PP: Due to where its being presented, have Polish-Munichian connections been highlighted in the exhibition?
AB: There is a kind of conscious absence. What our audience associates with Munich is the Polish Munich School, realism, names such as Maksymilian Gierymski and Józef Brandt. But this theme is not on show. The curatorial team focused on the turn of the century and the tradition that led to these paintings, and the Munich environment is a different formula. So there is no Brandt and Gierymski, but there is Józef Chełmoński and his Indian Summer, whose presence I am very happy about, because it’s a work which brings together many different tendencies. It includes a classical painting tradition, inspiration by Ukrainian nature, realism, and also symbolic content. Of course, many Polish artists passed through private schools and the academy in Munich, like Witold Pruszkowski and Aleksander Gierymski. The exhibition will include a beautiful painting by Gierymski, not usually exhibited at the National Museum in Warsaw. It shows a fragment of the Ludwig Bridge in Munich, so that there is a local accent. It’s displayed in a space telling the story of the presence of Polish artists in various European art centres. The links between Polish artists and Munich, St Petersburg and, of course, Paris are strongly marked. It’s important for us to show the international aspects of the Polish artistic environment, the influences, exchanges and migration of artistic ideas.
PP: Although its similar to the 2019 exhibition in Louvre-Lens, also created in collaboration with the National Museum in Warsaw and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, what is the distribution of themes this time round in the narrative of ‘Stille Rebellen’?
AB: The exhibition in the Kunsthalle highlights the post-Romantic tradition undertaken in Young Poland by Jacek Malczewski and other artists. At Louvre-Lens, art from earlier periods was also exhibited: Romantic painting, such as Artur Grottger’s works, realism, battle studies, as well as paintings created ‘to comfort the heart’. This time the emphasis is on what was happening around 1900 and on the tradition which the painters drew on or rejected. A clearly emphasised theme is the role of the Polish artist and the change in their perception that occured at that time, from duty to freedom.
NS: It’s within this context that we refer to the Polish artistic enclave in Munich, and the way in which the artists there adapted realist and stimmung painting. Moreover, affinities with the Symbolist painting of Arnold Böcklin and Franz von Stuck can also be found in other parts of the exhibition.