Exhibitions
Jacek Malczewski (Musee d'Orsay, till 14 May)
Stylistic jumble
Nicholas Powell
Paris by night and even, one imagines, by day had little allure for Polish painter Jacek Malczewski. Working there for 12 months in 1876, aged 22, he resisted every temptation to go out in the evening. 'What use to me are the boulevards?' he wrote home to his parents. 'When in my heart I have my own thoughts, depths of feelings of enormous value and memories, from which I can weave out an infinitely long thread of pictures?' Jacek was not just reas- suring mum and dad — he really was the most dreadful swot. Judging by the unset- tling mix of realism, symbolism and han- kering after death present in the 60 canvases on show at the Musee d'Orsay, a little fresh air on the boulevards would have done the lad good.
Malczewski, who died in 1929, has rarely been seen outside Poland, barring a brief airing or two at places like London's Barbi- can Art Gallery in 1990 and this is an intriguingly off-beat show for Orsay: Henri Loyrette, the museum's director, says it was Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda, himself a great Malczewski fan, who got him fasci- nated by the artist. Occupied for most of the 19th century by Germany and Russia, regularly and bloodily purged, Poland was more of an idea than a country. Painting was seriously out on a limb — influenced by what was happening in Munich and the realistic distortion of perspective invades `Melancholia'. In the top left hand corner, a painter works on a canvas from which a mass of writhing and ultimately direction- less peasants, soldiers, priests and fellow artists surges into the air. 'Autoportret z hiacyntem' (`Self-portrait with hyacinth') of 1902 is a tightly composed open-air work depicting the artist with his back to the light in a garden: an orthodox enough Post- Impressionist piece, it seems. Until you spot the four little satyrs in the background (dionysiac symbols apparently) and realise that the hyacinth, 'Jacek', is a visual pun, and have to start looking all over again.
Malczewski was also a first-rate por- traitist, as the pictures of Edward Raczyns- ki, a stolid handsome aristocrat, of the art collector, musician and writer Feliks Jasiek- si or of the artist Stanislaw Bryniarski — a splendid white haired Bertrand Russell lookalike — so amply prove. Even here, Symbolism intrudes, to literally complete the picture: all three men are surrounded by dreamlike figures representing artistic inspiration. The writer Waclaw Karczewski, meanwhile, was portrayed in 1906 against a sketchily drawn background of receding meadows in which gambols a knight in full armour: a reference, apparently, to the childhood friendship between the sitter and Malczewski. The latter was more than half in love with easeful death: two canvases fea- turing strapping and icy female figures are entitled, simply 'Thanatos'.
Malczewski would come across better put into perspective, shown alongside con- temporary Polish artists, rather than left to hang, as at the Musee d'Orsay, all by his peculiar self. fine arts school of Warsaw but little by the dominant modes and experimentation in painting in France, which Malczewski held to be the best in the world. Polish artists pursued realism until around 1890, far longer than anyone else in Europe, before suddenly taking on board a flurry of half- digested foreign influences, including Impressionism and Symbolism.
In Malczewski's case, none of these labels sticks. A superb technician, he is also a stylistic jumble and proves uncomfortable viewing: there is an Impressionist freshness and a delight in light effects in much of his work, alongside a precision of detail which has caused him to be criticised as too aca- demic, and a love of self-portraiture (15 of the Musee d'Orsay works are self-portraits) which has caused him to be charged with narcissism. The criticism is unfair, for Mal- czewski was interested in his own image as part of wider considerations about the artist, whose professional options were severely limited in the Poland of his day.
Holding Malczewski's eclectic artistic personality together is an acute and painful sense of Polish nationalism (Malczewski said that without Poland he would never have been an artist), and the strength, in adversity, of the country's Catholic identity: Malczewski came from a particularly pious family. Stark and realistic, his early work depicts Poland's wounds crudely, without any recourse to Symbolist flights of fancy: Russian repression and the deportation of Polish rebels are the subjects of `Smierc na etapie' Meath of a deportee in a convoy') and 'Wililia na Syberii' (`Christmas vigil in Siberia'), painted when Malczewski was 31.
By 1894, a flush of Symbolism and a sur- `L'heure de la creation — La Ha"pie endonnie; 1907, by Jacek Malczewski
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