Frédéric Chopin Monument – Wacław Szymanowski | #photography & visual arts

Frédéric Chopin Monument – Wacław Szymanowski

Situated in Łazienki Park near the Belvedere, the monument to Frédéric Chopin designed by Wacław Szymanowski is a unique example of the Art Nouveau style in Polish monumental sculpture. Unlike the unlucky ‘Procession to Wawel Castle’ which never reached completion, the artist’s most famous work was finally realised, but the road to its creation was exceptionally bumpy.

The vision of a monument to the eminent Polish composer was born in Wacław Szymanowski’s mind around 1903 in Paris. The city proved to be fertile ground for creating Chopin iconography: the Polish émigré community produced, amongst other works, the expressive relief Chopin by Bolesław Biegas (1902), and the first Polish art magazine in Paris, Sztuka, organised an art competition on Chopin themes in 1904.

Szymanowski, a sculptor and painter educated in Paris and Munich, actively involved in the Vienna and Munich Secession at the turn of the 20th century, lived in the French capital from 1895 to 1905. The creator of the Warsaw monument was by then an experienced artist, over forty years old. After his early attempts at painting, which took the form of genre scenes from the Hutsul region (amongst other works), he concentrated fully on sculpture. At that time, his atelier produced designs for a monument to Artur Grottger, realised in 1903 in Kraków, as well as a monument to Adam Mickiewicz for a competition in Lviv (in this case, awarded only the third prize; the artist took offence and did not accept the distinction).

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Preparing the head of Fryderyk Chopin for casting, 1957, photo: Royal Łazienki

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At the same time that efforts were being made to erect a monument to Chopin, Szymanowski was also working on the second of his most famous works, the sculptural group Procession to Wawel Castle, composed of over fifty figures and only ever existing in draft form. Shortly after the artist moved to Kraków in 1905, he also created busts of Jacek Malczewski and Karol Estreicher, amongst others. In the same year, at an exhibition of the Society of Polish Artists ‘Sztuka’ in Kraków, Szymanowski showed publicly for the first time the design of the future Chopin monument, which became the apple of his eye. Whilst still in Paris, he wrote to Konrad Olchowicz:

I live in constant anxiety, as this matter is extremely important to me [...] and I wish to realise my plans regarding Chopin with such force with which I have never before desired anything in my art.

The special feelings the sculptor had for this particular project – apart from prestige and patriotic considerations – is explained by the cult of the composer in the Szymanowski home. The teacher of the sculptor’s wife, Gabriela Turner, was Cecylia Działyńska, author of the book How to Play Chopin, described by researcher Joanna Nowak as a conservative suffragette. The notes with Chopin’s handwritten annotations, left by Działyńska, were treated by the Szymanowskis almost as relics.

Szymanowski’s proposal was a response to a long-maturing initiative in Poland to erect a monument to Chopin, but one which was regularly torpedoed by the partitioning authorities. The idea germinated in the Warsaw Music Society as early as 1876 and was revived over two decades later, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. Permission to set up a Committee for the Construction of a Monument to Chopin in Warsaw was finally given by the authorities of Warsaw’s General Government in 1901, thanks to the prima donna of the St Petersburg Opera, Adelaide Brochocka, who is said to have received a verbal promise from the tsar himself after one of her performances. The committee was headed by her husband, Count Dienheim-Brochocki.

However, there were several conditions attached to the agreement, including a limit on the size of the contribution (100,000 roubles) and a ban on publishing press advertisements about it – to prevent the collection from turning into a kind of large-scale political demonstration. The Committee was active until 1923, and its composition changed several times in the meantime. The proposed locations for the monument changed just as dynamically. One of them was Warecki Square, now Powstańców Warszawy Square, and it was this location that was included in the terms of the competition for the design of the monument, announced in 1908. The winning project, however, was the only one to ignore this guideline, as were the restrictions on the size of the monument. This did not prevent the jury from unanimously voting for Szymanowski’s concept.

However, it nearly happened that the winning proposal would not have made it into the competition at all. Whilst still in Paris, Szymanowski presented his concept to the Vice-Chairman of the Committee for the Construction of the Monument, Maurycy Zamoyski, who, delighted with the project, promised the artist its realisation. The struggle with the tsarist authorities, which dragged on for years, piling up formal difficulties, as well as problems with fund-raising, ended, however, with the announcement of a competition. Szymanowski was not invited to it, and offended by Zamoyski’s failure to keep his promise, he decided to boycott the competition. He changed his decision after a conciliatory letter from the second Vice-Chairman of the Committee, Henryk Dobrzycki.

The terms of the 1908 competition were drawn up by a commission consisting of sculptors, painters and architects. Sixty-six entries were submitted, including those by Xawery Dunikowski and Bolesław Biegas. The competition was covered in detail by the press, and models of the monuments were exhibited at Zachęta. The competition jury included, amongst others, the French sculptors Émile Antoine Bourdelle and Paul-Albert Bartholomé, and a considerable number of competition entries also came from the Polish colony in Paris.

Szymanowski’s unanimously selected design is a unique example of the Art Nouveau style in monumental realisation – a style which, although realised in architectural sculpture or in smaller sculptural forms, did not make its home in monumental sculpture. In Szymanowski’s rendering, Chopin sits at the foot of a wind-torn willow tree (whose leaves in the original version were covered with delicate gilding), in a twisted pose close to a Mannerist serpentine figure. The swaths of the dishevelled mantle resemble an ahistorical drapery that almost melts with the sloping tops of the willow branches. Szymanowski depicts the composer with a thoughtful face and half-closed eyes, with his hand raised above the trunk of a willow as if over a piano keyboard, as an artist in a moment of creative inspiration – listening to the sounds of the Mazovian landscape and transforming them in his imagination into the notes of his own composition. The moment of creative rapture had, in fact, been a theme of interest to Szymanowski for a long time. A few years earlier it had materialised in the form of Mickiewicz after Improvisation, a sculpture from the collection of the National Museum in Kraków.

The freshness of this kind of approach to the subject is all the more evident when we compare it with the other competition proposals. The second and third prize winners, Władysław Marcinkowski and Zygmunt Otto, prepared projects in which the figure of the composer was presented in a static, almost rigid manner, in the company of allegorical figures. Szymanowski focused all his attention on Chopin, abandoning attributes and additional figures. At the same time, he marked the musical theme subtly in the composition itself – the figure of the composer and the willow tree leaning over him are arranged in a shape resembling a harp, one of the classical attributes of musical allegory.

The form of the statue is as characteristic as the iconography in the context of Szymanowski’s body of work – the wavy, fluid, dynamic line of the composition and the sketchy modelling of the rough surfaces. The surroundings of the statue are also an element of the composition. Its silhouette is reflected in the pond at the foot of the statue, and the background is created by the wall of trees in Łazienki Park. Franciszek Mączyński, an Art Nouveau architect from Kraków, was responsible for the architectural design of the project. The jury’s critical remarks boiled down almost exclusively to reservations about this particular design – above all about the large size of the frogs that were to flank the pond around the monument. These frogs – a playful motif in Art Nouveau, with a penchant for organic, plant and animal decorations, appearing in numerous works, such as the architectural decoration of the tenement house Under the Frogs in Bielsko-Biała designed by Emanuel Rost junior, or the Kraków tenement house Under the Singing Frog designed by Teodor Talowski – became the final straw of bitterness in the eyes of the project’s critics.

For although Szymanowski’s proposal was enthusiastically received by the commission and the public, its expressiveness and mood also had its opponents, including the critic and writer Antoni Sygietyński. Speaking from the position of an advocate of naturalism, he saw its greatest flaws in what made the sculpture original. As he wrote:

This monument lacks poetry, artistry and the seriousness of monumental art. It is some kind of tender novella, casually cast in plaster – a novella more worthy of Boruta or some other devil in love with a broken willow tree than of Chopin, the most subtle of musical geniuses, not at all monumentally conceived and sculpturally executed [...].

In the design of the sculpture itself, following the opinions of the commission, Szymanowski introduced minimal changes (in the shape of the willow tree), whilst the pedestal and the pool of red sandstone were redesigned by Oskar Sosnowski, who removed, amongst other things, those controversial frogs on the pond, regarded as incompatible with the solemnity of the monument. The campaign against Szymanowski’s monument was still being conducted by the magazine Goniec, but the supporters of the project were more numerous, and amongst them were Jacek Malczewski, Wojciech Kossak, Vlastimil Hofman and Ludwik Machalski, who in 1910 issued an open letter calling for the project to be completed. After the competition was settled, the project was still held up by the actions of the tsarist administration, which above all resulted in a constant lack of consent on the part of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, whose approval was required by the regulations. Thanks to the efforts of the indefatigable artist, Tsar Nicholas II finally signed the building permit with his own hand.

Szymanowski finally got down to work on a 1:1 scale model in a Kraków workshop designed especially for him by Mączyński. The finished model was accepted in 1912 but subsequent negotiations concerned the bronze casting itself, which the artist insisted should be done in Paris. When he finally got what he wanted, and in 1914 the casting of the monument began in the French capital, the work was interrupted by an obstacle greater than any previous one – the outbreak of the Great War. During the turmoil of war, the foundry went bankrupt, and the part of the model located in France and divided into batches to be cast in succession, vanished into thin air.

After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, not only political but also artistic circumstances changed. As Hanna Kotkowska-Bareja, who thoroughly reconstructed the history of the monument, wrote:

Szymanowski’s project, the purest example of Art Nouveau, which in 1909 had numerous enemies as a work that was too modernist – in 1918, it had many more of these enemies, it simply became an anachronism.

In now-independent Poland, however, Szymanowski did not give up his efforts to complete one of his most important works. He sold his studio and left with his wife for Rome, and then for Paris, and finally, in 1922, having returned to Poland, he settled in Warsaw and reactivated the activities of the Committee for the Construction of the Monument, with an almost entirely new body, including Ignacy Paderewski.

The surviving Parisian part of the model was found, and thanks to another collection and government funding, work resumed at a new Parisian foundry. In June 1926, more than two decades after the original concept, the monument was finally cast. The final dispute concerned the problematic issue of the location of the monument, which was finally placed on the site of a former fruit orchard in Łazienki Park near the Belvedere. A lavish ceremony to unveil the monument (combined with a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Warsaw Philharmonic) was organised on 14th November 1926, made all the more lavish by the fact that it was the first unveiling of a new monument in the independent Republic.

Its creator died in 1930, having not lived to see the next, most dramatic chapter in the history of his work, which was its destruction by the Nazis. During the subsequent war, Chopin’s work was censored, and the occupying authorities methodically destroyed his images. Szymanowski’s monument was blown up in the spring of 1940 – as the first monument in occupied Poland. His wooden model, carved on a scale of 1:2 from linden wood, with gilding on willow leaves, which the artist gave to the Wielkopolska Museum, was chopped to pieces shortly after the German army entered Poznań. Only the head survived, hidden by the museum’s caretaker. As for the actual monument, only the pedestal remained and the fragmented bronze was most probably melted down for the armaments needs of the Reich army. The destruction of the monument became one of the symbols of the destruction of Polish cultural heritage by the occupant, and the photographs which were taken of the blown up and dismembered monument at the railway station were distributed to the west. Apart from photographic testimony, literary records of the event were also produced, including Leopold Staff’s poem The Destruction of Chopin's Monument.

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A delegation from the Łowicz region lays a wreath in front of the monument to Fryderyk Chopin, November 1926, photo: National Digital Archive / audiovis.nac.gov.pl

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When reconstruction of the capital began after the war, one of its elements was the reconstruction of the monument. The decision about it was made as early as 1946, although there were also ideas of replacing it with a new monument, and even two competitions were organised, but the idea of reconstructing Szymanowski’s work won, motivated more by historical reasons than by recognition of its artistic values. A small model of the monument was found in the cellar of the sculptor’s Warsaw home, and a photogrammetric analysis based on the preserved photographic documentation was prepared by Leon Suzin of the Warsaw University of Technology. Work on the model was undertaken at the State Visual Arts Workshops. The monument, reconstructed and cast in Warsaw, was unveiled on 11th May 1958.

It had to wait a few more years for its full renewed recognition not only as historical testimony but also as an outstanding work of art in its own right. Mieczysław Wallis, the author of a book on Art Nouveau published in 1967, which was coming back into favour in the 1960s, wrote:

Only someone who is a musician himself could have created this ‘Chopin’, with his head tilted painfully to one side and his eyelids closed, listening to the whisper of a weeping willow.

The reconstructed monument underwent thorough conservation in 1999, in the meantime becoming one of Warsaw’s icons – it has even had several copies made far from Poland’s borders. As part of cultural cooperation between Warsaw and Hamamatsu, a slightly smaller-scale replica of Szymanowski’s work was placed in the Japanese city in 1994. A rather loose copy of the sculpture, carved in stone, was also created in Hanoi in 2010.

Originally written in Polish, translated into English by P. Grabowski, March 2022.

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Royal Łazienki Park