Tender Nihilists: Józef Brandt & Polish Painters in Munich
When the January Uprising failed, the tsarist apparatus of repression decided to strike the artistic education system. A mass migration of Polish painters began, amongst them recent insurgents. They soon formed the largest artistic colony in Munich.
In the mid-1850s, the largest of the partitioning powers was dealt a heavy blow. Tsarist Russia emerged from the Crimean War defeated and weakened. A small political thaw begins. Although Tsar Alexander II extinguished any hopes of progressive liberalisation, Poles grouped into two circles: the landowning, conservative 'Whites' and the democratic, mainly young and middle-class 'Reds'. Together, they set the wheels of the conspiratorial machine in rapid motion. A year before the uprising, the Warsaw School of Fine Arts was elevated to university status, and at the end of January 1863, most of its students joined the ranks of the insurgent troops. Thus began the longest uprising in the post-partition history of Poland.
A brief history of the School of Fine Arts
Nearly 20,000 people died in the uprising, which lasted until the autumn of 1864. Almost as many were sent into exile. About 10,000 emigrated. Amongst them was an entire crowd of recent students of the School of Fine Arts. After the collapse of the independence uprising, the Russification campaign was redoubled. The artists did not enjoy the Warsaw school for long, as Russian authorities did not think to allow classes to resume. In 1866, they finally closed the school. In its place, they established the so-called Drawing Class. Although it was staffed in part by professors from the former SoFA, it was barely a shadow of its former self. It had the status of a secondary school and a very limited curriculum. At most, it could prepare students for a real academy. The most important professor of the Drawing Class became Wojciech Gerson, an esteemed painter and an outstanding teacher. However, this is where the path of native artists only begins. Gerson’s talented students could go on to the prestigious academy in St Petersburg, but in the political situation of the time, they chose the opposite direction – Munich.
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'Ferry crossing' by Józef Brandt, 1871, oil on canvas, private property, photo: the National Museum in Warsaw
The Bavarian capital was the apple of the Wittelsbach family’s eye. The age-old dynasty prided itself on its commitment to the arts and its patronage. In the first half of the 19th century, a powerful art infrastructure was created in Munich almost from scratch, from the Academy of Fine Arts to the Kunstverein to the Old and New Pinakothek, with collections of ancient and modern art. When Polish artists began arriving in Munich, it was already a promised land for artists. The Academy of Fine Arts in Munich enjoyed a reputation as a very liberal institution, with Wilhelm Kaulbach as its head, and Carl von Piloty, a valued representative of historicism, amongst others, having his studio there.
Munich’s pioneers
In the same month that the uprising broke out, Józef Brandt arrived in Munich. The 25-year-old painter opened his first private practice with Juliusz Kossak in Warsaw and Léon Cogniet in Paris. However, he failed the entrance exams to the Parisian academy and eventually settled in Bavaria. Along the way, however, he scored a small local victory – in 1861, he showed his watercolours and drawings at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art. In Munich, he came under the wing of Franz Adam, a renowned painter, whose works paired well with the young Pole’s experiments – they were mainly depictions of horses and battle scenes. Brandt slowly acclimatised to the city, exhibited in the Kunstverein and gained recognition.
When more young painting students from Poland arrived in the city, often almost straight from the insurgent front, Brandt, who had arrived in the city earlier, grew to become a natural leader of the Polish colony. He made friends with, amongst others, Maksymilian Gierymski, who came to study in Munich several years after him. The younger of the Gierymski brothers, Aleksander, soon found himself in the close circle of the Munich-Polish friends, as well as artists such as Józef Chełmoński and Stanisław Witkiewicz.
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'Meeting on the Bridge' by Józef Brandt, 1884, oil on canvas, photo: the National Museum in Kraków
In Munich, Poles had closer access to what was happening in European theory and art. They witnessed works by the Barbizonians and Courbet, which they would not have had a chance to see in Warsaw. They established contacts with collectors and, as the largest group of migrants in the Munich artistic milieu, were themselves noticed as a separate phenomenon. The 'Munich school' was born. Soon the whole milieu gained visibility in the whole country as the precursors to realism. Witkiewicz, one of the members of the Munich circle, became its theoretician.
Bohemia listening to the moaning of lapwings and partridges
It was, however, a specific type of realism, lined with the spirit of romanticism. It maintained political involvement but focused on different themes than the works of the French or Belgians, who portrayed the hardships of the working class. Polish painters tended to focus on the drama of the uprising (some of which, like the older Gierymski, were themselves recent heroes) and on depicting, without sentimentality, but with a fair degree of melancholy, the landscape of the country they had left. In Munich they enjoyed freedom, but in their free time, they indulged in activities far removed from the lifestyle associated with the artistic bohemia. As Stanisław Witkiewicz described them:
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In the evenings we would escape from the city into the fields, into the dark meadows where the lapwings moaned, or, lying somewhere on the grass, we would listen to the quails and partridges, as if to the sound of that longing which was eating us up.
In their canvases, they combined realism with moodiness and subtle luminous effects, similar to how it was done by the Barbizonists, Corot and sometimes even the emerging Impressionist movement. Grounded in the Romantic tradition, the ambience of the simple motifs – Mazovian muddy plains under a heavy grey sky, far from the idyllic idealisation of Polish villages in the pale light of dusk – was in line with the then-current drive towards Stimmung-moodiness. They gained the recognition of German critics, although not everyone understood this specific emotional tone of the paintings of the 'Polish-Munich people'. Adolph Bayersdorfer saw in them rather nihilistic ‘poetry of sterility and hopeless emptiness of all life of the soul’.
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'Prayer in the Steppe' by Józef Brandt, 1894, oil on canvas, photo: Piotr Ligier/ National Museum in Warsaw
Lord of the manor
Over the years, the informal leader of the Munich clan evolved from one of the pioneers of domestic realism into a noble artist attached to the gentry lifestyle, regularly visiting his wife’s family estate in Orońsko (it was this palace complex that decades later became the Centre of Polish Sculpture). He was fondly devoted to painting hunting scenes, as well as historical scenes meant 'to inspire', in the spirit of Sienkiewicz’s literature.
Brandt was in touch with the author of the Trilogy, Henryk Sienkiewicz, the two of them exchanging correspondences and sometimes inspiring each other – Brandt directly illustrated scenes from literary descriptions of 17th-century wars, whilst the writer drew inspiration for his texts from individual compositions. In a thank-you note for a donated painting, Sienkiewicz wrote to the painter:
[...] I openly confess that to your mastery and your incomparable sense of the chivalrous and steppe life of the Poles of old times I owe more than one inspiration, more than one idea and quite a few scenes in my ‘Trilogy’
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'Bogurodzica' by Józef Brandt, 1909, oil on canvas, photo: The National Museum in Warsaw
At this time, Brandt was still friends with Kossak, who is a dozen or so years older and with whom he started his education. He became a protector of Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski, who was far removed from avant-garde explorations, instead specialising in hunting scenes in which the main characters are wolf packs awaiting hunters – a kind of a way of working through the trauma of one of the hunts in which Wierusz-Kowalski himself participated. Together with Kossak, Brandt went on a journey across Ukraine, after which Cossack motifs started to dominate his paintings. The palette also changed, as dark 'Munich sauces' gave way to bright, saturated colours.
In 1870, he set up his Munich studio in a new building on Schwanthalerstraße. He set up all the painting equipment in the studio, but his private collection of historical artefacts dominated the space. The floor was covered with a Persian carpet, the walls with a Turkish tent. Around him, armour, weapons and flags piled up, which Brandt used to paint historical pictures. Reconstructed as part of the monographic exhibition presented from 22nd June to 30th September at the National Museum in Warsaw, Brandt’s studio is a kind of private museum and the artist’s showcase even more than his actual studio. It was visited by other artists, people of culture and members of ruling families. In the meantime, the next generation of painters coming from partitioned Poland began spreading their wings in Munich, and they soon created a new formation of Polish symbolists. This, however, is a completely different story.
Written by Piotr Policht, translated by PG March 2022, edited by AZ
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