The Air & Sun Belong to You: Matejko as a Teacher

15f0cc6588a8c98b390728fa49894b0c0a6f31b16bc099e3c09dc83cec109f66_max.jpg, default, Academy of Fine Arts building, Kraków, 1926, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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What kind of instructor could one of the greatest individualists in the history of our native painting have been? The story of the Kraków School of Fine Arts (SFA), now the Academy bearing his name, at whose helm he stood for two decades, shows that in some respects he was the same kind of teacher as he was an artist – namely, full of contradictions.

Matejko first appears within the walls of the Kraków School of Fine Arts long before he took its helm – as a student. In 1852, when he began his studies, the headmaster was Wojciech Korneli Stattler, a Romantic painter known mainly for a single painting, The Maccabees, and several friendships, especially with Mickiewicz and Słowacki. In terms of skill, Stattler never achieved the level of mastery that the Romantics displayed on pen and paper, although Słowacki, strongly engaging in wishful thinking, saw in his paintings ‘the rosy glow of Polish painting to come’. At the time, the university itself did not yet have a long, let alone particularly impressive, history. Established in 1818, it was initially affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University. In 1826, it became independent of the faculty but not yet of the university itself. Stattler was the first to reform the provincial academy, following the example of Rome’s Academy of St Luke, one of the oldest art colleges, by introducing the study of nature, including the study of the male nude. In 1833, the school’s affiliation changed – it was relegated to being a secondary school attached to the Technical Institute. The school’s expansion took place after 1850, when Władysław Łuszczkiewicz joined the staff. He introduced a new approach to history and landscape painting, organised excursions, and promoted historical painting based on period props. After Stattler’s departure, while Matejko was still teaching, Łuszczkiewicz took charge of the school, actually managing to make some timid stirrings reverberate within the walls of the buildings still on loan from the Technical Institute.

Kraków–Munich–Kraków

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Palette with self-portraits by Jan Matejko’s disciples: Szymon Buchbinder, Emanuel Herncisz, Aleksander Mroczkowski, Władysław Rossowski, Franciszek Żmurko, National Museum in Kraków

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On the one hand, Stattler modernised the young school to some extent by introducing painting from nature into the course of instruction; on the other hand, he lost sight of the essentials during his classes, giving pathetic speeches on the ideals of art and reciting poems by the Romantics. Coincidentally, he was not only an expressive personality but also the director who actually pulled all the strings – he personally decided, for example, whether a given student candidate had sufficient skill for admission. Matejko passed through this sieve, despite his strong and, even during his first years at the SFA, uncorrected myopia. ‘It would have been a grave sin to leave such talent to its own devices’ – with these words, he was to be admitted by Director Stattler.

Intimidated at first, he soon developed an interest in antiquity through Łuszczkiewicz, furthered it intensively on his own, became more confident and after a few years was already looking critically at the work of his professors, refusing to bend to Stattler’s strict rules. He returned to the SFA for the last year and a half once the director had already left, mainly because of the possibility of obtaining a scholarship to travel abroad. In 1858, he succeeded and travelled to Munich. There he encountered, among others, the work of Carl von Piloty and his teacher, Paul Delaroche, who was popular throughout Europe at the time and who strongly influenced Matejko’s early work. The terms of the scholarship required him to continue his studies abroad, so in 1860 he set off for Vienna, this time with evident reluctance – he did not linger in the imperial capital for long. By that time he had become convinced that he had found his way and was reluctant to accept any comments from his teachers – and even took offence at them. Leonard Serfiński reported that ‘Jaś [diminutive for ‘Jan’ in Polish, trans.] had a spat with the dean of a painting school in Vienna’.

More than a decade later, in 1873, during a trip to Bohemia, from which his father had originated, Matejko, by then an internationally recognised artist, was given the opportunity to see the other side of the equation. The offer to become director of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts was probably something he considered seriously, especially as the Czechs offered a non-negligible salary and the academy itself was one of the more important European centres. In the end, however, he decided that, although he felt ‘cordially friendly’ toward the Czechs, ‘my love belongs to my land – to Poland’.

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'All Souls Day' by Witold Pruszkowski, first part of triptych, 1888, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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Poland then reciprocated this love. Later that year, Matejko received an analogous proposal from his alma mater, the School of Fine Arts in Kraków. At the time, the fate of the SFA remained uncertain – its liquidation was planned. Matejko, on the other hand, not only called for the preservation of the school but also for its elevation to the status of an academy in defiance of the policy of the authorities of the imperial royal monarchy, which at the time was unfavourably disposed to the creation of autonomous Polish institutions. For the artist, the model that served as a template for its postulated elevation was the recently established Academy of Knowledge (Akademia Umiejętności). Treating the topic as a matter of personal ambition, Matejko managed to win over a number of people to the cause, but the Austrian authorities were opposed to raising the school’s status and funding. The SFA was to educate mainly drawing instructors, not artists. With Matejko taking over the direction of the school in 1873, however, the school at least managed to become independent.

Although its rank was not formally elevated, the name of Matejko imbued the school with prestige more effectively than the word ‘academy’. As his pupil and later successor as director Julian Fałat stated, the name was ‘passed from mouth to mouth with respect and extraordinary reverence’. Internationally successful at the time he took up his post, Matejko (in the same year that he became director of the SFA, he received a medal in Vienna for Batory at Pskov) attracted art students not only from his homeland. While the drawing class in Warsaw under the direction of Wojciech Gerson was a springboard for further studies abroad, primarily in Munich, some alumni of the Munich academy, including Witold Pruszkowski, Leon Piccard and Ludomir Benedyktowicz, began to gravitate towards the Kraków academy.

Successors & epigones

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'Battle of Cecora' by Witold Piwnicki, 1878, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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The strength of Matejko’s influence is evidenced by the fact that Pruszkowski, who had already been shaped abroad and whose visionary work is located somewhere between Neo-Romanticism and Symbolism, among other things, painted portraits in Krakow that were clearly inspired by those of Matejko. At the SFA, he also produced the only history painting in his oeuvre, Piast, although his choice of a semi-mythical chapter in Poland’s history and its fantastic elements distinguish it from his teacher’s conventions of history painting. Leon Wyczółkowski also painted historical subjects under Matejko’s direction, such as The Escape of Maryna Mniszchówna (Ucieczka Maryny Miszchówny). The eloquent facial expression of the heroine and the depiction of dynamic movement expose Matejko’s influence here, although Wyczółkowski’s individuality is also strongly evident – in the intimate scene, the study of the winter landscape plays as much of a role as the historical account.

Far less remembered today are those of Matejko’s pupils who more directly, even slavishly, attempted to copy the style and subject matter of their professor’s paintings. Matejko, although committed to his beliefs about the role of painting, was not looking for epigones but for valued artists who revealed exceptional talent and individuality – he saw Jacek Malczewski and Maurycy Gottlieb rather than Emanuel Herncisz or Józef Męcina-Krzesz as his successors. No wonder, however, that at an academy with Matejko at its helm, the domain of history painting was held in the highest esteem.

Matejko had his own enclave at the academy – it was to history painting that the Composition Department, accompanying the painting and drawing departments, was de facto devoted. The curriculum of the academy, however, remained classical – based on several courses ranging from the study of drawing from antiquity to the study of the male nude, while being limited to painting and drawing – sculpture was a subsidiary discipline, on a par with anatomy, perspective, general history, art history and the study of styles. For his Composition Department, Matejko accepted candidates personally and kept watch over their work, which took place in separate, individual studios.

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‘Coffin of St Stanislaus’ by Leon Wyczółkowski, 1907, photo: Krzysztof Wilczyński / Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie

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Although the primacy of history painting was mainly due to the artist’s personal artistic beliefs, this course was also a continuation of the line taken by his predecessors, Stattler and Łuszczkiewicz, but also a distinguishing feature of the Kraków school compared to other Polish centres. As Jerzy Malinowski pointed out:

In Warsaw, in the circle of Wojciech Gerson, landscape and genre scenes were predominant, and the attitude towards national issues was expressed by means of attachment to one’s native land, nature and people (also due to censorship). In Lviv, besides landscape and genre scenes, portraiture gained a particularly high position thanks to Henryk Rodakowski.

Matejko was a history painter and the headmaster of the academy, but he was not an academic in the ideological sense – he placed individual genius above the rules, ‘he formed not skilful performers but carriers of the ‘national spirit’, as Katarzyna Jarmuł put it. For Matejko, the artist’s moral and national mission was the ultimate goal, not only in relation to his own work but also with regard to the education of subsequent generations. Therefore, although he himself was formally far from rigorous academicism and even dismissive about Siemiradzki’s Candlesticks of Christianity (Świeczniki Chrześcijaństwa), which he saw as ‘Munich academic painting’, he rejected modernist formal pursuits as an obstacle in the way of the ‘higher aims of art’. It was not only how the Impressionists and Realists painted but above all what they painted that he objected to.

We must not separate art from a love for our homeland

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‘Zygmunt August & Barbara Giżanka’ by Maurycy Gottlieb, c. 1874, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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He himself addressed such words to his students:

By not repeating the old ways from art’s past but by following today’s demands of art, or to put it more clearly, by combining today’s realism with the classical principles of the ancient masters, we may achieve new ways that are relevant to the desires and needs of the times.

Responding to the needs of the present day and using new forms, however, had limits – Matejko drew them where painting began, from his point of view, to assume a non-idealistic form that did not attempt to pose the question about the meaning of historical events. ‘Art is now like a weapon in our hands; we must not separate art from a love for our homeland!’ he thundered during his inaugural speech in 1882. This speech, however, went down in history above all because of a further, infamous passage.

The speech, delivered on 16 October 1882, ended with the sentences:

And you Hebrew students who come to our School of Fine Arts, remember that art is not a commercial speculative job of some sort but work for the higher purposes of the human spirit, uniting the love of God with the love of our homeland. If you wish only to learn the fine arts in our artistic scholarly institution for the sake of speculation and feel no gratitude toward the country, nor any sense of duty toward it; if you, Hebrews, living in our country for centuries, do not feel drawn to nobler deeds for our country, nor wish to be Poles, then leave our country, go from us to where there is no homeland, no higher feelings of love for it, no greater human virtues conceived in a love for the land!

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‘Expulsion of the Moors from Granada' by Maurycy Gottlieb, ca. 1877, oil on canvas, 36 x 26.5 cm, Museum of Art in Łódź, photo courtesy of the Herbst Palace Museum in Łódź

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Maurycy Gottlieb, "Wygnanie Maurów z Granady", ok. 1877, olej na płótnie, 36 x 26.5 cm, Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, fot. dzięki uprzejmości Muzeum Pałac Herbsta w Łodzi

The reason for this antisemitic attack was said to be a deceit perpetrated by one of the school’s Jewish students, as described by Marian Gorzkowski, Matejko’s faithful follower and the secretary of the SFA, without specifying, however, what it consisted of; in any case, it does not justify the overt aversion of this attack on the Jewish community.

Aleksander Świętochowski spoke out sharply against these words: ’it is inhuman, it is dishonourable, it is unbecoming of a demigod’, he quipped. The response to the director’s attack came in the form of an open letter published in the magazine Czas (Time):

Words coming out of the mouths of such important people have a detrimental effect on young people as a whole, for by reverberating with a thousand echoes, they poison the notions of the younger generation and sow the seeds of hatred and contempt for their colleagues,

wrote the signatories.

Matejko responded to the protests with a lawsuit against a Jewish financier, Leon Eibenchütz, who, after meeting Gorzkowski, allegedly referred to Matejko as a ‘scoundrel’ (Eibenchütz himself explained the matter differently before the court). He responded to the letter with his own publication, or rather a speech by his lawyer, published at his own expense.

This latter was Józef Mochnacki, who himself proposed to Gorzkowski that he would bring a case against Eibenchütz, pro bono. Although Matejko won in court – a fine was imposed – the lawyer did not stop there. The aforementioned speech published by Matejko was such an openly antisemitic pamphlet that the public prosecutor’s office confiscated almost its entire print run. Several copies were kept and distributed by Gorzkowski. Suffice it to say that Mochnacki wrote in it, for example, that ‘everywhere and for all time the Jews have degraded the fine arts, making of them the filthiest speculation’.

Eibenchütz replied: ‘No one in Poland has ever spoken in such a way, no one has ever spread such antisemitic views’. He was, unfortunately, quite right – in this case, Matejko had added to the xenophobic propaganda that was only just taking root, even if he was somewhat implicated in the whole affair through the actions of Gorzkowski and Mochnacki. However, a year after the verdict, he himself published in Warsaw’s Rola (Farmland), Jan Jeleński’s antisemitic weekly, a proclamation that was only slightly less inflammatory than his lawyer’s speech, to which Eliza Orzeszkowa, among others, reacted with indignation.

Stanislaw Witkiewicz had already said directly about Gorzkowski, the secretary of the SFA, that he discredited Matejko with his explanations of his works because ‘he knows neither how to think nor how to write, his pamphlets about the master’s paintings are a heap of nonsense, linguistic defects and superficial flattery’. It is possible that it was he who played a key role in the whole affair, especially as only a few years earlier Matejko had envisioned the Polish-Jewish painter Maurice Gottlieb as his successor, someone who, he claimed, was ‘in addition to his extraordinary abilities, a man full of virtuous motive, a nature endearing in its goodness and selflessness’.

Gottlieb was also one of the artists drawn to Kraków by the magic of Matejko’s name. He began his studies as a fifteen-year-old at the Academy in Vienna. It was in the imperial capital that he saw Matejko’s Rejtan and, impressed by the painting, which differed in expression from the smoothed-out painting of the academics, decided to transfer to the School of Fine Arts. Matejko’s influence is already evident in Gottlieb’s paintings at the level of his choice of subjects – the young Jewish painter from Drohobych painted, among other things, historical scenes from the golden age of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He himself stated in Vienna, in response to accusations of copying Matejko’s formal errors, that ‘although he was imitating Matejko, he was nevertheless one of the best at the Academy’. There was no exaggeration in this – especially as, despite his death at the age of just twenty-three, he managed to strike out on his own and did not become an epigone of Matejko’s but a creator of original compositions of Jewish history and psychologically profound and colourfully sophisticated portraits, indicating his inspiration by Rembrandt. However, his fascination with his teacher never faded. When he met Matejko in Rome in 1878, his former teacher called him the greatest painter among Polish Jews, anointed him as his successor and suggested painting a scene with Casimir the Great granting rights to Jews. Gottlieb returned to the SFA and indeed took up the subject but passed away only a year later.

The spectral dean

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Students during painting classes in Professor Józef Mehoffer’s studio, 1928, photo: audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Matejko, who himself felt constrained rather than motivated by the school, stepped into the shoes of his former teachers to a certain extent when he crossed over to the other side and repeated their methods. He did not allow, for example, classes on the female nude – for ‘moral’ reasons. These would be not take place until his students, such as Józef Mehoffer, assumed the roles of professors. Moreover, although he himself graduated from the academy in order to receive a scholarship abroad, a scholarship which influenced the course of his career due to his contact with von Piloty and Delaroche, he was reluctant to allow his ‘unformed’ students to go abroad.

In some respects, Matejko’s teaching methods may seem like the embodiment of nineteenth-century rigour, but he occasionally used methods that were also daring in the context of today’s discussions surrounding the ills of the educational system. Unlike other professors, for example, the artist did not assign numerical marks. In addition, he offered not only numerous comments but also practical help – if necessary, he lent his collection of historical costumes and props to students and even funded scholarships out of his own pocket. Matejko’s corrections, for their part, were not limited to verbal suggestions – oftentimes he himself seized the brush and corrected problematic parts of paintings with his own hands. Wincenty Wodzinowski recalled: ‘Observing his work, which lasted half an hour or so, I learnt more about painting the folds of drapery than I had in the course of the past few years, during which professors made a correction and then lectured on how one should paint’.

‘We were all under the spell of his art, admired and celebrated at world fairs’, recalled Fałat. With time, however, Matejko’s star dimmed, the opinions of critics, especially the French, became less favourable. The Kraków master and his formula of history painting themselves seemed inevitably to pass into history. What had previously been the strength of the Kraków school – namely, the powerful personality of its director – was beginning to become an issue. According to Stanisław Witkiewicz, ‘Matejko fettered the Kraków school, killed it with the force of his individuality as a painter and tried to handcuffed it with his Catholic-artistic doctrines’.

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‘Winter Landscape with a River & a Bird’ by Julian Fałat, 1913, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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Julian Fałat, "Pejzaż zimowy z rzeką i ptakiem", 1913, fot. Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie

By the end of the 1880s, he was complaining about the lack of talented students, and the school had noticeably less gravity. At the same time, in the second decade of his directorship, he himself became less and less involved in university affairs and more and more focused on his own work, becoming ‘more of a legend than something real’ for his students, spending time in his own studio at the school, to which he sneaked through a separate entrance. Henryk Marek Słoczyński wrote:

He was ready to blame everything but himself for this and was unable to change anything in the ossified institution. The pedagogical functions continued to be performed by the director’s former colleagues, artistic mediocrities remaining in his deep shadow. Bringing in younger, talented painters was out of the question, as these were proponents of a foreign, 'mindless' art.

Matejko did not admit the thought of his own negligence and blamed the decline in the university’s popularity on the statutes, for example, which in his view needed updating, rather than simply on the higher level of foreign universities to which candidates were flocking. Meanwhile, Matejko continued to seek out his successors. Gottlieb died prematurely, Malczewski and Wyspiański for their part remained his closest heirs, but in their work they did not so much commit symbolic patricide as, by seeking their own way in other, more contemporary forms, find a way to expand upon Matejko’s historiosophical art. Their reflections on Polish history and modernity also led them to different conclusions.

To a certain extent, grand historical visions survived in the works of Jan Styka and his panoramas, a specific phenomenon at the nexus of the arts and mass spectacle, which, however, after a short period of popularity throughout Europe, were cast aside not even due to new trends within painting but because of the development of new media, especially film. A few students attempted to continue the Matejko tradition in the form of classical monumental painting, but the artists who followed this path, such as Witold Piwnicki, not only worked in a completely different artistic climate but also came nowhere close to their teacher in terms of talent.

Thaw

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Polychrome fragment by Stanisław Wyspiański in Franciscan Church in Kraków, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Reluctant to embrace new artistic currents, Matejko let his guard down a little in the last years of his life and directorship under the pressure of the changing spirit of the times. He was beginning to come to terms with the fact that the artistic sympathies of the younger generation were heading in a different direction from the one he himself considered righteous. ‘I have other interests… yours are the air and the sun, I will stay with the old kings,’ he declared melancholically in response to Włodzimierz Tetmajer’s painting Sanctified (Święcone), capitulating to some extent under the pressure of the Impressionist revolution. However, his criteria of talent and conscientious work remained unchanged – he would conclude his correction of Tetmajer’s work with the words: ‘It’s good that you went down this road, I enjoy the painting, please finish it… I, sir, can distinguish between those who study nature and have something to say, and those who study other people’s paintings’.

The artistic landscape was shifting, but so was the landscape of Kraków itself. As Jacek Purchla wrote:

Modernism, and in Kraków above all Young Poland of the turn of the century, became the reaction to a dying historicism. Simultaneously, the city gradually threw off the fetters of an Austrian fortress and, at the threshold of the First World War, Juliusz Leo’s Greater Kraków was born.

This Krakow, however, was also shaped by Matejko’s disciples, including Wyspiański and Mehoffer, who were completing their apprenticeships with the polychromy of St Mary’s Basilica, which contributed to the blooming of Young Poland’s monumental painting. Wyspiański referenced Matejko through the polychromy at the Franciscan Church in Kraków, covering its walls and ceilings with ornaments but moving away from historicism in favour of an individually treated Art Nouveau style.

Matejko’s pupils were also much bolder pedagogues than he, educating successive generations of modern artists and, in time, female artists. Many of them forged their individuality in opposition to his school-dominating personality. As Pruszkowski claimed:

Merely the spell of his name and his powerful spirit managed to bring minds and hearts together; only he was able to create this work, give it shape and set it in motion. In the course of its further development, however, this power and charm had a rather negative effect on the school.

Wojciech Weiss, who grew up in the cult of Matejko, saw a revival after his death equal to the one that took place when he had stood at the helm of the university:

We began to take an interest in colour. Everyone seemed to carry the sun in a cassette. We went out into the field. We tried to reflect our experience of the moment as faithfully as possible – like nature. We cared not at all for history. To paint a history picture – that’s reactionary, a lack of talent. We enjoyed the present day. The sun! Sunshine once again.

After Matejko’s death, the professors of the SFA included Weiss, Mehoffer and Wyczółkowski, and Fałat became its next director. For that circle, Matejko remained an important point of reference, even if, as an instructor, he had sometimes been a negative model.

English translation by Michał Niedzielski

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