DOI issue:
Nr. 2
DOI article:Henshaw, Julia Plummer: Images of Women in Polish Symbolist Art
DOI Page / Citation link: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18901#0051
12. Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, The Detroit Institute of Arts (photo courtesy of
j Founders Society Detroit Institute of Arts)
szewski, for whom woman is „the personification of all that is evil.” In the Self-Portrait with
Masks (1900, National Museum in Cracow, fig. 13), Weiss represented the femme fatale by the
mask he holds most prominently in the foreground. He wrote in a letter that this is „the mask
of a woman, but a devilish one, the kind who kills while giving ecstasy”8. This association of
woman with the devil can be found, of course, at the very beginning of human history according
to the Judeo-Christian tradition in the temptation of Eve by the devil in the Garden of Eden.
Once again, woman is dangerous, not just to man’s creativity but to his very life itself. Un-
fortunately, in the late nineteenth-century, there was an element of truth in this connection as
the sexually transmitted disease of syphilis was the cause of death in epidemic proportions.
The transmission of syphilis was not associated with a man’s faithful wife who bore him his
children but with the prostitute he visited for sexual pleasure.
It is interesting to consider, as an antithesis to the image of the femme fatale, the way that
some of the artists of the period portrayed their wives. One of the greatest Polish portraitists,
Konrad Krzyżanowski painted Michalina Piotruszewska in about 1905 in Portrait of the Artist’s
Fiancée (National Museum in Szczecin, fig. 14). Here this woman who was old enough to be
married is depicted by her husband-to-be as a withdrawn, frightened, almost-childlike person,
8. The Detroit Institute of Arts, Symbolism in Polish Painting, Detroit, 1984, p. 133.
41
j Founders Society Detroit Institute of Arts)
szewski, for whom woman is „the personification of all that is evil.” In the Self-Portrait with
Masks (1900, National Museum in Cracow, fig. 13), Weiss represented the femme fatale by the
mask he holds most prominently in the foreground. He wrote in a letter that this is „the mask
of a woman, but a devilish one, the kind who kills while giving ecstasy”8. This association of
woman with the devil can be found, of course, at the very beginning of human history according
to the Judeo-Christian tradition in the temptation of Eve by the devil in the Garden of Eden.
Once again, woman is dangerous, not just to man’s creativity but to his very life itself. Un-
fortunately, in the late nineteenth-century, there was an element of truth in this connection as
the sexually transmitted disease of syphilis was the cause of death in epidemic proportions.
The transmission of syphilis was not associated with a man’s faithful wife who bore him his
children but with the prostitute he visited for sexual pleasure.
It is interesting to consider, as an antithesis to the image of the femme fatale, the way that
some of the artists of the period portrayed their wives. One of the greatest Polish portraitists,
Konrad Krzyżanowski painted Michalina Piotruszewska in about 1905 in Portrait of the Artist’s
Fiancée (National Museum in Szczecin, fig. 14). Here this woman who was old enough to be
married is depicted by her husband-to-be as a withdrawn, frightened, almost-childlike person,
8. The Detroit Institute of Arts, Symbolism in Polish Painting, Detroit, 1984, p. 133.
41