"Angel and Shepherd Boy", 1908, oil on cardboard, 59.5 x 49 cm, private collection
"Faun", 1906, oil on panel, 46 x 38 cm, private collection
"In a Jewish shop", c. 1870, watercolour, ink on paper, 20 x 32.5 cm, private collection
"Self-Portrait", 1909, oil on cardboard, 45 x 55 cm, private collection
"Portrait of Kazimierz Pochwalski", 1914-15, oil on canvas, 92 x 117 cm, private collection
"Self-Portrait with Erynia", 1910, oil on panel, 49.5 x 61.1 cm, private collection
"The Path of Life", oil on canvas, 60.5 x 69 cm, private collection
"Derwid", 1907, oil on cardboard, 51 x 44.5 cm, private collection
"Portrait of Matylda Modesta Wolfarth", 1916, oil on cardboard, 33.6 x 65 cm, private collection
Jacek Malczewski made his only statement in painting; his immensely rich oeuvre remains ever intriguing and artistically uneven. The first stage was the so-called Siberian cycle, illustrating the torment of Polish deportees, portrayed naturalistically or filtered through the mystical poetry of Slowacki. During the Young Poland period, Malczewski created his own unique symbolic vocabulary in which corporeal and robust figures of chimeras, fauns, angels, and water sprites appear both in allegorical portraits, innumerable costume-clad self-portraits, landscapes, genre and religious scenes and, finally, in compositions which do not correspond to any thematic conventions. The art of Malczewski is dominated distinctly by two motifs, recurring and assorted painterly embodiments: the vocation of art and the artist, and death, under the antique form of Thanatos. The Malczewski oeuvre is the most vivid example of an intermingling of folk motifs and an anti-classical, Dionysian vision of antiquity, typical for Polish modernism; the artist achieved a peculiar polonisation of ancient mythology, not only by placing chimeras and fauns in a Polish landscape but also within an historical-national context, which ultimately proved to be regarded as the most important by this pupil of Matejko.
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Artist’s paintings in: malarze.com
Artist biography at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacek_Malczewski
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