The War & Us – Edward Okuń | #visual arts

The War & Us – Edward Okuń

A self-portrait maintained in the Art Nouveau style, depicting the painter and his wife, created between 1917 and 1923. It is the artist’s response to the dramatic events of the time, from World War I to the Polish-Soviet war. The most famous work in Okuń’s oeuvre is at the same time one of the icons of Young Poland art and a swan song of the belle époque.

Okuń’s decorative painting is built on a characteristic contrast between realistically rendered figures and a fanciful, colourful and flat background. The ‘us’ in the title are the painter and his wife, Zofia Wanda Tolkemit. Their figures fill the centre of the composition, dressed in elegant black clothes, wearing polished shoes and covered in a black cloak. They walk slightly hunched over and worried in the midst of fantastical, clashing beasts.

The lurking danger was suggested by the painter on several levels. The water lilies, which the artist’s figure holds in his hands, have red-coloured petal tips as if stained with blood. An old, grey-haired woman with a sinister expression, barefoot and dressed in a nightdress and a brown bedcover, creeps up next to the two spouses and grabs the hem of their cloak. Her features resemble that of the archetypical witch. She is the personification of war and hunger, although she has also been interpreted in other ways – Julia Henshaw, in relation to the misogynistic themes of turn-of-the-century art, saw her as the personification of male fear of women.

Above all, however, the painter depicted the horror of war in a metaphorical, fanciful, almost fairy-tale-like manner by means of a decorative, colourful, flat background. It is filled with a slithering cluster of winged, snake-like dragons with turquoise-blue scales and wings of butterflies and moths growing out of skulls. Their bodies are tightly woven together, and the beasts bare their fangs and throw themselves at each other’s throats.

The background contrasts with the pair of protagonists not only in the fancifulness of the theme but also in the way it is painted. Even if their sombre clothing slightly flattens the silhouettes, the figures of the painter, his wife and the old woman personifying war are painted realistically, in detail, respecting the rules of chiaroscuro modelling. The pool of snake-dragons in the background is more reminiscent of illustrative graphics or even a colourful stained glass window; it is completely flat and does not follow the rules of perspective. The artist has also used the method of 'macrosomia', typical for symbolists – the exaggeration of certain motifs, usually floral or animal, which intensifies the decorative and emotional effect of the work.

Małgorzata Biernacka, the artist’s monographer, compared this way of contrasting the figures with the unreal, ornamental background to Paul Signac’s Portrait of Félix Fénéon. The similarity, as the author pointed out, also concerns the way the figures are portrayed – the men in both paintings are shown in profile and with flowers in their hands (in Signac’s case it is an orchid). However, whilst the unreal nature of the background in the work of the French Neo-Impressionist goes a step further and the figural motifs are replaced by an abstract geometrical pattern, the contrast between the figure and the background, painted with a uniform pointillist technique, is less emphasised than in Okuń’s work.

Similarities to this compositional solution can also be found in Art Nouveau art, which Okuń was fond of, especially in Gustav Klimt’s paintings, such as Judith and the Head of Holofernes, where a realistic figure is placed on a decorative, ornamental, in this case also gilded background. The monsters in Okuń’s work, painted with Art Nouveau decorativeness, are at the same time embedded in symbols dating back to medieval iconography. From this perspective, the dragon is a symbol of the Devil, biting snakes – a symbol of evil, and the moth – that of death.

The War and Us is also the last of Okuń’s self-portraits with his wife. This theme frequently recurred since his early works, and the artist’s various sources of inspiration are evident in his subsequent depictions. For the artist, who worked with, amongst others, the Munich-based weekly Jugend and the Polish-based Chimera, Art Nouveau was not the only point of reference. His paintings were influenced by the art of the Italian Renaissance, but also by the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, to name some additional references. Later, Egypt, which the artist visited in the winter of 1914, also became an important point of reference.

Okuń placed the brunt of organising and financing the trip on the publishing house Gebethner and Wolff, which commissioned him to make illustrations for Bolesław Prus’s Pharaoh – the journey to Egypt was to be an essential element of preparation. Perhaps a trace of these inspirations can also be found in the painting The War and Us. As suggested by Biernacka, the black coat covering the figures can be interpreted as a transformation of the motif of the black wings of the falcon-Horus, which recurred in several works of the artist, such as the lost Angel of War shown in 1920 at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art.

Okuń’s interwoven aesthetic fascinations, on which his own painting language was built, is, in comparison with other painters of the Young Poland era, completely unique, and at the same time has a clearly cosmopolitan character. Okuń spent the last years of his life in Poland, earlier living mainly in Italy. He left the country at the threshold of his career – in 1897 he married Zofia Wanda Tolkemit, who came from a landowning family, and soon afterwards the couple went to Munich, then to Hungary, and the following year they settled in Rome, where they lived, with breaks, until 1920, when they returned to Poland and settled in a tenement house in the Old Town in Warsaw. Okuń’s symbolism is not, as in the case of Malczewski, Podkowiński or Weiss, rooted in native scenery and mythology (with some exceptions, such as in the painting Chopin’s Mazurka). It is a world populated by knights, chimaeras and sphinxes straight out of Gustave Moreau’s canvases, usually set in mythical, fairy-tale landscapes.

The inspiration Italian Quattrocento art was evident in the early Self Portrait with the Artist's Wife before Anticoli Corrado. The figures of the two are portrayed in busts, from a semi-profile, and dressed in stylised Renaissance costumes. In the background, there is a picturesque panorama of an Italian city on a hill towering above their heads. Reaching for the Renaissance convention of a portrait with a landscape in the background, Okuń, at the same time, updates it and instead of a closed, somewhat hieratic composition characteristic of the 15th century, uses an almost photographic frame, as in the case of his numerous Italian landscapes. The War and Us is a kind of a reverse of that painting, in which other sources of inspiration, taken from symbolism and secession, are revealed, and at the same time, it is an epilogue crowning a specific epoch.

Okuń developed the direction he had chosen early on practically until the end, incorporating new inspirations but not making major stylistic changes. In the interwar period, his name became a synonym of fin de siècle art. The artist enjoyed a strong position in Poland at the time, but in the public consciousness, his art became a testimony to a bygone era. As Małgorzata Biernacka wrote, it was with Okuń’s death in 1945 that the era of Young Poland symbolically ended. However, at the moment of painting The War and Us, he was already one of the last representatives of a vanishing world. The Great War, and after it the October Revolution, marked the definitive end of the belle époque, and with it not only the socio-political order prevailing in Europe at the turn of the century but also the artistic landscape.

Okuń began work on his canvas in Italy; at the same time that the devastating war was coming to an end, fascism was being born and revolution was taking place in Russia. He finished it in a newly independent Poland, shortly after the Polish-Soviet war, Mussolini’s march on Rome and the assassination attempt on Gabriel Narutowicz on 16th December 1922, which he, as the vice-president of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts, was a direct witness of – it was he who supported the body of the falling president.

While the traumas of war found release in violent forms, grating colour contrasts and the austere line of the Expressionists, Okuń remained consistently entrenched in the aesthetic positions taken up in his youth. Fauvism and Futurism aroused his violent opposition, and he remained equally reluctant even towards the art of Cézanne. And although the painting The War and Us refers to the existential drama connected not so much with internal experiences, but with real and drastic political events, they were expressed consistently with the language of Symbolism and Art Nouveau, not far from such paintings as The Struggle of Good and Evil created around 1900 – a stylised, decorative composition depicting the clash of the forces of light and darkness in the form of a duel between knights on horseback in armour imitating the Middle Ages art style. The War and Us is thus a unique attempt to talk about the horror of war using language shaped in a world that still seemed stable and orderly. In the figures hiding under the broad cloak like a shield there is a clear reflection of Okuń’s own perspective – not one of those artists who went to the front and experienced the nightmare of the trenches first-hand, but an artist living in Rome and travelling around Europe, observing the disintegration of his world from a distance.

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