The Story of Podhale Folk Art

restauracja_na_gubalowce_nac.jpg, default, Restaurant on Gubałówka, project by Antoni Kenar, 1938 - 1939, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC), center

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Time and peripheral capitalism have not been kind to Zakopane and its visual culture. But if today we sigh for the Podhale of decades ago, it’s worth remembering that its eclectic identity has been co-created by tourists for a long time.

Guys who like to play with knives

When, thanks to figures such as Tytus Chałubiński and Stanisław Witkiewicz, the Tatra Mountains became an increasingly popular destination for townsfolk craving the salutary powers of the spa air or seeking thrills through contact with the wild nature of the mountains, the souvenir industry in Zakopane did not exist. In the absence of folk products for sale, the visitors themselves became the midwives of their creation. In the pages of the daily Kraków newspaper Czas (Time), Father Eugeniusz Janota, one of the early promoters of local tourism, called on the Tatra highlanders to imitate their Swiss and Tyrolean counterparts:

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The local highlanders [...] should make things from wood, as is often the case with the highland tribes of Switzerland, Tyrol and the Black Forest. With little work in the fields [...] they could usefully fill this time with carving various little things, especially the guys who like to play with knives.

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Exhibition at the Zakopane Wood Industry School, furniture and wooden sculptures made by students, 1930, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Janota's invitation sounds paradoxical, but it fits perfectly into the imagination of the era. It’s no wonder that he recommended that the Zakopane mountaineers follow Alpine models, since at the same time, the first tourist inns were being built in the style we know today as ‘Swiss’ or ‘Tyrolean’. In order for the Tatra Mountains to become a tourist hit of the Interwar period, they first had to become similar to the fashionable Alpine resorts.

Academism’s lesson

However, the differences between the Tatras and the Tyrol was soon recognised and the use of local models began to be postulated. But first, the right conditions had to be created for this. In the mid 1870s, when Zakopane still resembled a shepherd's village, the first Polish tourist organisation, the Tatra Society, established the Woodcarving School, which was renamed shortly afterwards as the Wood Industry School. Although the very idea of the woodcarving school was again borrowed from the Swiss-Tyrolean models, its fruits were to grow out of local traditions.

The school became one of the elements of the society's extensive modernisation campaign. This initiative also propelled the prompt building of a railway station in Zakopane, a telegraph line being brought in, and a number of roads and bridges being repaired as well as built, which were illuminated by paraffin lamps.

Even though from today's perspective, we speak of Young Poland's ‘chłopomania’ (a term describing a fascination with peasantry), the relationship between folk art and the early modernists who drew from it was by no means one-sided. It is true that the first teacher at the Zakopane Woodcarving School was a highlander from Zakopane, Maciej Marduła, but the position was not simply entrusted to him with faith in his woodcarving skills. The sculptor was recommended to the society by a local parish priest; however, its members decided to polish their folk diamond a bit. So Marduła was first sent for five months to study with a sculptor who had little in common with folk woodcarving – Franciszek Wyspiański from Kraków. The coincidence of surnames was not accidental; Franciszek was none other than Stanisław Wyspiański's father.

When Marduła finally returned to the school, he didn’t stay for long. After two years, the school – which was generating increasing costs – was nationalised, and the Austrian authorities replaced the unruly woodcarver with a professional sculptor. Under the direction of the Czech František Neužil, the school quickly gained a very good reputation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Marduła's successor, to put it mildly, did not appreciate his predecessor, calling him a drunkard and an illiterate, amongst other things.

Under imperial rule, the school lost its local character. Neužil, a child of his time, was not interested in nurturing local traditions, but in setting up an efficient educational machine on the Austrian model. So he brought with him teaching aids – academic casts of ancient sculptures, supplemented by woodcarving patterns from the Tyrol.

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Antoni Kenar State High School of Art Techniques in Zakopane, wooden sculptures placed outdoors in front of the high school building, 1966, photo: www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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An artisan factory

At the same time, the members of the Tatra Society, in the positivist spirit, appreciated the social role of the school in bringing the pupils out of ‘unpleasant relations’ and providing them with ‘a proper education and the possibility of securing their own existence’. But they also expressed their fears about the loss of its local character:

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We fear […], the choice of models should not stifle the originality of the art, which might be inherent in the highlander. We should take as our starting point simple art, poured out by the highlanders in the decoration of their household utensils, tools and clothes, and by developing the elements in this way we could achieve an ornamental style, which would have a special value just by its originality.

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By the early 1980s, the school had a new, purpose-built building, and in addition to woodcarving, it also taught carpentry and milling. At the same time, a sister institution was opened in Zakopane – the National School of Lacemaking, one of the first vocational schools for women in Poland, founded with the support of the actress Helena Modrzejewska.

Within a decade, the expansion mission had definitely succeeded. When the school was taken over by Marduła, nine students came under his care. In the following decade, 10 times as many skilled craftsmen graduated from the school. Neužil was eventually replaced by the Hungarian Edgar Kováts, who maintained the school’s current programme. However, not everyone displayed admiration for the Zakopane institution. Stanisław Witkiewicz could not tolerate the models propagated by Kováts and Neužil. The creator of the Zakopane style got his way when Stanisław Barabasz replaced Kováts as director. Although he went down in history more as a pioneer of Polish skiing than as an artist, he introduced one significant change to the school – under Witkiewicz's influence, academic and Tyrolean models were removed from the programme in favour of promoting local motifs.

Folk avant-garde

The breakthrough in the school's history came after two decades of Barabasz as director, who was replaced in 1922 by Karol Stryjeński – a designer and graphic artist, privately the son of architect Tadeusz Stryjeński and the husband of artist Zofia Stryjeńska. The new director was not interested in subtle corrections to the programme. He reduced the number of departments, which had been growing steadily until then, and ordered the existing professors to pack their bags. ‘The school should be an area of perpetual experimentation’, he declared.

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View from the exhibition ‘Connection Warsaw-Zakopane’, 2017, the Museum of Sculpture in Królikarnia, Warsaw, photo by Bartosz Górka

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Although Stryjeński himself dealt with, amongst other things, interior design, he was more interested in the artistic potential of local folk art than in the previously nurtured industrial potential of the school. In fact, he was not the first to notice it. The decorative stylisation and positively valued ‘primitiveness’ not only inspired artists at that time to look for specific solutions in Podhale art, but also caused the original Zakopane art to be presented among the works of modernists. In 1917, the 1st Exhibition of Polish Expressionists in Kraków included not only the paintings of the Pronaszko brothers or Tytus Czyżewski, but also a collection of almost 30 paintings on glass and steel engravings from the Podhale region. They occupied a prominent place in the exhibition, as evidenced by the layout of the exhibition catalogue – it is these paintings which open it.

The famous Polish pavilion at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, co-created by Stryjeński, was also a success for the school – its student Karol Szostak, among others, won a medal at the exhibition. Stryjeński's revolution, which had begun three years earlier, consisted in the abandonment of specific models suggested to the students, be they Swiss or Witkiewicz's. Instead, Stryjeński focused on working with the material and chiselling the talent of his pupils. This resulted in the wooden sculptures being appreciated in Paris, in which the Podhale woodcarving tradition combined with Stryjeński's didactic guidelines began to gravitate towards forms close to Cubism and Futurism. The rhythmic, geometrised, softly modelled, dynamic forms of small figures of highlanders, animals or saints prove that the relationship between the avant-garde and folk art did not have to be one-sided and cannibalistic.

With time, the solutions proposed by Stryjeński turned into a kind of academism – mechanically reproduced solutions in the style of ‘Zakopane art deco’. Nevertheless, the values introduced by him did not disappear completely. Antoni Kenar graduated from the school in the same year the Paris exhibition was held; he later became director of the school, which bears his name today. He made a name for himself as a creator of modern and folk-rooted Zakopane visual arts, the realisation of which today has to be seen with a watchful eye in the devastated visual landscape of the city. Above all, he was a great teacher. In the Zakopane souvenir industry, it is hard to find the once distinctive combination of modernity and folklore, but it’s enough to look at the work of Władysław Hasior or Antoni Rząsa to see Stryjeński's ideological heritage.

The school itself still exists today, although the Zakopane milieu is no longer favourable to artists, to the extent that its most talented graduates decide to leave. Back in the 1990s, a group of artists tried to revive the Pegaz Gallery, co-founded by Tadeusz Brzozowski, amongst others, but its life proved short. And even those designers who continued the tradition of combining modern solutions with traditional materials from the Podhale region now mostly live and work in Warsaw.

Originally written in Polish, May 2019, translated by Agnes Dudek, Aug 2020

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