DOI Heft:
Nr. 2
DOI Artikel:Henshaw, Julia Plummer: Images of Women in Polish Symbolist Art
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18901#0042
3. Olga Boznańska, Portrait of the Painter Anna Sariusz-Zaleska, 1899, Warsaw,
Muzeum Narodowe
The image of another chained woman is the focus of In the Dust Cloud (1893—94, National
Museum in Poznań, fig. 6), also by Malczewski. Here the manacled figure once again represents
Polonia, and this desparate image is a particularly poignant one, for the maternal figure chained
to her children is explicitly denied the power to perform the function most whole-heartedly
ascribed to her by the social values of the 19th century, that of maternal care and nurturance of
her offspring. While the allegory here is obviously a political one, the image itself and its context
suggests a hostility towards women. Not only are bound women stock characters in hard-core
pornography, the artist here explicitly associates this woman with evil by presenting her in
a swirl of dust (called a „dust devil” in English and with a similar association in Polish folklore).
The compositional and thematic parallel with a contemporary painting by Giovanni Segantini,
The Evil Mothers (1894, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, fig. 7) makes this point even more
obvious.
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Muzeum Narodowe
The image of another chained woman is the focus of In the Dust Cloud (1893—94, National
Museum in Poznań, fig. 6), also by Malczewski. Here the manacled figure once again represents
Polonia, and this desparate image is a particularly poignant one, for the maternal figure chained
to her children is explicitly denied the power to perform the function most whole-heartedly
ascribed to her by the social values of the 19th century, that of maternal care and nurturance of
her offspring. While the allegory here is obviously a political one, the image itself and its context
suggests a hostility towards women. Not only are bound women stock characters in hard-core
pornography, the artist here explicitly associates this woman with evil by presenting her in
a swirl of dust (called a „dust devil” in English and with a similar association in Polish folklore).
The compositional and thematic parallel with a contemporary painting by Giovanni Segantini,
The Evil Mothers (1894, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, fig. 7) makes this point even more
obvious.
32