The son of the Polish painter Jacek Malczewski, he followed in his father's footsteps and, despite not having graduated from any art school, became an acclaimed landscape painter. In his youth he became involved, like his rope-climbing partners in the mountains, with the Tatra Mountains and later with Canada. Considered one of the most outstanding Canadian painters. Author of several books.

Names:

Marceli Ludwik Fortunat Joseph

Surname:

Malczewski coat of arms Tarnawa

Date of birth:

24 October 1892

Place of birth:

Kraków

Parents:

Jacek Malczewski and Maria née Gralewska

Date of death:

15 February 1965

Place of death:

Montreal

Buried in the Notre-Dame-Des-Neiges cemetery in Montreal

Occupation:

Painter, writer, publicist

Hobbies:

Mountaineering, mountain hiking, skiing, lover of the Tatra Mountains and the Podhale region

Awards:

Golden Academic Laurel (1937)

Gold Honorary Badge of the Mountain Volunteer Rescue Service (1959)

Biography:

Rafał Malczewski, son of one of Poland's most eminent painters Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929), matriculated at St. Jacek's Gymnasium in 1910 (like his father) and settled in Vienna. There he studied philosophy, architecture and agronomy between 1910 and 1915. However, he did not complete any of these courses. After returning to Poland, he studied briefly at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and also learned painting in his father's atelier.

In 1917, he settled in Zakopane and became involved in the life of the artistic bohemia and circles connected with winter sports and mountaineering. He belonged to the Tatra Volunteer Rescue Service, he was also a ski instructor and a journalist of the "Przeglad Sportowy".

Fascinated by the Tatra Mountains and Podhale, he painted and practised mountaineering. Of his more important mountaineering routes, it is worth mentioning: the south face of Ostry Peak, the north face of Mnich, the crossing of the Fork ridge from Łomnica to Kieżmarski, Batyżowiecka ridge, Mięguszowiecka ridge or the crossing of the north-east ridge of Wielka Buczynowa Turnia.

The defining moment of his life was an attempt to ascend the south face of Zamarła Turnia, which he undertook on 25 September 1917 with his rope partner Stanisław Bronikowski. The expedition turned into an unexpected tragedy, as described by Kazimierz Wierzyński: "In September (...), he [Rafał Malczewski] made the fourth ascent of Zamarła Turię with his friend Bronikowski. The attempt was disastrous. In the upper section Bronikowski, who was going first at the time, fell off the wall, the rope snapped and the faller crashed on the boulders of the Empty Valley. Rafal was left with a small piece of rope by the hook to which he had attached himself. He survived in this position for almost 24 hours. He never liked to talk about the tragic event, about which legends later circulated. After the accident, he immediately went to Krakow to reassure his parents and accomplish what he had vowed to himself, hanging over the precipice and the cooling body of his friend. He was married within a week. Nothing could tear him away from the mountains. He settled down with his family in Zakopane, had his house Marysin there, and took up painting seriously", wrote Kazimierz Wierzyński in the text "Rafał Malczewski" ("Wiadomości", London, no. 1044/1045, 3-10 IV 1966, p. 1).

As a result of his decisions, he gave up climbing and married Bronisława Dziadosz. A month later, their son Krzysztof was born, followed a few years later by a daughter Zofia. As head of the family, he earns money by working not only as a painter, but also as a journalist and writer. He is the author of books: "Narkotyk góry", "Od cepra do wariata", "Trzy po trzy o sporcie", "Tatry i Podhale" and the text for the album "The mountains are calling - wandering with the lens from the Olza River to the Czeremosz River" (misleadingly called "Our mountains" for years), as well as the screenplay for the film "White trail".

He also publishes regular columns in Wiadomosci Literackie and in daily magazines. He paints a lot, mainly landscapes of the Tatra Mountains, later a series of paintings from "Black Silesia". He presented his works at many collective and individual exhibitions, at home and abroad (Venice International Biennale, Berlin, Helsinki, Los Angeles, Moscow, New York, Scandinavian countries...). In 1929, Rafal Malczewski's work was honoured with a small silver medal at the General National Exhibition in Poznań, and in 1937, at the Paris International Exhibition of Art and Technology, he was awarded a gold medal for his work entitled. "Spring in the mountains". The artist exhibited in Poland and abroad, mainly under the aegis of the Society for the Propagation of Polish Art Among Foreigners (abbreviated as TOSSPO).

In the meantime, he abandoned his family and began an informal relationship with a mountain hiking enthusiast, Zofia Mikucka (née Jakubowska), who became his faithful companion in his private life, and having no money to his name, sold the entire painting legacy inherited from his father to the National Museum in Warsaw, thus completely ignoring the rest of his heirs.

In 1939, after the outbreak of the Second World War, he and his partner fled via Slovakia, Budapest and Venice to Paris. Here he received material assistance from the Polish embassy. In mid-1940, he travelled via Spain to Portugal, where he spent four months. At the beginning of 1941, he moved to Brazil, where he stayed for almost two years. From there, he wanted to move to the United States, but was refused a visa. Together with his partner, he decided to move to Canada.

On 14 November 1942, they arrived in Ottawa and stayed at the hospitable home of the then Polish MP and Minister Plenipotentiary in Canada, Wiktor Podoski. It was thanks to him that as early as December, Malczewski had a solo show of works at the Museum of Art in Montreal, and on 27 January 1943, a large exhibition of paintings was organised under the patronage of Princess Alice, wife of Lord Athlone's Governor General in Canada, at Charles Ogilvie in Ottawa. In April this year, the exhibition was repeated at the capital's and very representative Chateau Laurier Hotel. In addition to attracting critical interest in Malczewski's paintings, these exhibitions also brought him concrete benefits. This is because Rafal Malczewski received a four-year contract from the Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railways to paint paintings on Canadian themes, which were later used not only for exhibitions, but also as decorations for railway stations and illustrative material for advertisements.

"In exchange for the paintings, the Cultural and Propaganda Department of the Canadian National Railways provided the painter and his wife (author's note: Zofia Mikucka was not yet Malczewski's wife at the time) with free locomotion. The Malczewski family made three trips across the continent and a number of shorter expeditions, and their familiarity with the vast territory between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans was further enhanced by another ocean-to-ocean trip on the private Canadian Pacific Railway. To the refugees, who had nothing but their talent and courage, these railway privileges not only made travel possible, but also facilitated the familiarisation of Canadians and the mounting of exhibitions," wrote the art critic, editor of the journal "Canadian Art", closely associated with the cultural activities of the Canadian National Railways, Robert Ayre in the text "Canadian Landscape in Malczewski's Interpretation", ("News", London, no. 1044/1045, 3-10 IV 1966, pp.5).

In 1943, in Vancouver, during a solo exhibition at Spencer's Art, Malczewski learns that on 11 March of that year, at the request of the then Premier of British Columbia, one of the mountain ranges in the Kootenay district of that province was named Mount Warsaw. As a symbol of the indomitable heroic capital of Poland during the Second World War.

It was at this time that not only was he a painter, but also a mountaineer. He decided to find this "Polish massif", reach it and, if not conquer it, at least immortalise it with his brush. On 7 October 1943, he packed a box of paints, a folder of papers and set off to meet the mountain. After a journey of many hours, hiking along the old Big-Bend gold prospectors' trail along the Columbia River, he reached the flooded Selkirk mountain range with its snow-capped Mount Warsaw.

This is how he described it in his book Late Autumn (Polish Cultural Foundation, London, 1964):

"I sit on a patch of dried grass and paint. In front of me a snowy peak emerging from the mists. Below, pin woods; below, almost at my feet flows a river, a green mountain river. It could be the Poprad or the Dunajec, maybe the Białka. It is October - the sky is the same as over the Tatra Mountains. There is an unbroken silence, the sun clears the mists, the world comes into focus, the illusion fades away, it is a different land, unknown mountains, a different river. Its waters roll on smoothly and silently, strongly green, malachite-turquoise, not the unforgettable bright reseda colour, full of sparkles, whistles and noises. The woods are different too. Smreeches as slender as spires, great cedars like the towers of a Gothic cathedral, "hemlocks" similar to yews. Mountains, too, dissimilar, unknown, unnamed, alien. But nothing - the very peak that rises above the dense wilderness and stretches wide towards the serene sky is the one I knew about long ago and longed to see. It is called Mount Warsaw.

Fascinated by this huge mountain massif with two peaks, the artist painted it in various scenes over several days. And this was regardless of the weather, which, as befits autumn in the mountains, was capricious. Its vicissitudes became apparent in his watercolours. Once the painting is bathed in sunshine. Then again, with an overcast sky shrouded in shades of grey. He signed his painterly series of at least a dozen (probably 24) watercolours: "Rafał Malczewski, Columbia Big-Bend, Mount Warsaw, X-1943".

However, it was not given to him to reach the summit. He wrote not without regret: "To reach the important massif of the mountain and to penetrate its cliffs for this you would not only need sleeping bags and a tent, but horses under the top and, above all, time". And he had little time, as the days were getting shorter and - as he put it - "it smelled of frost".

Malczewski's dream was realised in 1996 by a Polish team of "mountaineers" from Ottawa and Montreal. Following in the footsteps of the Polish painter and mountaineer, they climbed Mount Warsaw ((2 697 m above sea level) and planted two red-and-white flags on it: the Polish and Canadian flags, which had previously flown on the main tower of the Federal Parliament in Ottawa.

In 1944, paintings featuring 'Warsaw' and the surrounding flooded peaks of the Selkirk Massif became part of a major exhibition, 'Rocky Mountain Landscapes', held in the spring at Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. The exhibition, sponsored by the Canadian railways and again patronised by Princess Alice (who at the time purchased the painting 'The Outpost, Foothills Rockies'), was a great success for Malczewski and established him as an eminently capable landscape painter in Canada.

Overall, the crop of journeys Malczewski made between 1943 and 1946 with the Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railways was remarkably rich. More than 1,000 paintings! Malczewski exhibited them in a number of exhibitions that took place in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Halifax, New York, Vancouver, among others... Some of them also served as decorations for railway stations, some were used as illustrative material for advertisements.

In 1949, the Dominion Gallery in Montreal held the largest exhibition ennobling Malczewski, which was enthusiastically received by reviewers and the Canadian media. It featured as many as 70 paintings by the Polish artist. Two of them were later included in the 'Eighteen Canadian Painters' exhibition in Edmonton, considered a presentation of the most outstanding Canadian artists.

From the 1950s onwards, Rafał Malczewski limited his painting activities due to health problems. In one of his letters in 1954, he wrote the following to his friend from his mountaineering days, Alexander Schiele: "I have often visited the Rocky Mountains, feeling at home there. They are cool mountains, although different from the Tatras - big with glaciers, inside rarely visited, but on the horizon they appear like the Tatras from New Market. Now I am an old grandfather with a dichotomous body, full of rebellion against such a fate. I never imagined that I would descend so quickly, so cruelly". ("Taternik", no. 3-4, 1965).

Now he paints less, so he has more time for his literary work. Between 1952 and 1957, he wrote the books "Pêpek świata" ("Navel of the World"), "Późna jesień" ("Late Autumn"), a theatrical farce about Polonia "Piwo w proszku" ("Powdered Beer"), "Król Nikodem" ("King Nicodem") and a radio play broadcast on Radio Free Europe entitled "Trzej kapelani" ("Three Chaplains"). "Three Chaplains". He publishes texts in the Parisian "Kultura" and the London "Wiadomosci". They often deal with memories of his youth and family home.

On 1 March 1957, Rafał Malczewski suffers a stroke and partial paralysis of the left hand he was painting with. Intensive treatment, rehabilitation and especially the care of Zofia Mikucka, who only officially became his wife in 1953 after the death of his first wife Bronisława Dziadosz, made the artist slowly recover. He begins to paint and draw with his right hand. However, the couple are in extremely difficult financial circumstances. Various organisations, the Polish media, friends who organise various auctions and Rafał's daughter Zofia (Hipa) Malczewska-Kondracka who lives in the United States come to their aid.

Two years later, thanks to funding from the Polish Consulate in Montreal and his daughter, Malczewski made the "Batory" trip to Poland. In spite of his great longing for Zakopane and the Tatra Mountains, his spontaneous and unusually cordial reception, his being offered a flat, his renewed friendship with his son Krzysztof, his meetings with old friends, his printing in "Przekrój", a series of memoirs about Zakopane, soon published by "Czytelnik" in the book "Pêpek świata" (1960), he did not decide to return permanently and live in the "heart of the Tatra Mountains". He was disillusioned with the then homeland he had missed so much throughout his life. Embittered, he returns to Montreal, where, just before his death, his last exhibition was organised at the Dominion Gallery.

On 15 February 1964, he dies in a local hospital and is buried in the Notre-Dame-Des-Neiges cemetery in Montreal.

Rafal Malczewski left behind an extensive collection of paintings, which are now in the collections of many museums. The artist's works belong to the collections of the National Museum in Krakow, the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Poznań, the Silesian Museum in Katowice and the Tatra Museum in Zakopane, among others.

The Canadian journalist George Herbert Lash, advisor to the president and director of the communications department of the Canadian railways - was greatly impressed by Malczewski's work. In the text "Farewell to Rafal Malczewski" ("News", London, no. 1044/1045, 3-10 IV 1966, p.5) he wrote: "He loved these Canadian sites because he sensed in them a kinship with the mountains of his native Poland, where his heart remained, although tyranny had banished him from it (...) The tragedy of Poland was Rafał's tragedy".