Vicious Circle – Jacek Malczewski | #visual arts

Vicious Circle – Jacek Malczewski

The dynamic 'Vicious Circle' is one of the most important paintings in Jacek Malczewski’s oeuvre – it is one of his so-called manifesto works.

At the top of a tall wooden ladder sits a barefoot boy with a large, round brush in hand. He looks down thoughtfully as if watching the fantastic figures swirling around him – or perhaps conjuring them from his own imagination. At the bottom, almost outside the frame, one can see the hallmark signs of the painter’s profession: sheets of stencils with cut-out ornaments, buckets of paint and brushes.

A ladder divides the composition into two parts. On the left, there is a mythological-folk procession of naked bacchantes, a faun decorated with vines and a peasant couple in colourful costumes. Just behind the boy, we can also see a woman in a red Phrygian hat, a white blouse revealing her breasts and a blue skirt – it is probably Marianne, the personification of republican France. The left sphere is full of joy, sensuality and carelessness. Bright, warm colours dominate, reds and oranges flicker and golden light embraces the figures.

This contrasts with the right side – dark and grey, filled with dramatically contorting bodies. Phantoms in black robes and exiles with shackles at their feet bend here in suffering. Instead of leopard skins swirling around the dancing nymphs, there are sinister Siberian coats and heavy neckwear. A straw crown, a common attribute of Polonia in Malczewski’s works, flashes in the corner. The figures seem to be led by a half-naked old man, positioned exactly on the axis of the ladder. He is holding a rope in his hand, with which the procession is tied up.

The boy-painter balances between these two spheres. Although surrounded from all sides, he does not appear to be trapped. He towers over this whirl, like its creator. With the innocent, unmannered eye of a child, he observes the circle of figures, looped like the cycle of life. From his position, he is able to see its entire spectrum, to know both good and joy as well as evil and suffering.

Malczewski began work on Vicious Circle in 1895 in his atelier in Prądnik Czerwony (now part of Kraków). A year later the painting was shown at the Internationale Kunst Ausstellung in Berlin. Before the exhibition in 1897 at the Zachęta Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Kraków, the artist introduced a few more corrections to the composition. In 1898, the work was bought by Edward Aleksander Raczyński, who created a gallery with a rich collection of paintings at his residence in Wielkopolska. The painting is still held at the Palace in Rogalin, a branch of the National Museum in Poznań.

Vicious Circle is considered one of Malczewski’s most important works – his artistic manifesto. It was at this time that the symbolist universe he built combining mythological, folk and patriotic motifs crystallised. Maria Poprzęcka pointed out in her essay Szczęśliwa Godzina: Malarstwo Polskie Około Roku 1900 (Happy Hour: Polish Painting around 1900), that Vicious Circle and Melancholy are ‘probably the first self-referential works in Polish painting, paintings about paintings, like self-referential prose, the subject of which is itself’. These two titles were also sometimes associated with earlier paintings depicting the painter, such as Introduction (1890).

In his other work Melancholy (1890-1894), we see a cluster of characters from the world of imagination, although there are no references to mythology yet. It is a procession of generations fighting for freedom, from little boys wielding oversized sabres, through insurgents with scythes and mourning women, to old men in Siberian dresses. They glide through the painter’s studio, escaping the picture on the easel, in front of which the painter is sitting with his back turned.

Thus, Melancholy touches upon the problem of the ‘spirit of history’ and the role of the painter in the recording of national struggles. As researchers underline, with this composition Malczewski symbolically ends the ‘martyrological-patriotic’ phase of his work, so far associated with depictions of Siberian exiles. At the same time, it is an introduction to the next stage. This interpretation was also suggested by the title the artist wrote on the back of the canvas: ‘Prologue. Vision. The last century in Poland. Tout un siècle.’

In Vicious Circle, Malczewski offers a broader perspective on the role of the artist. Critics and researchers interpreted the content of the work in different ways, unanimously, however, seeing the painter as Malczewski’s alter ego. Stanisław Witkiewicz saw in it above all a gesture towards rejecting limitations and a celebration of intuitive expression. In 1903, he wrote in the art monthly Krytyka:

[...] the artist’s soul renounces all conventions, all routine, all templates […] and creates in direct connection with the universe.

What does this indicate? The painter, caught in the ‘vicious circle of life’, ‘dropped the conventional, soulless cardboard cut-out patrons [templates] with which, sitting at the top of his ladder, he was supposed to cover the walls of some building’.

Just what is it that makes Melancholy and Vicious Circle unique? This was the question posed by Adam Heydel, author of the 1933 monograph Jacek Malczewski: Człowiek i Artysta (Jacek Malczewski: Human and Artist). And he immediately answered:

First of all, it is Malczewski’s raw, hard, granite realism. Dream figures, embodiments of dreams, appear in the form of almost brutal reality. There is nothing in them of the airiness, transparency or lightness of the fantastic creations of other painters.

It is hard not to agree with this assessment. The circle of figures swirling around the ladder seems as real and tangible – despite the fantastic nature of the performance – as a boy-painter ‘from our world’.

Heydel also drew attention to the original location of the scene, so different from the visions of Arnold Böcklin, for example:

In the paintings of other symbolists, similar apparitions appear in ultra-romantic surroundings: rocks and foams of the sea, storms, alchemists’ ateliers – this is the most common background of these paintings. Jacek squeezes his phantoms between the empty, cold walls of the painter’s studio or has them huddle around the renovated, paint-splattered room. Easels and painting stools, or buckets, pots of paint, stencils for wall-painting – in all this everyday, working greyness, a fascinating drama of spectres takes place. By the law of contrast, the mood works all the more forcefully. Theatricality has been banished from these paintings far and wide, which is why they are so dramatic.

The procession of spectres visiting seemingly ordinary, everyday spaces of life was to become a permanent feature of Polish culture. According to Malczewski’s memoirs, it was Vicious Circle and Melancholy that inspired Stanisław Wyspiański to write The Wedding.

jacek malczewski

symbolic painting

young poland

polish painting of 20th century