The whole beginning of Weiss’ career appears to be inextricably connected with Przybyszewski. Recent research gives us the certainty that Przybyszewski came to Kraków because of young people: young artists, students or even, as the satirist Adolf Nowaczyński said, middle-schoolers. They all saw genius in the Berlin celebrity who was already covered in literature and was able to give a voice to the nascent Young Poland movement. After their master’s arrival, they formed his entourage and supplemented Kraków’s bohemia with a characteristic, decadent style, full of ill-fated love, drunken excess and emphatic declarations of disbelief in the sense of life and faith in the sense of art. Because of them, this phase became an ecstatic carnival – the legend of the Kraków bohemia was born with the café as its forum and stage. The extravagant-sloppy lifestyle went into fashion.
While most acolytes burnt out in Przybyszewski’s shadow like moths in a flame and some of them achieved maturity only after overcoming his influence (Nowaczyński, Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński), Weiss, thanks to Przybyszewski, immediately obtained an original artistic language and intensity of expression.
Firstly – the themes. Przybyszewski’s students lived instead of creating. Weiss was supposed to paint those decadents and it is thanks to his function as the chronicler that we now have records of the bohemia’s condition such as Possession (a Dionysian vision of the master’s arrival in Kraków) and The Melancholic (Totenmesse).
Secondly – the form. Imitating Przybyszewski brought young writers more harm than good. However, thanks to him, Weiss gained another role model – the great progenitor of expressionism, Edvard Munch, Przybyszewski’s friend from Berlin. Thus, being almost a debutant, he found himself among European Art’s avant-garde. Munch’s expressive linearism and intensive, aggressive colour scheme articulating the soul’s most pristine states – but also the liberation of colour in pictorial form – set a direction for European art which would be achieved by German expressionists in just ten years or so. Weiss, by masterfully picking up Munch’s form, beat them by a few years.