Malczewski’s complex and multilayered oeuvre rarely leaves the viewer indifferent, although it may not be understood by all viewers. Malczewski’s painterly oeuvre includes more than three thousand works on a variety of subjects, some of which are still undiscovered today, while others form private collections, not always made available to the public. Recent years have revealed new and interesting paintings, previously unknown even from reproductions. The revelation of 2011 is a collection called To the Glory of the Artist, collected for several years by art lover Jacek Malczewski, a collector of this one artist alone. The carefully selected paintings – twenty-three works from different periods of his career – provide an excellent opportunity to contrast them with selected works from the Jacek Malczewski Museum in Radom, the artist’s monographic museum, and with works from the great collection of Polish art created by Tom Podel of Seattle.

Malczewski, one of the most prominent representatives of the art of Polish modernism, was interested in a variety of subjects: portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, fairy-tale and fantasy representations, patriotic (related to the Polish nation’s struggle for independence), symbolic and visionary. They touch on fundamental problems of man, existence, eschatology, as well as issues of particular interest to the painter: the role of art and the vocation of the artist.

Jacek Malczewski, a pupil of Jan Matejko, in his first period of work painted realistic compositions recounting the fate of Polish exiles in Siberia, as well as historical, genre paintings and portraits. During the time of Young Poland, he created for himself an appropriate symbolic language, in which Christian mythology and iconography, fairy tales and folk tales, romantic poetry and Polish patriotic traditions met. The main themes of his works were man and his fate, the artist and the duties of art, and the problems of life and death. He developed the subsequent themes he undertook into series, continuing throughout his life. He presented his artistic program successively in large-scale, repeatedly interpreted productions, in Introduction, Melancholia and The Wrong Circle.

From Malczewski’s rich and varied oeuvre in the exhibition “Metaphors and Spaces. The Paintings of Jacek and Rafał Malczewski,” several themes were evoked, present in the collections on display. The martyrdom theme, patronized by Polonia, was highlighted, the artist’s largest collection of self-portraits in private collections was presented, which is a painter’s autobiography, a kind of diary, as well as works from the Poisoned Well series, the biblical theme and works dedicated to the motif of death. An interesting supplement to the exhibition are the lesser-known but interesting small intimate landscapes painted from the artist’s villas in Zwierzyniec in Cracow and in Lusławice.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog by Anna Król, graphically designed by a group of volumes.

Additional information:

Joanna Wójcik

e-mail: jwojcik@muzeum.stalowawola.pl

phone: +48 15 844 85 56