What started the Polish avant-garde art? Paintings on glass by the highlanders! It sounds like a joke, but this claim is only a slight exaggeration. The first exhibition of the Formists (who were not using this name at the time) – the Exhibition of Polish Expressionists, organized in Kraków in November 1917 – was opened by a collection of works painted on glass by artists from the Tatra mountains and Podhale. It was a strong declaration, something similar to when Picasso visited the Parisian Natural History Museum after 1905 and referenced primitive art in his works of the time.
The Formists were aware of the meaning of this gesture and of the fact that a few years earlier glass paintings from the Bavarian Alps was used as an inspiration (and thus promoted) by the expressionists from the Munich group Der Blaue Reiter. Repeating their gesture in Poland was a turning point. ‘It’s a return to our roots’, said the Formists at their first exhibition. One had to find one’s own tradition as an alternative to the ancient one.
This way, the young avant-garde entered the discussion about the shape of Polish national art, which had already lasted for a few generations. The Russian Wassily Kandinsky could find only the formal roots of his art in paintings on glass, while the Formists searched for cultural roots as well.
In such an action lay a seed of iconoclasm, a possibility of treating folklore in a primitive way – as their Western predecessors did, as well as Russian neo-primitivists such as Mikhail Larionov a few years before, who took all aesthetic embroidery out of national art. It was also an attempt to find an agreement with previous trends – the Formists didn’t really say much more than what was said in the late 19th century by Stanisław Witkiewicz and repeated by other artists from the Młoda Polska period.
It seemed possible that the Formists would take the heroization and idealization of the Tatra mountains and the region’s inhabitants from Witkiewicz, that they would attempt to search for the roots of Polish culture there, among the highlanders – for an idealistic pattern of ‘peasant knighthood’, an alternative to that of the Polish nobility. It was actually declared at this first exhibition of Polish Expressionists. Right next to glass paintings, graphics by Władysław Skoczylas (1883-1934) were presented.
His biography sounds like an eclectic yet skilful CV. At the beginning of the 20th century he studied painting in Kraków and sculpture in Vienna, and he also studied with the great Emile-Antoine Bourdelle in Paris. He was educated in the mainstream of modernism. In 1908, he started working as a sculpture teacher in Zakopane for health reasons, in the School of Wood Industry, which can be read as a step towards Polish art and searching for a national style based on the art from the highlands. From 1917 he took part in Formist exhibitions, who were the most important group of the young avant-garde. A year before the group was dissolved, in 1921, Skoczylas was one of the founders of Rytm / Rhythm, a group that turned out to be as important for Polish art, but much more decorative, classicist and prone to referencing European style. In the Rytm milieu, nostalgia for art connecting ethnographic credibility with the idealisation typical of the national style was present, and Skoczylas became one of the patrons of this search.
It would be hard, however, to treat Skoczylas as a conformist. His art changed very little. The constructive sense, which disclosed his background in sculpting, deep, strong cuts (characteristic of wood engraving), the simplicity of composition and noble idealization (noticeable mostly in the images of the highlanders), the density and rhythm of the form, and finally quotes from highlanders’ art (ornaments, colours of the woodcuts, taken from glass painting) all remain the same, regardless of whether he worked with Formists or Rhythmists.
His first great success – Teka zbójnicka / Highlander Outlaws' Portfolio (1920), of which Pochód zbójników / Highlander Outlaws' Parade is a part – shows how he understands the national style. Small changes happen in his art only a few years before his death when, experimenting with the city landscape (influenced by his students), he successfully attempts softer modelling, using the possibility of subtler textures through wood engraving. But that’s the gesture of a master, aware of his own style; a style which became a bridge between avant-garde simplicity and anesthetization of folklore art, and which was satisfactory for all sides of the discussion.
These features, as well as his rare skill at reconciling diverse groups and his amazing organizational talent, predestined Skoczylas to become an important figure of the official art of the Second Polish Republic. For the most part it was him that stood behind the incredible expansion of graphics in the inter-war period, which from a mediocre trade was promoted to an art similar to sculpture.
This ennoblement of graphics was possible also thanks to the idea that Skoczylas connected to it, naming this discipline ‘the greatest school of democracy’. When underlining the collectivity of creating this work, the living guild rules, the feeling of trade community, Skoczylas saw in them a model of civic education. Without a doubt, the Department of Graphics in the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy played this part until the master’s untimely death. This civic school was also a way of building national style, which Skoczylas, like Stanisław Witkiewicz before him, tried to engrave in both wood and in people.
Author: Konrad Niciński, March 2011, transl. N. Mętrak-Ruda, December 2015.
• Władysław Skoczylas
Pochód zbójników" (z Teki zbójnickiej) / Highlander Bandits' Parade (from the Highlander Bandits' Portfolio)
1919-1920
coloured woodcut, 28,5 x 31 cm
National Museum in Warsaw
