[…] In winter there is snow, wind-drifted snow, heaps of wind-drifted snow
Slick fluff plucked into millions of weighty tones
The mountains have bogged down in mud, like a hay wain,
The frost shoots straight into the stomach with a rhyme-like breath that almost causes pain.
In the winter the sky is glassy, the weather is full of ice,
A ski is sinking with a crunch in the scattered grainy sand,
In a blowhole, young, cerulean water shows its charm,
Ginger thaw puts its smoking tongue on a roof and sticks it out.
Then, both the spring and the autumn in concert start to prance
The world appears anew for the hundredth, thousandth time [...].

Kazimierz Wierzyński

To Rafał Malczewski(excerpt)^[1]

Rafał Malczewski (1892–1965) is a legendary figure, mentioned in the same breath as famous representatives of the artistic bohemia of Zakopane of the 1920s and 1930s. The unique artistic atmosphere of the Tatra resort was created, among others, by Witkacy, Zofia Stryjeńska, Karol Szymanowski, Kornel Makuszyński, Władysław Broniewski and Zofia Nałkowska. Zakopane, back then, became a mythical place. It remains so to this day, despite the fact that over the course of the post-war years — as Leon Chwistek wrote prophetically in the thirties — “each year it was gradually turning into more of a tasteless mixture of primal scruffiness and pretentious luxury”.^[2] The myth of pre-war Zakopane^[3] would not be complete had it not been for the art and activity of Rafał Malczewski, one of the most important characters of Zakopane, author of the memoire entitled Pępek świata ^[4] [The hub of the universe] and screenwriter of Biały ślad [The white trace] (directed by Adam Krzeptowski, 1932).Malczewski  was a social butterfly, painter, writer, poet, set designer, climber, competitive skier, and the son of the most famous Polish painter of the turn of the century, Jacek Malczewski. The latter fact finds an analogy in the biography of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, undoubtedly a unique figure in Zakopane during the inter-war years. Malczewski and Witkacy were sons of extremely strong artistic personalities. Both had to face the fame and the vision of the art of their monumental fathers. In terms of their artistic activities, they were both technically self-taught. This, among other factors, led to their becoming outsiders looking for their own unconventional paths, both in art and in life.
The first artistic fascinations and role models of Malczewski were related to his studies, which he started in Vienna in 1910, where he became acquainted with the work of Egon Schiele. The art of this Austrian, based on the legacy of Art Nouveau, impressed Malczewski primarily with the power with which it conveyed the artist’s feelings and state of mind. The other painter who left a mark on the young Pole was a Swiss representative of Art Nouveau, Ferdinand Hodler. Both these artists also significantly influenced Rafał Malczewski’s approach to landscape painting. The third artist whose paintings clearly influenced the painter’s landscape art was his father. Small landscape paintings done by Jacek Malczewski in the period 1900–1910, depicting fragments of the landscape of Kraków’s Zwierzyniec, are different from the other works of the great symbolist. Landscape is also present as the background of many figural-symbolic works of the master. In such works, Malczewski, the father, strives to synthesize. The reduced colour scheme and purification from unnecessary details of the reality are in consonance with the approach to landscape presented by both of Rafał's role models from Vienna, as well as with his own later reflections.
The knowledge of contemporary Western art — including expressionism, cubism and futurism — and contact with members of the Kraków’s Formist group (the first Polish avant-garde group) gave Malczewski a solid foundation in the field of painting theory and practice. Along with his extraordinary imagination and the skill of attributing symbolic meanings to the elements of reality, he created unique and surprising works.
Undoubtedly, when it comes to Rafał Malczewski’s approach to composition, form predominated over colour. This is probably the influence of, among others, the Formists in question, especially visible in the skilful synthesis of elements which contribute to the coherence of a work of art. Writing about his painting Malczewski stated: “To me, composition on the surface of the canvas is a series of selections and eliminations of unnecessary, in my opinion, objects [...]”.^[5]
Initially, Malczewski filled his landscapes with characters, making them anecdotal. This sometimes makes his works from this period closer to naïve painting. Witkacy described it in a manner characteristic of himself in the review of the exhibition in 1927: “In the present period one could say that Malczewski is characterized by a brilliant exploitation of his own infirmity”.^[6]
In contrast to these compositions, in the second half of the twentieth century, Malczewski painted a series of paintings, the main theme of which are the Tatra Mountains, usually depicted as remote, with the foothills in the foreground. In these paintings, the artist experiments with perspective. In some of the paintings, the background is excessively enlarged in comparison to the foreground, which introduces a strange mood of anxiety. This resembles some of the best contemporary paintings by Zofia Stryjeńska, who also experimented with the perspective and the order of composition plans in her works. The human figure is always present in these works of Malczewski, but it constitutes only a part of the landscape and is placed in a carefully selected spot of the composition. In several paintings, Malczewski becomes a radical synthesizer, reducing them to stains and shapes bordering on abstraction.
The extraordinary nature of these paintings, as isolated worlds created by the artist, is described by Witkacy in his next review one year later. He pointed out that Malczewski’s works represent the real world (the realistic factor is the “reconstruction”, as Witkiewicz wrote, of the depicted objects), but shown in deformation. Their range of colours diverges from the traditional harmony, and space is distorted in such a way that — as Witkacy put it — “in itself, it seems to have a crooked structure”. He also noted that:

All of this [...] results in the fact that while looking at the paintings of Rafał Malczewski, even though everything appears to remains the same, we are in a completely different world, reminiscent of narcotic visions induced by certain alkaloids or of overly-realistic dreams – both these worlds are, in their strangeness, irreducible to any simpler factors.”^[7]

In the second half of the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, Tatra landscapes were also the theme of watercolour paintings, Rafał Malczewski’s favourite technique, which he practiced throughout his entire life. Treated as personal notes, they resulted from completely different artistic assumptions than in case of refined oil paintings. Painted outdoors, often in winter, they depicted mountains seen from up close: lakes, valleys, individual peaks and slopes, often tightly framed. Malczewski also painted wider panoramas of mountains seen from a distance, which he later used as studies for his oil compositions. Watercolours, unlike oil paintings, are usually devoid of human presence: sometimes traces of a skier are the only sign of human presence on the painted mountainsides. Malczewski’s watercolour landscapes are testimony to his exceptional sensitivity to the beauty of his beloved mountains.

Jan Nepomucen Głowacki, Karpathian landscape seen from Poronin, District Museum in Toruń, public domain.

After 1930, Malczewski’s major interests take a new turn: he travels around Poland painting compositions that tell stories about the industrial landscape in a poetic way. The climax of this quest is the series of paintings — a painting reportage called Czarny Śląsk [Black Silesia] — which was the result of a journey that took place in 1934. The second series devoted to the industrial theme in the thirties is Centralny Okręg Przemysłowy – reportaż malarski [The Central Industrial District — a painting reportage] which consisted of over forty oil paintings and watercolours. This was created as a result of an expedition made along the construction sites of the largest investment of the Second Republic of Poland in 1938, together with Melchior Wankowicz. At that time, he rarely painted pictures with the theme of the Tatra Mountains. These few pictures differ from the ones painted before. They seem to be deprived of the expression possessed by the works from the 1920s. Unconventional perspective and experiments with settings are replaced with aestheticization, concentration on rendering the poetic beauty of the mountains, and a classic perspective.
These works include Spring in the mountains, which is dated to 1937. The painting received the Gold Medal at the World Exhibition in Paris the same year: Art and technology in everyday life.
This extraordinary work is one of the last monumental oil paintings of the Tatra mountains by Rafał Malczewski. The panorama of snowy mountains seen from a distance and a sea of ​​mists, as well as hills in the foreground, represents a sheer landscape devoid of staff age. The path and the huts located at the centre of the composition, which draw the viewer’s eyes towards the mountains, are the only traces of human presence. The landscape seen against the light is veiled by a fine haze that makes the colours seem surreal. We contemplate Malczewski’s favourite season: early spring. In the high parts of the mountains, there is still a lot of snow contrasting with the colours in the valleys. The time of high-mountain ski trips has come. The snow on the hills in the foreground has almost completely melted, revealing fields that make almost abstract forms in the painting. Like no other painting by Rafał Malczewski, this composition brings to mind yet another issue. It is highly probable that it is a conscious reference to the history of Tatra painting, being a reference to the oldest paintings depicting a large part of the mountain range, the most famous of which is the work by Jan Nepomucen Głowacki (1802–1847), Widok Karpat z Poronina [View of the Carpathians from Poronin]. By creatively drawing inspiration from classical compositions of the Romantic era, Malczewski, in a way characteristic of himself, deprived the landscape of reality, limiting the elements of the foreground to the symbolic minimum. No details interfere with the contemplation of the main theme. It is a tribute and a song of the painter in honour of the peaks, which, although far away, are the most important here.

Elaborated by Światosław Lenartowicz (National Museum in Kraków),

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Poland License..