The Tatras Exhibition Opens the POLAND-ROMANIA Cultural Season 2024-2025

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‘Abstract Composition No. 150, Abstract Composition: Triangles’ by Andrzej Wróblewski, undated, watercolour, gouache, pencil, ink, paper, 18.6 × 28.9 cm, private collection, courtesy of the Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation, photo: ⓒ Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl

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Fri, 06/21/2024 - 11:59 - Sun, 09/01/2024 - 11:59

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On 21st June 2024, the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu in Romania will host the opening of a unique exhibition called ‘The Tatras: Wróblewski, Karłowicz, Wyczółkowski’. The exhibition features works by three artists who had a significant impact on Polish culture and art in the 19th and 20th centuries: Andrzej Wróblewski, Mieczysław Karłowicz and Leon Wyczółkowski.

The exhibition features works by three artists who had a significant impact on Polish culture and art in the 19th and 20th centuries: Andrzej Wróblewski, Mieczysław Karłowicz and Leon Wyczółkowski. It was first displayed at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków last year, but in Sibiu, it will be presented in a new enhanced form. The opening will also inaugurate the first-ever POLAND-ROMANIA Cultural Season 2024-2025, aimed at fostering and strengthening cultural collaboration between the two countries – the season’s motto is ‘We Share a Common Language’. On until 1 September 2024, the exhibition ‘The Tatras’ is organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation and the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków, in collaboration with the Brukenthal National Museum, the Romanian Ministry of Culture and the Polish Institute in Bucharest.

‘Mountains (Mountains No. 284)’ by Andrzej Wróblewski, 1952, ink, paper, 22 × 31.1 cm, private collection, courtesy of the Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation, photo: ⓒ Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl

Among the works presented at the exhibition are: an ink series by Andrzej Wróblewski depicting the Tatra Mountains (from 1952-53), the highest massif of the Carpathians, and the artist’s geometric abstractions from 1948; original prints of Mieczysław Karłowicz’s mountain landscapes; and graphics by Leon Wyczółkowski inspired by Japanese aesthetics from the first decade of the 20th century, including unique test prints. These works share an extraordinary ability to translate the experience of mountains into visual language. The exhibited pieces come from eight private collections, as well as the National Museum in Kraków, the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology and the Tatra Museum in Zakopane. The photographs by Mieczysław Karłowicz will be on display courtesy of the PTTK Central Mountain Tourism Centre in Kraków where they are normally held. The exhibition’s curators are Professor Anna Król, Dr. Magdalena Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała.

Mountains – a motif for artistic expression

Mountains are considered a monumental motif in the canons of art, serving as a source of inspiration for many artists both in Western culture and in Eastern traditions. So it is no surprise that fate led the lives of these three Polish artists to the picturesque and diverse Tatra Mountains. Mieczysław Karłowicz travelled to Zakopane, the most famous Tatra town, from Warsaw as a teenager, likely with a camera. Andrzej Wróblewski discovered the Tatras as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, after repatriation from Vilnius. Meanwhile, Leon Wyczółkowski regularly visited Zakopane and the Tatras from 1896 to 1913, documenting scenes of highlander life, with portraits of famous mountain guides and beguiling Tatra landscapes. Two of them, Wróblewski and Karłowicz, are also united by their premature tragic deaths in the mountains.

In the first documented annual planner of Andrzej Wróblewski – from 1948 – there is a small drawing on the inside cover. A few straight and diagonal pencil lines connect points with single letters. This abstract scheme might seem meaningless, barely noticeable and easy to overlook, but its precision draws attention. It looks like a performance notation or a record of an artistic action. Deciphering the abbreviations though reveals the artist’s travel route (including Katowice, Chorzów, Bytom, Częstochowa and Oświęcim) and likely a mountain hike starting and ending in Zakopane. This is the first known record of Andrzej Wróblewski’s travels and hikes, visually similar to the abstract city, mountain and landscape views composed of geometric forms and figures created in the same year that we can see at the exhibition.

In their essay Edge of the World: On Andrzej Wróblewski’s Mountain Abstractions, the exhibition’s co-curators Magdalena Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała from the Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation write as follows:

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The unique representations of the universe on display, where whirling spirals and polygonal arrangements fill the interiors of planets and stars (such as the Earth as a sphere of colourful fragments), are described by Wróblewski as ‘crude, visible from afar, glaring when up close with their clarity’. In these paintings, ‘everything is on the surface and speaks in the simplest words of joy and strength’, because, as the artist emphasised, ‘Painting a landscape, people, or a city is not enough. One must show how vast the universe is, paint a person as known to modern biologists, an object, which we know is more void than matter.’

– piszą współautorzy wystawy, Magdalena Ziółkowska i Wojciech Grzybała z Fundacji Andrzeja Wróblewskiego w eseju "Krawędź świata. O górach-abstrakcjach Andrzeja Wróblewskiego".

The theme of mountains recurs in Andrzej Wróblewski’s work multiple times and in various forms. Its most significant representation appeared in 1952-1953. This was when the artist produced a collection of several dozen black-and-white ink drawings of similar format, almost reportage-like, showcasing Tatra landscapes realistically – views of Tatra peaks, meadows and passes. The artist simply called this collection ‘The Tatras’. They were made on the cheap and widely available drawing pad paper used by students at the time. Interestingly, Wróblewski favoured ink techniques during that period and created three series of works using a photography-like aesthetic starting in early 1952. The first captures the construction of the Great Furnace at the Nowa Huta steelworks near Kraków, the second ‘Mourning News’ depicts the public’s reaction the day that Stalin died, and the third includes several reportage scenes from the flood that struck northern Holland.

Magdalena Ziółkowska explains:

In all these ink drawings, strong lines dominate and there is an excellent sense of capturing the emotions of a moment, akin to photographic or cinematic frames. It seems that via this ink sketching technique, Wróblewski has managed to stop time and capture fractions of seconds.

‘Frozen Pond by the Polish Crest’ by Mieczysław Karłowicz, between 25 June and 20 September 1906, photo: courtesy of the PTTK Central Mountain Library

The second figure of the exhibition is Mieczysław Karłowicz, primarily known as a composer and conductor, a master of symphonic poems. He is most famously associated with the Tatras due to his tragic death at 32 in an avalanche on Mały Kościelec on 8 February 1909. Karłowicz was a renowned mountaineer and mountain photographer. He often guided groups as a mountain guide, but he primarily embarked on solitary hikes with his camera. According to letters to fellow mountaineers, the artist did not consider his photographs art, concentrating instead on the technical aspects and practical use of prints for outlining and describing routes. Nevertheless, photography brought him great pleasure. He enjoyed sending his photos to friends, and his work was appreciated within the climbing community, published in the magazines like The Tatra Society Record and Mountaineer.

Jan Sunderland, author of An Outline of the History of Tatra Photography, wrote:

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[...] he always had a camera with him, and that’s how his beautiful photos came about [...]. He knew – better than many others – with his artistic eye how to recognise those fragments in the views that should be captured in small images, so that the chaos of mountains and rocks might be artistically arranged. He managed to infuse these images with so much indescribable Tatra poetry that whenever I view them, I feel reality before me.

The photographic activity by Karłowicz displayed at the exhibition covers a mere three years, 1906-1908, during which he took 127 photos. He placed them in carefully prepared albums (usually housed in the PTTK Central Mountain Library) annotated with handwritten notes.

‘Dry Mists’ by Leon Wyczółkowski, from the eight aquatint series ‘The Tatras’, Kraków 1906, aquatint, etching, paper, 27.4 × 34.8 cm (32 × 44.6 mounted), photo: National Museum in Kraków

The third part of the exhibition features works by Leon Wyczółkowski. His artistic vision was already shaped by Japanese art and aesthetics, as instilled into him by Feliks ‘Manggha’ Jasieński – one of Poland’s most important art collectors. The artist likely painted his first Tatra landscape, titled View from Giewont, during his initial visit in 1896. Initially, the Tatras appeared in his compositions as symbolic backgrounds for portraits of leading Polish literature figures from the period, such as the poet Jan Kasprowicz and the writer Stefan Żeromski with his son. Later, he began to paint landscapes: Giewont, mountain slopes, forest interiors and, most notably, Tatra lakes. He was fascinated by its changing landscape, and he frequently visited Zakopane during 1904-1905 and created works intensively there.

One of the exhibition’s curators, Anna Król, a curator from the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology and an author of numerous articles on the exhibition’s artists, emphasises:

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Many Polish painters during the modernist period created synthetic, expressive views of the Tatras. The most beautiful and important of these were by Wyczółkowski, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e colour woodcuts – they are images of a floating, transient world.

During his stays in the Podhale region, Wyczółkowski created dozens of compositions, which he compiled into the series ‘Impressions of Zakopane’, ‘Impressions of the Tatras’ and ‘Tatra Legends’. He also painted views of Morskie Oko and Czarny Staw (in the series ‘Mickiewicz’s Waterfall’, ‘Giewont in Snow’, ‘At the Gates of Chałubiński’, ‘Rocks in the Tatras’ and ‘View of Murań’). The artist also made sketches and pencil studies of selected Tatra motifs, reminiscent of Hokusai’s woodcuts. The exhibition also features graphics from the series ‘The Tatras: Eight Aquatints from 1906’.

Anna Król summarises how the works of these three artists are juxtaposed:

'The Tatras. Wróblewski, Karłowicz, Wyczółkowski’ in Romania [gallery]

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They represent an interpretation of earlier motifs in a different, black-and-white reality, unknown in Tatra painting apart from in photography. The strength of Wyczółkowski’s compositions lay in his new, synthetic, fragmentary approach to mountain motifs. And although we don’t know if Wróblewski knew Wyczółkowski’s works – it’s likely he did – the confrontation of these two visions of the mountains is interesting. Equally inspiring is looking at Wróblewski’s works in another context: through the Tatra photographs of the composer, conductor and mountaineer Mieczysław Karłowicz. His characteristic tight frames, close-ups, use of fragments instead of the whole, the backstage nature of the shots and his deliberate use of empty space as an artistic means of expression can be found in many of his photographs, as well as in Andrzej Wróblewski’s drawings.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue in English and Romanian, as well as the monograph Andrzej Wróblewski: Exhibiting, which premiered at the Biennale Arte in Venice in April this year. The monograph was conceived by Magdalena Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała from the Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation.

'The Tatras: Wróblewski, Karłowicz, Wyczółkowski' – Photo report from Romania [gallery]

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From the exhibition catalogue

The first Polish-Romanian cultural season, which takes place in 2024/25, marks another chapter in a shared history that began on June 22, 1919, when after 123 years of absence from the map of Europe, the reborn Polish state established official diplomatic relations with the Kingdom of Romania. From the early 1920s onward, Romania, alongside Latvia, was a key ally of the Second Polish Republic when it came to its bordering neighbours. In 1921, the countries signed their first defence alliance, and a year later, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, Poland’s Chief of State, made an official trip to Romania. In 1923, the Romanian royal couple – King Ferdinand I and Queen Consort Marie Saxe-Coburg – made a reciprocal visit to Poland. It was the first official visit by the head of a neighbouring state during Poland’s interwar history.

Their son and successor, Carol II, shared a personal affinity with Marshal Piłsudski, who himself valued the closeness between the two countries so much that he claimed: ‘One could almost say that from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, there is one nation with two national flags.’ In September 1939, Romania proved this closeness by providing shelter to tens of thousands of Polish refugees, and cultural treasures such as the Jagiellonian tapestries. Just two years earlier, in November 1937, Bucharest became home to the Polish Cultural Institute – the first Polish institution of its kind in the world, likewise confirming the significance of the relationship between the two neighbours on a cultural level. Although post World War II there is no longer a shared border, the cultural mission has continued, with the renewed Polish Institute in Bucharest being established in 2001.

Polish audiences have had the opportunity to see many examples of contemporary Romanian art over the past decade, including the exhibition ‘A Few Grams of Red, Yellow, Blue: New Romanian Art’ at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Works by the artists Geta Brătescu, Ciprian Mureșan and Şerban Savu have been hosted on several occasions in Polish public institutions and private galleries. However, the POLAND-ROMANIA Cultural Season 2024-2025 gives this cultural exchange a completely new dynamic, encompassing dozens of exhibitions, concerts, plays, films, and literary events. After 1945, activity slowed between Warsaw and Bucharest when it came to sharing how art was developing in their respective countries – for this reason the events program taking place in Romania later this year will showcase a series of Polish postwar art exhibitions. In the coming months, Romanian audiences will have the opportunity to see works by key Polish artists from the second half of the 20th century, including Jerzy Nowosielski, Tadeusz Kantor and Wojciech Fangor.

During the interwar period, Poland and Romania shared a border over three hundred kilometers long. Today, their only mutual terrain is the Carpathians, the mountain range that cuts through Central Europe. This is why the season is being inaugurated in Romania with the exhibition ‘The Tatras: Wróblewski, Karłowicz, Wyczółkowski’ at the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu. Much like the search for a Polish national style at the turn of the 20th century (which resulted, among other things, in Stanisław Witkiewicz’s concept of the Zakopane style), Romanian artists during that period were also turning to local culture in search of identity. At the foot of the Carpathians, the town of Câmpina and the landscape around it strongly influenced the art of Nicolae Grigorescu after he settled there in 1890. It is fitting then that an exhibition of Grigorescu’s works from the collections of Bucharest’s National Museum of Art of Romania, will open the season’s events in Poland.

The Carpathians remain the backdrop for reflections on identity in neo-avant-garde projects such as Do the Mountains Know? by Ion Râmnic and István Mihály, and in contemporary projects like The Alpine Project by Cristian Rusu.

When it comes to the exhibition ‘The Tatras’, we are treated to three differing views of those famed mountains: landscapes by Leon Wyczółkowski inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e graphics; survey photographs by the composer, conductor, and avid mountaineer Mieczysław Karłowicz; and views of the Tatra peaks and passes by Andrzej Wróblewski, a painter who sought a new postwar artistic language at the intersection of realism and abstraction. All three demonstrate the crucial role of mountain imagery in the history of Polish modern art, reaffirming the season’s motto: ‘We share a common language.’

Speaking this language requires the involvement of many people, so I would like to thank all the cultural institutions and partners for their contribution and support in organising this special season. I hope that everyone reading this publication will discover and celebrate the shared cultural heritage of Poland and Romania, which has been shaped for centuries in the spirit of cooperation and mutual inspiration.

The POLAND-ROMANIA Cultural Season 2024-2025

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...is a series of artistic events across the two named partner countries. It takes place over eighteen months and it is the result of joint efforts by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, with full support from the Polish Institute in Bucharest as well as the Romanian Ministry of Culture and the Romanian Cultural Institute. The season includes dozens of concerts, theatre performances, film screenings, exhibitions and literary events. The visual identity of the season is the result of a collaboration between graphic design students from Poland and Romania; it includes a logo inspired by the diacritical marks characteristic of these two challenging languages. Complementing the visual aspect is the slogan ‘We Share a Common Language’, referring to the language of culture, a language that allows for deep understanding and communication through a diversity of forms, means of expression and traditions. The full season programme can be found on the Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s website and on this site in English.

The Poland-Romania Cultural Season 2024-2025

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The Brukenthal National Museum

Poland-Romania Cultural Season 2024-2025

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