Aleksander Gierymski

Aleksander Gierymski was one of the most acclaimed representatives of realism, and the precursor of luminist and colour experiments in the Polish painting of the late nineteenth century. He was born in 1850 in Warsaw, and died in 1901 in Rome.

Wed, 01/30/1850 - 12:00 - Fri, 03/08/1901 - 12:00

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Portrait of Aleksander Gierymski, 1885, photo: Conrad Photographic Studio, Warsaw

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He was born into a family of intellectuals that had resided in Warsaw for generations. He was the younger brother of the painter Maksymilian Gierymski. In 1867, he began his studies at the Warsaw School of Drawing, probably under Rafał Hadziewicz. In 1868, he went to Munich for further studies, where he trained at the Academy of Fine Arts under George Hiltensperger, Alexander Strähuber, and Hermann Anschütz, and from 1870 to 1872, he perfected his compositional techniques under Karl Piloty. In 1869, together with Maksymilian, he attended the private studio of Franz Adam. During this period, he began to work as an illustrator for Warsaw-based magazines (including Kłosy and Tygodnik Ilustrowany) and later for German and Austrian journals as well. In 1871, he travelled together with his elder brother to Italy (Venice, Verona). Direct experience of Italian Renaissance paintings had a significant impact on the style of his early works. He also accompanied his sick brother to medical facilities in alpine towns.

From 1873 to 1879, Gierymski lived mainly in Rome, but he visited his hometown on few occasions. During a longer stay in Warsaw, he became acquainted with Stanisław Witkiewicz and Antoni Sygietyński, with whom he worked for Wędrowiec weekly. The magazine published many of his illustrations, mostly urban landscapes, which looked like visual reportages depicting the city's sites and customs. In 1882, he became a member of the Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych (Zachęta Society of Fine Arts). From 1885, he stayed almost exclusively abroad. At the end of 1884, he went to Vienna for treatment (he had been suffering from neurosis, which at the end of his life, developed the characteristics of mental illness) and spent some time in the resorts by the North Sea (Blankenberg, Heist am See). From the spring of 1885, he lived in Italy (Padua, Venice, Florence and Rome).

From 1888 to 1890 and 1895 to 1897, he lived in Munich, and he travelled to the Bavarian Alps and the Tyrol region (Schleissheim, Kufstein, Rattenberg) to take part in courses on outdoor painting. In autumn 1890, he went to Paris after being commissioned by Ignacy Korwin-Milewski to paint an evening view of the Opera Square. There, for the first time, he had a chance to see a wide range of Impressionist paintings, which had an impact on his further experiments in the fields of light and colour. At the end of 1893, he visited Kraków, probably on account of an offered position as the head of painting department at the School of Fine Arts. At that time, he befriended Włodzimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer and created his most important paintings during this period. However, his increasing sense of loneliness and alienation from the Polish artistic environment contributed to his decision to leave Poland in 1894, this time for good. The last years of Gierymski’s life were filled with constant journeys. From the autumn of 1897, he travelled mainly to Italian cities (Venice, Palermo, Amalfi, Rome and Verona). During this period, he also made longer trips to Paris (1898-1899 and 1900).

Gazebo by Aleksander Gierymski, details of the painting – Image Gallery

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Portret Aleksandra Gierymskiego, Stanisława Witkiewicza i Antoniego Sygietyńskiego oglądających obraz — Portrait of Aleksander Gierymski, Stanisław Witkiewicz and Antoni Sygietyński looking at the painting, 1884, © Copyright by Piotr Ligier / National Museum in Warsaw

Aleksander Gierymski, as one of the few nineteenth-century Polish artists, was always at the centre of affairs and issues troubling the contemporary European art of the time. As an extremely sensitive and ambitious painter, he was consumed by his pursuit of the mirage of an unspecified artistic ideal. At the same time, he was an intellectual painter. Gierymski did not express his emotional states in his paintings, and he did not intend to move viewers, nor did he succumb to generally prevailing aesthetic tastes. He had the attitude of a cold, meticulous observer of nature. In his works, devoid of descriptive narrative, he attempted to capture the fleeting moods he spotted in the natural world. Most of all, Gierymski was fascinated with the characteristics of light and its effects on variations of shades. His major achievement at Munich Academy of Fine Arts was the painting Court scene from Shakespeares Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare with which he debuted at the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873. The most important feature which distinguishes this work from other historical paintings of the Munich school was its reference to the Venetian style of painting from the period of the depicted event, especially to the work of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini. Apart from the perfectly captured climate of the late Quattrocento, critics emphasized its "beautiful, warm tone and great power of light", mastery in portrayal the diversity of characters, and wealth of differentiated textures.

Aleksander Gierymski, Old Town Gate, 1883, oil on canvas, 64 x 49 cm, photo: Art Museum in Łódź

Gierymski disregarded the sublime ideals of academic art, and expressed such an attitude in his first fully independent works depicting the life of the Rome’s proletariat Roman Inn and Playing Mora The finished paintings were preceded by dozens of preparatory sketches, and during the work Gierymski copied photographs of properly dressed and posed models. Yet, the two paintings, unmistakably realistic in recreating the modern scenery of the Italian taverns, showed clear signs of an academic discipline in painting. This is manifested in Playing Mora, which is painted with a clear, logical structure to the composition (based on the principles of symmetry and balance of vertical and horizontal accents), with the attention to strict, precise delineation of forms, and an effort to obtain a smooth surface of the canvas and harmonious range of colours, subordinate to the primacy of one tone.

Both images were heavily criticized in the Polish press for the triviality of the topic, though it didn't deny its artistic value. Affected by those reviews, as well as enthralled by Helena Modjeska, who he had he met in Warsaw, Gierymski decided to change the theme of his work. As a consequence, from 1876 to 1880 he painted Italian Siesta, repeated in two versions of composition, showing a group of Renaissance patricians listening to music and poetry on the terrace of the palace. The painting was inspired by the works of the Italian masters – Titian and Tintoretto – and its distinction lies in its luminosity, warmth of colour, deep saturation of applied layers of hues, richness and density of painting matter.

In the autumn of 1875, Gierymski began a few years preparatory work for the painting Gazebo, showing the elegant Rococo society resting in a garden in the full glare of the sun. Paradoxically, in this particular composition in which he retained the style of historical costumes, the artist finally freed himself from the rigid rules of academic convention, and achieved, through individual experiments, effects close to that of impressionist paintings.

Gazebo by Aleksander Gierymski, details of the painting – Image Gallery

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In order to create the most objective image of reality, he thoroughly studied every little detail of nature, explored the arrangement of forms in space, and analysed the optical phenomena of the interpenetration of spots of colour and light reflections. The evidence of those efforts is the Polish museums’ collection of outdoor sketches, captivating with their freshness of impression, richness of colour and shimmering reflections of sunlight Study of the Cylinder, approx. 1876; Begonias, Fountain (approx. 1876-1879).

With his return to Warsaw at the beginning of 1880, Gierymski ended his youthful period of exploration and experimentation which was associated with the change of his work subjects. During this period, the artist finally abandoned painting elegant genre scenes of past eras, and focused all attention on the images of everyday life in poor, neglected districts of Warsaw - Old Town, Powiśle, Solec. He made dozens of visual notes and outdoor sketches, showing randomly observed episodes of urban life, which he used both in his work as an illustrator and in the compositions of his oil paintings.

In these works, Gierymski closely approached the principles of Realism, widely propagated at that time by Stanisław Witkiewicz and Antoni Sygietyński in Warsaw's magazine Wędrowiec (The Wanderer, trans. OT). Initially, with an innate passion for authenticity, he tried to recreate every detail observed in the real situations and to accurately copy the looks and actions of the individuals captured in the foreground Jewess with Oranges 1881, Gate of the Old City. However, in subsequent paintings from 1883 and 1884 (Powiśle, Solec Harbour, The Feast of Trumpets, we can observe a gradual abandonment of this descriptive narrative. It seems as if Gierymski perceived the scenes from a greater distance, both in terms of actual distance, as well as some mental distance. People and their daily affairs do not attract all our attention; they seem to be an inherent part of one's surroundings. This kind of compositions enhances the impression of uniformity of the painter's vision, on in which the human figure ceases to be the main character, and becomes merely a set of patches of colour co-creating the structure of the entire composition.

Aleksander Gierymski's Jewess with Oranges: details of the painting – Image Gallery

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With the painting The Feast of Trumpets, Gierymski ended another stage of his experiments aimed at exploring the mystery of light and its effect on the harmony of colours. The hazy glow of the evening twilight and the golden hues reflected in the mirror of the water emphasizes the elegiac mood of this painting, full of reverie in which the silent, prayerful concentration of people harmonizes with the stillness of dusk. Gierymski returned twice to the motif of Święto trąbek in 1888 and 1890, slightly changing the arrangement of the composition and its colour tone. Gierymski’s fascination with light, which was significant for all of his works, gained a new dimension in a series of urban nocturnes, started during his subsequent stay in Munich, and continued in Paris.

Aleksander Gierymski, Feast of trumpets, oil on canvas 47 x 64,5 cm, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

The main issue the artist tried to resolve in the following paintings was the differentiation in the intensity of dark colours, and perfecting his technique of showing the complex light effects of street lamps, scattering in the mid-tones, angles of architectural shapes, and faint reflections emanating from the dark silhouettes of people. Architectural forms and characters are built with just colour and no lines, and subtle gradations of nuanced colours give the compositions uniform, blue or dark brown-greyish tones. In the images opening this series, Maximilian Joseph’s Square in Munich/ Plac Maksymiliana Józefa w Monachium (1890), Wittelsbach Square in Munich/Plac Wittelsbachów w Monachium (1890) and Paris Opera/Opera paryska (1891), Gierymski skilfully brought out a generic aspect in the presented scenes by playing primarily with light effects. With the diligence of an astute observer, he recreated traffic spotted by chance, and the individually varying poses and gestures of passing people. However, in his later nocturnes, such as theLouvre at Night /Luwr w nocy /(1892) and Street in Rome/ Ulica w Rzymie we can discern his attempts to intensify expression through intense contrast of light and shadow, emphasizing the emotionalexpression of the loneliness of man and his feeling of being adrift in the dark alleys of the city.

The painting which concluded Gierymski’s Parisian period was the monumental Evening on the Seine (1893), preceded by a series of outdoor oil studies. By employing a light sketch technique in these paintings, resulting in the vague outlines of forms, the artist masterfully captures the fleeting impression of colourful light reflections refracted on the waves of the river. Gierymski's new painting technique, used for the first time in Evening on the Seine and similar to divisionism, was applied also to most of his paintings from the Kraków period – in bright, sunny landscapes, realistic scenes, and portraits of the inhabitants of Bronowice (Boy Carrying a Sheaf, Inn in Bronowice, Road in Bronowice). Peasant's Coffin (1894-1895) also belongs to this series of works, and, apart from its simplicity and economy, is distinguished by its great strength of expression and the artist’s exceptional ability to portray the psychological truth of the depth of the parent's pain after the death of their child.

Aleksander Gierymski, Evening on the Seine,1893, oil on canvas, 27.5 x 20.5 cm, photo: National Museum in Kraków

The last six years of Gierymski’s life were filled with anxiety and hectic creative tension. Initially, from 1895 to 1897, he returned to realism, as evidenced by his paintings of old town alleys and church interiors from Rothenburg and Schleissheim, in which the artist expressed his constant interest in the subject of light and colour. With the passing of time, Gierymski’s passion for objective, detailed portrayals of nature again prevailed over his other inclinations. Sunny images of Italian cities painted in bright, intense colours, especially of old churches and their interiors, are executed with pedantic accuracy in recreating the tiniest architectural details (Cathedral in Amalfi, approx. 1897-1898; Seashore near Amalfi, approx. 1898; Interior of the Cathedral in Siena, 1898; Piazza del Popolo in Rome, 1900).

The precision with which Gierymski used the brush to achieve clarity in modelling every detail of the composition, as well as the thickness and heaviness of the paint, are typical for many of his works from this period. They show his predilection to subjugate visual sensations to intellectual concepts of composing on the canvas. As a result, these painting, wearying with their excessive amounts of meticulous details and applications of vivid, sometimes even dissonant, colour combinations, evoke feelings of anxiety.

Aleksander Gierymski, "Opera paryska w nocy", 1891, olej na płótnie, 161 x 129,4 cm, wł. Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, fot. MNW — Paris Opera by Night by Aleksander Gierymski, 1891, oil on canvas, 161 x 129,4 cm, in the collection of National Museum in Warsaw, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

Contrary to works that could be labelled as photo-documentaries are paintings from the series of images of the Italian parks, including gardens of the villa d'Este in Tivoli, which in all their fullness revealed Gierymski’s ability to capture on canvas the fleeting impressions that are proper for impressionist paintings (Italian Park, approx. 1897-1898; Pinieta di Villa Borghese in Rome, 1895-1900).

In these paintings, executed in a range of bright pastel colours, the artist masterfully managed to transpose the subtle interplay of light and colour which determines the immediate appearance of a landscape into the language of painting. One of the greatest and most beautiful of Gierymski's works from this last period is Interior of the Basilica of St. Mark's in Venice (1899). In this painting, the artist returned to the poetry of the nocturne and related light effects, so that all the details lost their focus and precise outline in the its hazy, subtle chiaroscuro. The artist created a romantic vision of dark, mysterious temple interior which is enlivened by the delicate glow of sunlight coming from the darkness of the architectural elements and the discreet splendour of the wall mosaics.

Two praying women, small figures against the monumental scale of the temple, intensify the impression of silence and its contemplative mood. This mood, which is typical of symbolic paintings and evoked by the view of the interior of St. Mark's basilica in Venice, is also found in one of the last of Gierymski’s paintings – Lake at Sunset (1900). The painter’s sensitivity, manifested here in accurately perceived and recreated colour relations, is combined here with an attempt to obtain a monumental vision of the landscape, painted in a suggestive, foreshortening perspective. Contrasted with the heavy, dark mass of land, the pink-gold colour of the sky, enriched with a mass of lilac reflected by the water, exudes such radiance that it almost becomes the light. In this painting, the atmosphere of poetic understatements from Evening on the Seine returns, with its impression of unrealistic forms, dissolving into the misty aura of twilight, which unifies the vision and tones of colour expression.

Author: Ewa Micke-Broniarek, National Museum in Warsaw, September 2004, transl. GS, 19,09.2014

realism