Malczewski and self-portraits

Jacek Malczewski is regarded as the artist who created the largest number of of self-portraits of Polish artists , a number that is by no means easy to estimate. It is difficult to count how many times he portrayed himself, not only because of the large number of works preserved in museums and private collections created over the course of half a century of his creative work, but also because of their content. Malczewski produced dozens of: classical self-portraits, either alone or in the company of another person; self-portraits - as a participant in a scene with a different title and content ; and crypto-portraits - lending his face to other figures, such as Christ or St Francis.

The form of Malczewski's self-presentation is significant, as he literally and metaphorically changed his costume and attributes, playing various roles in his paintings : mythological, historical, religious. In the Nativity scene of the "Green Balloon" in the Michalik's Den, Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński portrayed Malczewski in Jacek Symbolewski's Kuplet (Words): I am neither a dog nor a beast / Time and again I change state / It's in a pirogue, then again without / It's a professor, then again a gentleman [...]. The artist remained consistent to the end - in accordance with his last will, he was buried dressed in the habit of a Tertiary.

Bolesław Orzechowicz - donor to the Lviv gallery

Bolesław Orzechowicz (1847-1927) , a philanthropist and generous donor to Lviv's public institutions, established a private museum in his estate in Kalników near Przemyśl from collections inherited from his family and his own purchases of works of art and artistic creations. At a ceremonial meeting of the City Council on 28 August 1919, Orzechowicz's collection was donated to the city of Lviv. It consisted of a total of 998 objects , an impressive collection of Polish and foreign paintings, handicrafts, weapons and watches, which the owner also enriched with objects brought from his own distant travels. He also collected Polonica.

The extensive collection of works by Polish artists included works by Marcello Bacciarelli (1731-1818), Artur Grottger (1837-1867), Henryk Rodakowski (1823-1894), Jan Matejko (1838-1893), Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907), Julian Falat (1853-1929), Juliusz ( 1824-1899 ) and Wojciech ( 1856-1942 ) Kossak and, of course, Jacek Malczewski . The indivisible collection was to have functioned under the name 'The Collection of Bolesław Orzechowicz'. Unfortunately, the collection is now dispersed.

"Christ before Pilate"

The Boris Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery , a museum continuing the traditions of the pre-war National Gallery of the City of Lviv, holds dozens of paintings and drawings by Jacek Malczewski , including 11 self-portraits. "Christ before Pilate" belongs to the hidden self-portraits and is one of the artist's most intriguing images.

In the first layer , in keeping with the title, the painting depicts a scene familiar from the Bible - Pontius Pilate presenting the tormented, blood-soaked and humiliated 'King of the Jews' to a crowd who demanded that he be tried and sentenced. In the close frame, in the foreground to the right of the painting, we see Christ in the Ecce homo (Behold the Man) convention , framed in a half-figure, wearing a crown of thorns, a red cloak over his naked torso, bound and tied to a pole. Contrasting with the beaten and mocked Jesus is the figure of Pilate , with his head covered by a shawl, naked torso, half reclining on a Roman bed with a gilded backrest. His ostentatious indifference to the tragedy of Jesus is emphasised by the figure's focus on the banal activity of cleaning his fingernails.

Parallel to the 'title' layer , we can read the painting as images of specific people in historical costume. In the figure of Christ, we see a self-portrait of the painting's author - a face familiar from dozens of his own representations, with his head covered this time by a red wig with long hair. The figure of Pilate is 'played' by Mieczysław Gąsecki (1883-1948), painter and restorer, art collector and friend of Jacek Malczewski, known as Gon. Towards the end of the artist's life, as the painter and writer Michalina Janoszanka (1889-1952) recalls, Gąsecki "devoted the whole day to Mr Malczewski, bringing him home from the studio, taking care of frames, stretchers, paints, brushes - in a word, everything". Malczewski portrayed his friend several times individually, as well as in his company.

'Christ before Pilate' is not their only double portrait . The Lviv museum's collection includes ' Self-Portrait with Mieczysław Gąsecki ' and a painting thematically and formally related to the scene with Pilate, the canvas ' Christ at Emmaus ' . The scene takes place shortly after the Resurrection and again Christ has Malczewski's face. Another version of the self-portrait 'Christ at Emmaus' is held in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw.

A short biography of Malczewski

Jacek Malczewski was born in Radom on 14 July 1854. From the time of his secondary school education, his professional and private life was associated with Krakow. Here, in 1873, at the suggestion of Jan Matejko himself, he began his studies at the Kraków School of Fine Arts. He perfected his talent and technique in Paris, Munich and Vienna, was awarded at exhibitions at home and abroad; he taught at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, of which he also became rector , taught at the A. Baraniecki course for women and at the M. Niedzielska Female School of Fine Arts. After fifty years of creative work, he died on 8 October 1929 and was buried in the Pantheon of the Deserved, in the crypt of the Basilica of St Michael the Archangel and St Stanislaus the Bishop and Martyr in Kraków Na Skałce.

Jacek Malczewski's oeuvre stands out among Polish artists not only for its unique, individual style, vision and distinctive colours. The painter was the forerunner of the modernist trend and the undisputed "king" of symbolism in Polish art at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century , and his paintings "Melancholia", "Wrong Circle", or "Polish Hamlet" entered the canon of Young Poland art . Alongside new trends, patriotic themes were still present in his paintings, intertwined in his Siberian cycles recalling the dramatic fate of Polish exiles, with motifs from classical mythology and folk beliefs and the Bible. Malczewski was an excellent portraitist , who in this matter also developed his own distinctive artistic formula, leaving an extraordinary artistic image of his contemporaries from the world of culture and art.