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DOI Artikel:Kossowski, Łukasz: Wojciech Weiss - "Kryzys"
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.48914#0079
WOJCIECH WEISS - "KRYZYS"
which the depicted manekin is trying to demonstrate
something to the thoughtful model by means ofawkward
and mechanical gestures of its anns. It becomes the same
vehicle of human experiences; of loneliness and shyness.
In 1934 Weiss organises the largest of łiis post-First World
War individual exhibitions at which he displays his
works from the period 1890-1920. He also includes one
of his most recently painted pictures titled Crisis,
depicting the interiors of a painter's studio with piles of
canvas stretchers stacked high, on top of which the
manikin hasbeen thrown. Commenting on this painting,
Weiss defines the manikin as "a suicide in a tragic
gesture", adding that a crisis has taken over art and that
modern society no longer needs it. It is difficult to
believe that while composing Crisis Weiss also paints
landscapes of Kalwaria in full sunlight. In order to
understand this dichotomy it is necessary to go
backwards in time and bear in mind that the 1930s
painting Crisis represents a continuation of the artist's
youthful and expressionistic works. In Weiss's pictures
from the turn of the 19th. century nature was portrayed
as a murky and sleepy element. Thereafter the trail leads
through the predatory, Japonese-like linearism of the
white period and depicting of the studio up to Crisis. The
reality of this composition is a world reified to the
extreme, this conciding with the poetics of contemporary
European painting in the 1930s (ie surrealism and Neue
Sachlichkeit). In Weiss's painting, however, attachment
to the object does not arise from a fascination with the
avantgarde, but bears witness to the artist's attachment
to tradition and the role which the object played in 19th.
century Polish art when it had been the conveyer of
meanings and contents creating an art which was always
national and always Polish. The painting arising in
Weiss's studio during the 1920s and 1930s might be
defined in generał terms as a kind of still life, including
into this genre nudes and compositions such a Crisis. A
widely understood still life constituted during the
interwar years an enclave of traditional and artistic
values; an enclave which this time was not created in the
face of the threatened national identity, but of the
extremities of the avantgarde and the dehumanisation of
art ensuing from them. Just as in his early youth, when
he had wished to speak about matters which were to him
particularly persona! and painful, hiding his face behind
a mask with a grotesque grin, so thirty years later,
wishing to express sentiments of a similar content, the
artist made use of a manikin-suicide.
Translated by Peter Martyn
69
which the depicted manekin is trying to demonstrate
something to the thoughtful model by means ofawkward
and mechanical gestures of its anns. It becomes the same
vehicle of human experiences; of loneliness and shyness.
In 1934 Weiss organises the largest of łiis post-First World
War individual exhibitions at which he displays his
works from the period 1890-1920. He also includes one
of his most recently painted pictures titled Crisis,
depicting the interiors of a painter's studio with piles of
canvas stretchers stacked high, on top of which the
manikin hasbeen thrown. Commenting on this painting,
Weiss defines the manikin as "a suicide in a tragic
gesture", adding that a crisis has taken over art and that
modern society no longer needs it. It is difficult to
believe that while composing Crisis Weiss also paints
landscapes of Kalwaria in full sunlight. In order to
understand this dichotomy it is necessary to go
backwards in time and bear in mind that the 1930s
painting Crisis represents a continuation of the artist's
youthful and expressionistic works. In Weiss's pictures
from the turn of the 19th. century nature was portrayed
as a murky and sleepy element. Thereafter the trail leads
through the predatory, Japonese-like linearism of the
white period and depicting of the studio up to Crisis. The
reality of this composition is a world reified to the
extreme, this conciding with the poetics of contemporary
European painting in the 1930s (ie surrealism and Neue
Sachlichkeit). In Weiss's painting, however, attachment
to the object does not arise from a fascination with the
avantgarde, but bears witness to the artist's attachment
to tradition and the role which the object played in 19th.
century Polish art when it had been the conveyer of
meanings and contents creating an art which was always
national and always Polish. The painting arising in
Weiss's studio during the 1920s and 1930s might be
defined in generał terms as a kind of still life, including
into this genre nudes and compositions such a Crisis. A
widely understood still life constituted during the
interwar years an enclave of traditional and artistic
values; an enclave which this time was not created in the
face of the threatened national identity, but of the
extremities of the avantgarde and the dehumanisation of
art ensuing from them. Just as in his early youth, when
he had wished to speak about matters which were to him
particularly persona! and painful, hiding his face behind
a mask with a grotesque grin, so thirty years later,
wishing to express sentiments of a similar content, the
artist made use of a manikin-suicide.
Translated by Peter Martyn
69