Stabrowski’s artistic stance was shaped within the framework of academic norms and canons of depiction (Study of a Female Model, 1895). However, between 1900 and 1914, the culmination period of the multi-threaded Young Poland movement, the artist developed his own recognisable style, visible in his portraits, fantastic-symbolic compositions and landscapes. He became one of the outstanding representatives of art at the beginning of the 20th century, representing painting of a decorative style, related to the Vienna Secession and Paris Art Nouveau. Stabrowski assimilated and adapted his impressions from European travels, creating fairy-tale visions and carefully arranged portraits in interiors (Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, before 1908). Several analogies linked his art with the imagery and conventions of the Russian Mir Iskusstva group.
Common to Stabrowski and Mikhail Vrubel’s iconography, as to many European symbolists, were images of gown-clad peacock women (Against a Stained-glass Peacock, 1908), princesses in lace and pearls emerging from sea waves (The Story of the Waves: Portrait of Emilia Auszpitz, 1910) and winged demon-knights (Portrait of Mr B. in Fantastic Attire. Portrait of the Painter Bronisław Brykner, 1908). The suppleness of lines and the wavy contours, encircling slightly modulated patches of saturated and deep or bleached and tarnished colours, determined the decorative dimension of Stabrowski’s compositions. Ornaments, plant and flower patterns covering fabrics, costumes and stained glass panes played an important role in them. In his oil and pastel landscapes, the artist used harmonious combinations of colours or their dissonant clashes. With his imagination rooted in Romantic fantasy, he gave his compositions the dimension of an allegory rather than a symbol, understood as an elusive, multi-faceted metaphor, stimulating various associations.
Stabrowski’s crowning and defining work, a series of paintings titled Procession of the Storm, created between 1907 and 1910, was lost during the revolution in Alupka. At the end of his stay in Russia, the artist deepened his interest in occultism, theosophy and anthroposophy, which found expression in the fantastic and mystical compositions he painted. In the 1920s, the artist did not undertake any new formal or thematic explorations, situating himself in conservative positions. The Sursum Corda group, which he founded in 1922, cooperated with the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts, a mainstay of passéist and epigone tendencies in Polish art between the wars. Stabrowski’s late work oscillated between mystical themes and mimetic recreations of nature. Landscapes became the dominant theme; numerous journeys around Poland and abroad provided the artist with landscape motifs.
Originally written in Polish by Irena Kossowska, Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, May 2006, translated into English by PG, March 2022.