Rafał Malczewski, MOUNTAIN PEJZAZZIE, ca. 1943

51.0 x 68.8cm - oil, canvas signed p. d.: Rafał Malczewski



On the reverse:

- on the upper loom strip, circular ownership stamp: KM (in the rim) | Z KOLEKCJI | Krzysztof Malczewski;

- next to the number (in pen): NR 18;

- next to the inscription (in pencil, in pen): Spring ploughing | 11;

- next to probably a framing note (in pencil): B 1204 | 20 x 27;

- in addition, on the upper border of the frame, two exhibition stickers from the District Museum in Sandomierz and the Jacek Malczewski Museum in Radom, and an auction sticker.



Provenance:

- Collection of Rafał Malczewski's son Krzysztof;

- In 2006 in the collection of Wanda Marossanyi - niece of Zofia Mikucka-Malczewska;

- Purchased at auction for private collection.



Exhibited painting:

- Jacek and Rafal Malczewski, Jacek Malczewski Museum in Radom, March 25, 2011 - September 4, 2011;

- Jacek and Rafał Malczewski, District Museum in Sandomierz, 17 March - 31 August 2012.



Stanislaw Potępa, author of a monograph on Rafal Malczewski, links this painting with - painted around 1930 - "large landscape panoramas" captured from high above, paintings of large wavy space showing "vast arrangements of fields with counterpointing cottages and trees." He dates our painting to around 1932 and gives it the title On the Halls. However, given the architecture in the painting, we can't connect it with the Podhale landscapes. The different color scheme and form also point to a later dating. The painting, which bears many features in common with the works of the 1930s mentioned by Stanislaw Potepa, was probably created shortly after the artist's arrival in Canada and we can date it to around 1943.



Much has been written about Rafal Malczewski's paintings. The best characterization attempting to define and specify the essence of the originality of his works is quoted below. This is what Stanisław Igancy Witkiewicz, a friend of the artist, wrote in the 21 nu-mer of "Wiadomości Literackie" of May 20, 1928:

The world depicted by Malczewski, is not a fantastic world - it is this everyday world of ours, without any formal stylization in any direction, presented realistically, only as if in a light caricature and deformation, having its source not in the requirements of form, but in the psychology of the artist's life. This consists, among other things, and shifting in different directions (rather than harmonizing in a certain tone) of colors. Atmospheric but specific moments are added; the monstrosity of commonness and the commonness of strangeness and the resulting, also in different directions, deformation of shapes. The unheard-of scale of colors, deviating differently in each painting from normal harmony (complementary and its derivatives), whose perversity is the result of the intensification of life in the aforementioned dimensions. All of this, combined with the realistic "re-creation" of the objects depicted, gives the result that when looking at Rafal Malczewski's paintings, although everything apparently remains the same, we are in a completely different world, reminiscent of narcotic visions under the influence of certain alkaloids or dreamlike dreams with intensified reality - both of these worlds are in their strangeness not reducible to any simpler factors.

One more property of Rafal Malczewski's paintings: there are no deformed objects, immersed in normal space. There, space itself seems to have a curved structure, like the spaces of Riemann and Lobaczewski - and at the same time variable in its curvature within the painting depending on different psychic potentials, in connection with the painter's (non-artist's) relation to individual objects. It is impossible to describe these things without using specific artistic means. You have to look yourself, but know how to look.



Image described and reproduced:

- S. Potępa, Rafał Malczewski, TTK Tarnów 2006, p. 254, il. [In the halls, ca. 1932].

Rafał Malczewski (Kraków 1892 - Montreal 1965) studied agronomy, philosophy and architecture in Vienna; he also attended the Academy of Fine Arts there, but owed his artistic education primarily to his father, Jacek Malczewski. From 1917 to 1939 he lived permanently in Zakopane; he was a passionate mountaineer. In 1930 he left for a six-month stay in France. In December 1939 he broke through Slovakia and Hungary to France, from where he then left for Brazil and later the United States. In 1942 he arrived in Montreal, where he remained permanently. Beginning in 1919 he exhibited extensively; from 1934 also as a member of the "Rhythm" grouping. He painted mainly landscapes - from the Tatra Mountains, Podhale, views from small towns and factory Silesia, later also from Brazil and Canada. In his paintings - consciously primitive, often maintained in a poetic and fairy-tale mood - he is close to the art of naive realism. Malczewski was also a literary man, author of articles on art, columns, essays and memoirs of the Tatra and Zakopane Mountains, including "Narcotic of the Mountains," "The Mountains Call" and "Navel of the World," a book already written in Canada.