Rafal Malczewski - Central Industrial District - painting reportage 1938.

The exhibition is complemented by watercolor winter views from Canada from the collection of Tom Podel of Seattle, deposited at the Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola.

Rafal Malczewski’s first painting reportage was the series Black Silesia, the result of the artist’s journey through Upper Silesia and Cieszyn Silesia in 1934, made at the instigation of his friend Ferdynand Goetel. Malczewski produced dozens of works – oil paintings, watercolors and sketches, which were dispersed during World War II; today we know only some of them. Not hiding his admiration, Malczewski wrote several enthusiastic texts – confessions, reporting in them “a magnificent source of inexhaustible beauties – distinct, austere, threatening.” After nearly twenty years spent in Zakopane and Podhale, intensively practicing mountaineering and alpine skiing, mining and metallurgical Silesia became a magical and inspiring place for the artist.

While the landscape of “black Silesia” evoked ambivalent feelings in Malczewski, the construction sites associated with the most important investment of the Second Republic – the Central Industrial District – aroused only admiration, amazement and enthusiasm. Commissioned by the government, the artist made an expedition to the CID area with Melchior Wańkowicz, a little later, in the summer of 1938 with his later wife, Zofia Mikucka. In the pages of “Gazeta Polska” he published literary columns from the places he visited, illustrated with his own drawings.

The fruit of this journey was a series of paintings, unique in Polish art of the time, with no parallel in European art, titled Central Industrial District – painting reportage 1938. The artist produced more than 40 works – oil paintings and watercolors – which are painter-journalist accounts.

He made drawings in sketchbooks, took photographs and watercolor studies, collected material on the basis of which, partly in the open air, partly in the studio, he painted oil paintings. Only a dozen works have been found from this series.

Rafał Malczewski (1890 Kraków – 1965 Montreal) – painter, writer, columnist, mountaineer, skier, rescuer of the Tatra Voluntary Rescue Service. He was the son of Jacek Malczewski. He studied at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. In 1915-1939 (with breaks) he lived in Zakopane, then in Brazil, from 1942 in Canada, where he lived until the end of his life.

He actively participated in the artistic life of Zakopane. He participated in many exhibitions of the Podhale Art Society and the Podhale Association of Artists, both in Poland and abroad. He was a member of the Rhythm group.

He painted mainly landscapes – mountainous and industrial (Black Silesia and the Central Industrial District). He consciously primitivized, creating mysterious, sometimes fairy-tale compositions situated in the circle of widely understood magical realism. Among his masterworks are watercolor views of the Tatra Mountains.

He published, among others, Narcotic of the Mountains (1928), Tatra Mountains and Podhale (1935) and Navel of the World.

Memories of Zakopane (1960). He wrote the screenplay for a film about the Tatra Mountains entitled White Trace.

Works for the exhibition were lent by:

Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, Museum in Chorzow, Czestochowa Museum, Jacek Malczewski Museum in Radom, National Museum in Poznan, National Museum in Szczecin, National Museum in Warsaw, Silesian Museum in Katowice and private collectors.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog.