Mieczysław Sterling's article entitled 'The position of Józef Mehoffer in Polish painting. 'Józef Mehoffer's position in Polish painting', published in the journal Świat, 1935, no. 25, pp. 3-6 (public domain, reprinted after Mazowiecka Biblioteka Cyfrowa), was written in connection with the artist's jubilee exhibition taking place in the building of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. The article is illustrated with reproductions of two stained glass cartons that Mehoffer made between 1895 and 1936 for the Collegiate Church of St Nicholas in Freiburg.

A modernised reading of the text.

Asked by the editors of the 'World' to write a report on the Mehoffer exhibition in place of Mrs Zofia Chrzanowska, I proceeded to fulfil the editors' wish having already written a report for the 'Kurjer Poranny'. I revisited the exhibition and read the existing literature and, above all, Professor Kozicki's study in the 'Fine Arts' (1926-1927). One and the other effort to bring out new material, however, did not produce a clear result. While in other similar cases, when I was asked to re-write a report, I easily found a new approach to the same subject, at the moment - the first impression of the exhibition and the imposing reflections were so dominant and by far the only ones that I feel, unfortunately, compelled to repeat much of what I have already said in the 'Kurjer Poranny'. This is not a pronouncement of judgment on the artist's work, but rather an attempt to place his work in the history of Polish painting of the nineteenth or twentieth century.

Surprisingly, the view of the quality of Mehoffer's talent and work is remarkably consensual. All those who have written about him, whether it be the German art historian Alfred Kuhn, Kozicki, who deeply researches the artist's art, or Kopera, who takes a very outward approach to it, make the same statement about the artist's calmness, his "sunny" attitude to life and death, his spiritual serenity. But they also all state what he has done, how he has done it, utter a whole range of admiration, sometimes reservations. Kuhn even draws conclusions as to under whose influence he was in Paris, but no one really establishes what I was so exclusively interested in at the exhibition - what role falls in the development of the history of forms to an artist who leaves behind such an enormous artistic legacy. After all, his oeuvre cannot go down in history merely as a nomenclature of his name, as a sum of tributes or criticisms, as a disjointed whole without a name or definition. When we say the word "Matejko", an image of a man, of the human psyche, is formed in our imagination or notions, but also an image of a certain achievement of a holistic, specific creative personality within the art of his nation. If we say the word "Rembrandt", we also see a painting entity with a very strictly defined painting personality, with a face seen from all the lands of the world - we know at once that we are talking about an artist who has such and such an importance for the whole world of art. If we say "Wyspiański", we also know who he was for the whole of Polish art - we immediately see him on a particular path, leading from pre-war times to post-war times, and we know without a moment's hesitation that here we are dealing with a man who played this and that role in the development of Polish art.

Well, when we look at such a huge exhibition, showing us at once a man with such a wide range of possibilities - an excellent landscape painter, portraitist and extremely serious creator of stained-glass art, we are suddenly overcome with doubt: who is he in Polish art? Why didn't those who wrote about him think about it? Forty years of creativity, fame outside Poland, an enormous number of works, among them works we have known by heart for years, and with all this - a complete inability to weave him into the development of art, or a complete lack of effort in this direction?

This thought absorbed me to such an extent that it actually took the place of all other reactions. The comparison with Wyspianski's paintings or stained-glass windows produced a result that was unexpected for me, but which seems to me to be close to the truth to some extent.

Mehoffer left very early, in 1889, to study in Vienna; he stayed in Paris for quite a long time, from 1889 to 1896, and then stayed in Kraków as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. He lived the mood of the Kraków 'Art' of the time. Everything that flowed through his life was quite clearly fixed in him and entered his art with a clarity a hundred times greater than in the art of other contemporary artists. As a painter who brings his works to as perfect a finish as possible, he also brought in them all forms, even transitory ones, to the point of finite and very substantial things. In this way, everything that was even the most transitory and everything that constituted the essential great capital of the art of this epoch grew up in his works to a classical form. His art was thus, as it were, the product of all that constituted the spirit or artistic character of the epoch, and which in his art was brought to the most finite forms. And that at the same time his art was perhaps the only one in the life of Krakow at that time which continued the greatness of Matejko's intentions, that the decorativeness of his compositions was based not only on the action of people in the picture, but on the action of the ornamental line, the character of the whole epoch, in which the ornamental line played such a great role, lives in his works with a completely exceptional force. And his great decorative art becomes, on the one hand, a link, as it were, between his era and that of Matejko, and, on the other, between the art of his generation and that of the people of the 1980s, who eliminated ornamentation without content from art.

And suddenly Mehoffer's exhibition begins to give the impression of something museum-like, something already past. For in his work is spoken a moment of his life. Uttered so completely that with the passing of this moment the work that remains after it lives in the past. Excluded from this impression are his sunny landscapes, very beautiful and full of poetry, which also have that touch of classicism in the open air that transforms his works into documents of a bygone era. The task I am trying to solve for the first time, and which surprised me somewhat unprepared, should be taken up by a researcher of Mehoffer's work and solved more convincingly and perhaps closer to reality: however it seems to me that Mehoffer's position in Polish painting, established here, is not too far from the truth.

The exhibition is given in a manner worthy of the highest praise. The initiative of the city management, first and foremost that of President Pochowski, was extremely important and worthy of the greatest praise: the fact that all the works were hung by the artist himself, that as much material as possible was collected from all over Poland, that the catalogue was put together in a way which suited its purpose, and that a good introduction was given by Professor Kozicki.

It seems to me that if "Zachęta" had organised other exhibitions in this way, for example those of Witold Pruszkowski, the public's dislike of this neglected institution would have collapsed long ago. Unfortunately, a good exhibition was created when others arranged it.

P.S. Józef Mehoffer was born in Rapczyce, in 1869, the son of a councillor of the Land Court. After a two-year stay at the School of Fine Arts in Krakow, studying philosophy and law at the university at the same time, he went to Vienna for a year and then to Paris, where he stayed for about six years. Very young, in 1897, he was appointed by Fałat as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, a post he has held ever since. He is a peer and friend of Wyspiański.