrait of Eliza Pareńska) (1902), the muse of Kraków’s artistic bohemia. Wyspiański portrayed Eliza several times, employing the double-portrait style known from Whistler’s work, where the model appears twice within a single composition.

The dissonant harmony of warm and cold tones in Pareńska’s image is a fully assimilated method of divisionism, while the arbitrary use of homogeneous colour planes bordered by flexible contours is a reinterpreted lesson in Gauguin’s Synthetism and Cloisonnism. Wyspiański became acquainted with Gauguin’s aesthetics in Paris, where Władysław Ślewiński, a painter who had settled in France in 1888, became his mentor, introducing the young artist to the art of the Pont Aven circle.

Gauguin’s style was also reflected in Wyspiański’s portraits of children; he depicted them lost in thought, daydreaming, or sleeping in relaxed poses. The artist outlined the small figures of his models with flowing contours; he used only a few chromatic tones and harmonised them so that the expression of the colours matched the characters’ psyches. To create such portraits, a kind of empathy, a strong emotional connection with the model, was needed. Therefore, Wyspiański’s best and most intimate portraits are those of his own children, Helenka, Mietek, and Staś. The wide diagonal of the window-sill or tabletop on which the pensive children are leaning alludes to compositional techniques borrowed from Japanese woodcuts, as seen in Gauguin’s work.

Wyspiański’s pastel Macierzyństwo (Motherhood) (1905) became a secularised parody of the Madonna and Child motif. The painting depicts Wyspiański’s wife, Teofila Pytko, breastfeeding her son, Staś, with their daughter, Helenka, watching them, shown twice – en face and en profile.

The family is enclosed within a green wall of an imagined hortus conclusus, shielding them from the outside world. The double portrait of Helena heightens the sense of parental love emanating from the painting. The blooming geranium in the background, Teofila’s fuchsia-embroidered jacket, the abstract pattern on Helena’s dress, and her golden bows create a quintessential Art Nouveau abundance of ornaments, enhancing the decorative quality of the composition. The dramatic narrowing of the pictorial space and the focus on elements around the child’s head transform an ordinary family moment into a symbolic portrayal of love – hidden among the flowers of a timeless sanctuary of tenderness, trust, and peace.

Author: Irena Kossowska, Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, December 2006.

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

Language English