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#0049
10. Jacek Malczewski, Portrait of Edward Raczyński, 1903, Poznań, Muzeum Narodowe
It is interesting to compare this black horse with flaring nostrils to the similar one in Henri
Fuseli’s Nightmare (1781, Detroit Institute of Arts, fig. 12) and to remember that Sigmund
Freud hung a photographic reproduction of this image in his study in Vienna in the 1890s.
Perhaps this painting can be seen as Podkowdnski’s answer to the famous question posed by
Freud:” What do women really want?” The artist suggests that women want a large, masculine
element to fill them up and carry them away in sensual frenzy, that women are at the mercy of
their bodily instincts. The ideas of German neurologist P. J. Möbius published in Über den
physiologischen Schwachsinn des .Weibes (1901) express this common belief of the scientific
establishment of the period: „Instinct has definite advantages. It is dependable and causes no
doubt. Instinct makes the female animal-like, dependent, safe, and happy”0.
But this instinctual sexual drive can also become very dangerous, even deadly, as is so clearly
indicated in one of the most common depictions of women in late nineteenth-century art: the
femme fatale, whose beauty and sexual allure are irresistible to men, but whose embrace brings
death6 7. The theme of the femme fatale was explored most extensively by Edvard Munch, an
artist whose personal and sexual life was filled with problems, and by Aubrey Beardsley, an
open homosexual. In terms of Polish painting, no artist seems to have shared this gynophobic
attitude as fully as Wojciech Weiss. Weiss was fascinated by the ideas of Stanisław Przyby-
6. P. J. Möbius, Uber den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes, 3rd. ed, Halle, 1901, p. 53.
7. See Martha Kingsbury, „The Femme Fatale and Her Sisters” in Woman as a Sex Object, New York, 1973, PP- 183—2-05.
It is interesting to compare this black horse with flaring nostrils to the similar one in Henri
Fuseli’s Nightmare (1781, Detroit Institute of Arts, fig. 12) and to remember that Sigmund
Freud hung a photographic reproduction of this image in his study in Vienna in the 1890s.
Perhaps this painting can be seen as Podkowdnski’s answer to the famous question posed by
Freud:” What do women really want?” The artist suggests that women want a large, masculine
element to fill them up and carry them away in sensual frenzy, that women are at the mercy of
their bodily instincts. The ideas of German neurologist P. J. Möbius published in Über den
physiologischen Schwachsinn des .Weibes (1901) express this common belief of the scientific
establishment of the period: „Instinct has definite advantages. It is dependable and causes no
doubt. Instinct makes the female animal-like, dependent, safe, and happy”0.
But this instinctual sexual drive can also become very dangerous, even deadly, as is so clearly
indicated in one of the most common depictions of women in late nineteenth-century art: the
femme fatale, whose beauty and sexual allure are irresistible to men, but whose embrace brings
death6 7. The theme of the femme fatale was explored most extensively by Edvard Munch, an
artist whose personal and sexual life was filled with problems, and by Aubrey Beardsley, an
open homosexual. In terms of Polish painting, no artist seems to have shared this gynophobic
attitude as fully as Wojciech Weiss. Weiss was fascinated by the ideas of Stanisław Przyby-
6. P. J. Möbius, Uber den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes, 3rd. ed, Halle, 1901, p. 53.
7. See Martha Kingsbury, „The Femme Fatale and Her Sisters” in Woman as a Sex Object, New York, 1973, PP- 183—2-05.