Royal Castle at Wawel, Krakow Jan Matejko (1838-1893), the leading Polish historical painter of the nineteenth century. Born barely a year before Paul Cezanne - he was a classical academic, but his art has shaped the imaginations of many generations of Poles. Matejko's big, crowded canvases illustrate the most important moments in the history of the nation. At a time when Poland had been wiped off the map of Europe, Matejko, recalling moments of greatness and national sins, called for the people to examine their collective conscience. In Poland, his works still live and wake the emotions.

The decor of Krakow's Franciscan Church is among the most beautiful modernist decorative art in Europe. Its creator, Stanislaw Wyspianski (1869-1907), a student of Jan Matejko, was the greatest individual in the so-called Young Poland movement - the art at the turn of the twentieth century. It is from him that the new epoch of Polish art begins. His multi-facetedness recalls the Renaissance masters: revolutionary playwright, innovator in painting and remaker of the art of design.

Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929) was the enfant terrible of Polish symbolism. A student of Matejko, into his painting he introduced folk tales, Greek myths and end-of-the-century angst.

Malczewski's art is an explosive mixture, joining eroticism with mysticism, folk art with classical, brutal sensuality and unbearable pathos with irony. However, his mad, unpredictable imagination did not merely create symbolic brainteasers, but also moody, lyrical landscapes - roadside willows, storks circling above a freshly ploughed field, a cloudy sky.

During the 19th century, discussion about 'Polish national art's right to exist' broke out in Poland. On the road from Romanticism to Modernity, the turning point was the Positivists' fight for the autonomy of painting and the attempt to bring art closer to reality. Among the campaigners for a new aesthetic was the outstanding art critic Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1851-1915), who worked out the theoretical basis for the new national style. His proposals were based on the Highland folk art 'Zakopane Style'. His unique villas in Zakopane, fully furnished and with characteristic Highland decor, are an original homegrown example of the artistic design movement, which swept Europe at the turn of the century.

There are many interesting museum collections in Poland, the most curious of which arose in an industrial city, Lodz, among the Polish Constructivists. As early as the 1920s, Wladyslaw Strzeminski (1893-1952), along with his colleagues from the avant-garde group 'a.r.' began collecting avant-garde works from all over the world. In February 1931, the Lodz Gallery of Contemporary Art was opened, one of the world's first permanent museum exhibitions of avant-garde art. This unique collection became the kernel of the Lodz Museum of Art - a collection that today consists of works by over 1,500 artists.

In Twenties Poland, the avant-garde found their voice. The regaining of independence had freed artists from their patriotic duties. The watchwords became aesthetic functionalism, rationalism and modernity. The most outstanding representative of Polish Constructivism was the sculptress Katarzyna Kobro (1898-1951). Kobro's researches were pioneering. Her spatial, abstract constructions of wood, glass and metal are an original conception of a sculpture which has ceased to be a shape, and become an analysis of space and 'space-time rhythms'.

The most interesting personalities in Polish twentieth-century culture are the multi-talented artists who work in many disciplines. The classic example is Witkacy - S.I. Witkiewicz (1885-1939), an outstanding playwright, philosopher, art theorist, and also painter and photographer. The creator of the theory of 'Pure Form', wishing to express metaphysics and the 'mystery of existence' in his works, painted fantastic surrealist-expressionist compositions.

He left a fascinating gallery of portraits completed within the ambit of his so-called Portrait Firm, but within his artistic oeuvre, his innovative and experimental photography was more important. Witkacy proclaimed a catastrophic vision of the impending collapse of Western civilization.

In the Fifties, the Communist authorities wanted to use art as a tool for agitation and propaganda. The works that arose under the pressure of Socialist Realism had little in common with art, being a kind of ideological folklore. Some artists, however, managed to link art with an engagement with the important matters of their time. The tragically politically entangled Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-1957) left the most valuable painted documents of those years. His outspoken figuration is a metaphor of a degraded, straitjacketed reality. Wróblewski was artist with a sense of mission; he believed that art, by enabling us to distinguish Good from Evil, would change the world for the better.

One of the most important and longest-lasting traditions in Polish painting is colorism - the Polish version of post-impressionism. The artists gathered in the 'Paris Committee' took the pilgrimage to the Seine in search of inspiration and light, and after their return fulfilled the function of apostles of 'good painting'. For them, the most important things were harmony of colors and the beauty of canvas evoking shining cloths. Their successive generations dominated artistic education, founding the Polish school of colorism: sensitivity to color and the decorative elegance of canvas.

The history of the Polish avant-garde has colorful legendary characters. The long-lived Henryk Stazewski (1894-1988) was named a "classic of modernity" even while he was still alive. He was one of the pioneers of geometric abstraction and a member of several avant-garde groups - BLOK "Praesens", "a.r." - and also the international groups "Cercle et Carré" and "Abstraction-Création". He worked closely with the famous Paris Galerie Denise René. He remained faithful to geometry to the end, constantly expanding its language with new questions of space, color and movement.

In the culture of every nation, there are emblematic characters, person-symbols. For contemporary Poland, one such person is Jozef Czapski (1896-1993), a moral authority and a true witness of the 20th century. His is one of the most beautiful Polish biographies: multi-talented educated aristocrat, participant in wars, concentration camp prisoner, strong patriot and Catholic. He was a simultaneously writer, an erudite and a sensitive painter. His books about Soviet war crimes closed his road back to Poland. His nostalgic, shocking pictures: snapshots of Paris streets and cafes, or the Metro, strike us with the freshness of their vision and the bravery of their color choice.

Folk art is today not merely for ethnographers and researchers of country customs. The fashion for 'art at the edge' and 'borderland artists' is enjoying a visible renaissance. Professional painters, too, borrow from the rich treasure house of folk culture, using the ethnic and homegrown motifs in a new, creative way. Eugeniusz Mucha (1927), the person behind many church polychromes, bestows a brave, untypical interpretation on the religious subjects. In Mucha's painting, we can see the Polish countryside with its carved shrines, scenes painted on glass, the fairground dazzle of village fetes, but also the golden mediaeval altars and gravestones.

Since the cubist period, naive, or primitive, art has been an important source for artists. In its sincerity and outspokenness, people look for real emotion, passion, and simplicity - something the cultured and avant-garde academics have lost. The most famous Polish self-made painter, compared with Rousseau himself, is Nikifor (1895-1968), actually Epifan Drowniak - a Lemko beggar and illiterate gifted with an unusual talent and diligence. For many years linked with Krynica, a small town in the Beskid Sadecki, in his simple aquarelles, he uncovered the beauty in the sub-Carpathian landscape: lonely stations or villages set in fields, but also the fantastic architecture of the towns.

Magdalena Abakanowicz is the first entry in almost all international dictionaries and encyclopedias of art. The world's best-known Polish sculptress' (1930) works can be found in the most important museum collections as well as in the open air. Her creativity has revolutionized artistic weaving, earlier considered to be exclusively as an example of craft or decorative design. The thickly woven, meaty and spatial 'Abakans' won the top award at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1965. With time, Abakanowicz moved in the direction of sculpture, open-air installations and architectural design. Her Crowds, Backs, Herds and Swarms, consisting of tens of figures of resin-soaked burlap, wood, stone, and bronze, are a striking metaphor of the human condition in the contemporary world.

At the end of the Fifties, Polish artists, too, undertook experiments with the 'painting of matter', including in their pictures unconventional materials such as gravel, sand, and scrap metal. Jonasz Stern (1904-1988), Jew and Pole, interpreted structuralism in his own way, using organic remains: prepared bones, fish scales and bones, dried plants. Stern's original art connects his tragic life - periods in the camps and the ghettoes, a miraculous rescue - with his private passion, angling. The monochromatic Boards in which painted animal bones take the form of a Jewish headstone, is a symbolic epitaph for the Chosen People.

Among Polish artists working in other countries, many successfully integrate into artistic life abroad, writing the Polish tradition into the visual landscape of Europe. True success was achieved by the graphic designer and representative of the 'Polish school of Poster Art' Roman Cieslewicz (1930-1996), settled in Paris since 1963. He used his experience as an illustrator and typographer, gained in Poland, as the artistic director of 'Elle' and 'Vogue' magazines, and also as a long-time associate of the Paris Centre Georges Pompidou, for whom he designed posters and catalogues. In his works, Cieslewicz employed collage and quotations, using mirror images and enlarged screens of photographs. His greatest mastery was achieved in his colorful, surreal photomontages, based on reproductions of the Old Masters.

One of the main themes in contemporary art is the problem of the human body - it fragility and lack of permanence. Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) was one of the first European artists to show a desperately brave and no-holds-barred corporeality. For the last 10 years of her life, she lived in France. She enjoyed technical experiments: cement, iron filings, colorful stones and sap, which enabled French critics to categorize her as a member of the New Realism. The greatest impression is made by her work in polyester, in which she employed casts of the human body.

The eminent painter and Orthodox theologian Jerzy Nowosielski (1923), the creator of Orthodox and Catholic polychromes, was able to utilize the heritage of Byzantium also in his secular painting: landscapes, nudes, and abstracts. His inimitable style was a blend of Western and Eastern traditions, of the avant-garde and Byzantine art. From surrealism, Nowosielski borrowed an aura of ambiguity and mystery. From iconic art - religiousness, strong contours and flatness of form, as well as the deep symbolism of light and color. In Nowosielski's art, as in the Byzantine tradition, all reality is holy.

During the Communist era, poster art was one of the islands of artistic freedom. The phenomenon of the 'Polish School of Poster Art' - created by painters and full of fantasy and freedom - depended on the fact that in socialist realism there was no such thing as a commercial poster, and advertising was concerned with spiritual and cultural matters. In posters for the theatre, the circus, or film, the avant-garde tradition of photomontage and decorative artistic merits were made use of. In 1968, in Wilanow near Warsaw, the world's first Poster Museum was opened. Since 1966, the International Poster Biennale has been organized in Warsaw. One of the more important representatives of the 'Polish School of Poster Art' is Jan Mlodozeniec and his recognizable hand: thick, superficially clumsy, though decisive line, vivid colours, childlike styling and a warm sense of humour.

International pop art blended various conventions and techniques, mixed high art with low, borrowing from mass culture as it wished. In Poland, an original homegrown version of pop art was created by Wladyslaw Hasior (1928-2000), member of the Phases Association, author of poetic assemblages, monuments and monumental outdoor sculptures. His metaphoric compositions allude to the form of liturgy, travestying the shapes of altars, gravestones and feretories. Hasior's works, betraying a fascination with kitsch, using cheap votive objects, broken toys and baubles is enjoyed all over a world which values its hidden picturesque and somewhat exotic poetry from the Polish provinces.

One of the world's most important artistic festivals is the International Graphic Design Triennale (at one time Biennale) organized since 1966. It is not accidental that the site of this prestige festival is Krakow. Since the time of modernism, there has been a strong tradition of artistic graphic design here, often created by painters, who have enriched it with painterly and colouristic effects. A respect for technique, incredible precision and an atmospheric language of metaphor are the common thread in sometimes very different works: the symbolic constructions, ruins and Towers of Babel from the copper engravings of Krzysztof Skorczewski (1947), the visionary and mysterious architecture from the gloomy aquatints of Tadeusz Jackowski (1936), the poetic and erotic landscapes of Andrzej Pietsch (1932), the grotesque and radical portrait woodcarvings of Jerzy Panek (1918-2001), and the human comedy in crowded scenes from the copper engravings of Jacek Gaj (1938). One of today's most interesting representatives of the "Krakow school of graphic design" is Anna Sobol-Wejman (1946), Grand Prix laureate at the International Graphic Design Biennale at Györ (Hungary) in 1995. Her rhythmically ordered, multi-segmented works form a type of picture writing, and, at the same time, a discreet and far from humorless commentary on life and reality.

One artist who, in recent years, has frequently represented Poland at international arts festivals is the sculptor Miroslaw Balka (1958), an exhibitor at, among others, Documenta in Kassel (1992) and the Biennale in Venice (1993), as well as the person behind an individual exhibition in the Tate Gallery (1995). His sculptures and installations are examples of a personal, autobiographical art, referring to experiences in his childhood and constructing a private mythology. Balka creates ascetic, geometric forms from wood, metal, or concrete, recalling the human body, its proportions, temperatures, and imprints. In his installations, he uses untypical materials: cheap soap, salt, lastriko slabs. Balka's subtle and thrifty art is also very well received outwith his home country.

The Nineties, known as the 'first decade of freedom', was a difficult stage in the change of systems, which aimed to bring Polish society into the circle of modern democratic civilizations. This period of transformation left its mark on culture, too, bringing the need to once again define a national and social identity. The answer to these questions has been a wave of 'critical art', using new media, drastic visual effects and the poetry of provocation. Artists are taking on all the current situation's 'hot' topics, like AIDS or racism, demolishing successive taboos without hesitation, be they sexual, religious or national. Poland's leading scandalist is considered to be Katarzyna Kozyra (1963), who won an award at the Venice Biennale (1999) for her video installation Bathhouse. Her photographs, films and installations, circling the subjects of corporeality, disease and death, have instigated a discussion in Poland on the rights of the artist and the limits of artistic freedom. Embarking on her discourse about suffering, Kozyra also employs new media in order to undertake a sensitive aesthetic dialogue with European culture: the painting of Ingres or Manet, or the music of Stravinsky.

Down the ages, Polish culture has often turned out to be very attractive to new arrivals. Many foreigners, having permanently settled in Poland, have enriched her culture with their own national traditions. This has been, and is, particularly true of our closest neighbours, although there is no lack of more exotic examples. The avant-garde Koji Kamoji (1935), a Japanese artist who has lived in Warsaw for 40 years, is today exhibited and awarded prizes as a Polish artist. Counted among the avant-garde linked with geometry and constructivism, he brought to Polish art a particular poetry, full of the symbolism of the elements and references to nature and the spirituality of the Orient. In his frugal installations and objects of stone, sheet metal, wire, and other building materials, he organizes intriguing spatial situations, full of surprising connections and internal tension.

Leon Tarasewicz (1957), belonging to the generation of 'wild expression', is one of the most eagerly exhibited Polish artists in the world today. A Belarussian with Polish citizenship, he works and lives on the edge, in the Bialystok village of Walily. His expressive canvas balances on the edge of abstraction, however the starting point is always nature, the homely landscape of the Polish borderlands: snowy forests, boulders, flying birds and the furrows of ploughed earth. Tarasewicz's canvases are a new, enlightening synthesis of the Polish landscape, although the artist ever more frequently concerns himself with questions of pure painting. The dense brushstrokes cover walls, pillars and interiors. The rhythmic composition of colored stripes painted straight on the ceiling or walls creates a painterly environment, enabling one to enter the very centre of the work. Bright, luminescent colours radiate a strange energy - this art, too, is a creative development of traditional symbolism of Byzantine icons.

Poland is a country with a strong Catholic tradition, in which Christian iconography is treated with a particular piety. In spite of this, or perhaps precisely because of it, there is no lack of artists interpreting religious symbols shockingly independently, ripped out of their traditional context. The brave, frequently scandalous treatment of sacred topics need not signify blasphemy. In Poland, such provocativeness has a social connotation, as an attempt to rock the psychic boat, overbalancing unthinking, automatic religiosity. Demasking hypocrisy, artists once again pose fundamental questions, attempting to break the viewer out of customary routines and mental stereotypes. Eugeniusz Get-Stankiewicz's (1942) shocking collage, the suggestion of a personal participation in the action of the crucifixion, forces one to ask oneself about the real consequences of faith and shows the foremost sense of Christianity - a personal responsibility for undertaking the challenge of the Gospels.

There exists a category of 'total artists', who want to subordinate their whole lives to one idea and transform their existence into a work in progress. One example is Roman Opalka (1931), one of the world's best-known artists of Polish descent. Once a talented graphic designer, since 1965 he has exclusively painted Counted Pictures: white-grey canvases consistently covered in rows of numbers.

This desperate idea of devoting one's whole life to an artistic counting from 1 to infinity demands respect, although it more resembles a stoic philosophical attitude than any kind of artistic expression. A taped recording of counting and a photographic record of the artist's face, further underlining the inevitable passing of time, accompany the gradually lightening pictures.

Source: www.poland.gov.pl