DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.25820#0011
History of Art at the Jagiellonian University 1882-2007
Sokołowski had to wait a long time for his academic
successors, for except for Feliks Kopera who obtained his
doctorate in 1896, they emerged only after the year 1900.
However, except for two outstanding scholars who took
up research on Baroque architecture: the prematurely
deceased Emanuel Swieykowski (1874-1908) and
Franciszek Klein (1882-1961) who quickly shifted his
interests to art criticism and popularization of art, it was
only in the period between the wars that they began to
play a more significant role in art history.
Due to the exceptional political situation of Cracow, its
historical, artistic and intellectual traditions as well as the
specific symbolic functions, it was here that modern art
history supported by appropriate institutions could have
been shaped at the soonest; whereas out of a specific sense
of patriotic duty, it made Polish art or else art created for
the Polish public an almost exclusive subject-matter of its
research. In turn, it is to the creators of modern art history,
Łuszczkiewicz - and above all Sokołowski that the Cracow
academic milieu of this time owes its methodological
maturity and research methodology which in many respects
is similar that of the leading European “Vienna school” - at
that time. Additionally what favoured the development of
art history in Cracow was the fact that the Cracow scholars
- similarly as was the case in Vienna - combined their
activity in the field of “pure” science with work in the fields
of museology, conservation or inventorying of monuments
- that is disciplines which imposed on one direct contacts
with a work of art. The similarity between the two milieus
- Cracow and Vienna - also revealed itself in a tendency to
widen the scope of research material to include the
products of artistic handicraft and the art of Baroque - both
of which were subjected to an aesthetic “rehabilitation”
beginning with the late 1880s.
The recovery of sovereignty in the aftermath of the
First World War brought about important changes in the
Julian Pagaczewski
functioning of art history in Poland. Side by side with the
already existing chairs of this discipline in Cracow and
Lvov, there arose successive chairs at the restored or
newly created Polish universities in Warsaw (1917),
Poznan (1919) and Vilnius (1922). Competition with the
Cracow milieu - traditionally the strongest in respect of
cadres and institutions - was taken up not only by the
more advanced Lvov milieu in respect of methodology,
thanks to Władysław Podlacha, a pupil of Boloz
Antoniewicz, but also by the Warsaw chair, beginning
with around 1930. In the case of the latter, the growing
significance of this milieu was partly the result of
Warsaw’s advantage as the capital which favoured
centralization of means and resources; it was also the
effect of the activity of architect Oskar Sosnowski,
professor of Polytechnic, who as head of the Department
of Polish Architecture was able to create a truly modern
academic institution in which he employed young, able
and ambitious scholars: architects, historians and art
historians.
In Cracow, the generational change took place a little
earlier; it is the retirement of Sokołowski in 1910 and his
subsequent death in the following year that mark the
caesura. From that moment onwards, it was his “adopted
disciples”, and gradually and to an ever greater extent,
his formal university students that decided about the
image of the local milieu.
Following Sokołowski, it was Jerzy Mycielski who
took the chair, but his true successor and continuator was
Julian Pagaczewski. It was already in 1910 that Paga-
czewski, as associate professor, took over his master’s
lectures, and in 1917 he obtained a new, second chair of
art history which was liquidated for political reasons
in 1933. After Mycielski, it was another student of
Sokolowski’s, Tadeusz Szydłowski who was elected head
of the first chair; earlier on Szydłowski had been curator
of the National Museum and since 1914, he was
a distinguished conservator of monuments in Lesser
Poland (Małopolska). As private scholars (.Privatdozent),
it was also the museologists who lectured here, though to
a limited extent: Feliks Kopera (1871-1952), director
of the National Museum for 49 years and since 1910
titular (honorary) professor of the Jagiellonian Univer-
sity and - in the 1930s - Stefan Saturnin Komornicki
(1887-1942), conservator (curator) of the Princes
Czartoryski Museum and researcher specializing in the
Italian Renaissance in Poland as well as theoretician of
museology; in the latter group, there was also Pagaczew-
ski’s student Adam Bochnak who having obtained
a postdoctoral degree at an early age, became employed
at the university at the post of adjunct professor and after
his master’s dismissal he took over his lectures.
In the interwar period, it was Julian Pagaczewski
(1874-1940), a diligent scholar, excellent pedagogue and
teacher of the majority of the representatives of the
successive generation of art historians, born at the turn
of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth
century, who began their academic career around the
year 1930, but gained importance after the Second World
9
Sokołowski had to wait a long time for his academic
successors, for except for Feliks Kopera who obtained his
doctorate in 1896, they emerged only after the year 1900.
However, except for two outstanding scholars who took
up research on Baroque architecture: the prematurely
deceased Emanuel Swieykowski (1874-1908) and
Franciszek Klein (1882-1961) who quickly shifted his
interests to art criticism and popularization of art, it was
only in the period between the wars that they began to
play a more significant role in art history.
Due to the exceptional political situation of Cracow, its
historical, artistic and intellectual traditions as well as the
specific symbolic functions, it was here that modern art
history supported by appropriate institutions could have
been shaped at the soonest; whereas out of a specific sense
of patriotic duty, it made Polish art or else art created for
the Polish public an almost exclusive subject-matter of its
research. In turn, it is to the creators of modern art history,
Łuszczkiewicz - and above all Sokołowski that the Cracow
academic milieu of this time owes its methodological
maturity and research methodology which in many respects
is similar that of the leading European “Vienna school” - at
that time. Additionally what favoured the development of
art history in Cracow was the fact that the Cracow scholars
- similarly as was the case in Vienna - combined their
activity in the field of “pure” science with work in the fields
of museology, conservation or inventorying of monuments
- that is disciplines which imposed on one direct contacts
with a work of art. The similarity between the two milieus
- Cracow and Vienna - also revealed itself in a tendency to
widen the scope of research material to include the
products of artistic handicraft and the art of Baroque - both
of which were subjected to an aesthetic “rehabilitation”
beginning with the late 1880s.
The recovery of sovereignty in the aftermath of the
First World War brought about important changes in the
Julian Pagaczewski
functioning of art history in Poland. Side by side with the
already existing chairs of this discipline in Cracow and
Lvov, there arose successive chairs at the restored or
newly created Polish universities in Warsaw (1917),
Poznan (1919) and Vilnius (1922). Competition with the
Cracow milieu - traditionally the strongest in respect of
cadres and institutions - was taken up not only by the
more advanced Lvov milieu in respect of methodology,
thanks to Władysław Podlacha, a pupil of Boloz
Antoniewicz, but also by the Warsaw chair, beginning
with around 1930. In the case of the latter, the growing
significance of this milieu was partly the result of
Warsaw’s advantage as the capital which favoured
centralization of means and resources; it was also the
effect of the activity of architect Oskar Sosnowski,
professor of Polytechnic, who as head of the Department
of Polish Architecture was able to create a truly modern
academic institution in which he employed young, able
and ambitious scholars: architects, historians and art
historians.
In Cracow, the generational change took place a little
earlier; it is the retirement of Sokołowski in 1910 and his
subsequent death in the following year that mark the
caesura. From that moment onwards, it was his “adopted
disciples”, and gradually and to an ever greater extent,
his formal university students that decided about the
image of the local milieu.
Following Sokołowski, it was Jerzy Mycielski who
took the chair, but his true successor and continuator was
Julian Pagaczewski. It was already in 1910 that Paga-
czewski, as associate professor, took over his master’s
lectures, and in 1917 he obtained a new, second chair of
art history which was liquidated for political reasons
in 1933. After Mycielski, it was another student of
Sokolowski’s, Tadeusz Szydłowski who was elected head
of the first chair; earlier on Szydłowski had been curator
of the National Museum and since 1914, he was
a distinguished conservator of monuments in Lesser
Poland (Małopolska). As private scholars (.Privatdozent),
it was also the museologists who lectured here, though to
a limited extent: Feliks Kopera (1871-1952), director
of the National Museum for 49 years and since 1910
titular (honorary) professor of the Jagiellonian Univer-
sity and - in the 1930s - Stefan Saturnin Komornicki
(1887-1942), conservator (curator) of the Princes
Czartoryski Museum and researcher specializing in the
Italian Renaissance in Poland as well as theoretician of
museology; in the latter group, there was also Pagaczew-
ski’s student Adam Bochnak who having obtained
a postdoctoral degree at an early age, became employed
at the university at the post of adjunct professor and after
his master’s dismissal he took over his lectures.
In the interwar period, it was Julian Pagaczewski
(1874-1940), a diligent scholar, excellent pedagogue and
teacher of the majority of the representatives of the
successive generation of art historians, born at the turn
of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth
century, who began their academic career around the
year 1930, but gained importance after the Second World
9