Malczewski and the ideas of Young Polnd

According to Stanisław Stopczyk, the break of the 19th and 20th centuries in Poland was a time well known for the problem that many artists who represented that period had: they were constantly looking for their own truth(s), they own way(s), their own style. They developed into two main categories, those who made work for “today”, that fufilled itself during the lives of the artists and those who tried to develop a new style (Art Noveu to be precise) and regime for creating aesthetic forms and applied art. It’s appropriate to add that the latter, that was created with the intention of a style was crushed by steel contructions and/or lost it’s truth on the production line, leaving it simply a historical phenomenon. I however will concentrate on the former, the Young Poland art movement, that was centered in Kraków and took place in the years 1891-1918 and is widely accepted as the Polish version of modernism. (1)

I shall start with a bit of cultural and historical context. The last decades of the XIX century and the first 15 years of the XXth, were said to be the worst time for post-partition Poland, but also a period full of hope and a slow gathering of collective activism after an epoque of complete hopelessness. Various factors led to Poland’s politics not being taken into account in the scheme of European politics, but rather left to be resolved internally by the Partitioners (????). These factors included the fall of the January Uprising, the creation of the victorious and united Bismarck Reich (?????????), the French-Russian alliance and the military and political faliures of Austria, which led the austrian partition to be more and more sumbissive and dependant on Germany. This turn of events in combination with a resignatory atmosphere and the loss of hope for a better future, due to the inability to accept defeat, led to the overall loss of patriotic morale and the formation of so called “triloyalism”. The Polish people tried to form a policy of