In Mieczysław Treter's article 'Kazimierz Sichulski. On account of an exhibition at the Tow. Zachęty Sztuk P. in Warsaw", published in the periodical "Sztuki Piękne", 1926/1927, no. 2, pp. 58-70, a reproduction of the artist's painting entitled "Orphans", located in the Lviv Art Gallery, was included.

A modernised reading of the text

Kazimierz Sichulski
(Because of an exhibition in the Polish Society for the Encouragement of Arts in Warsaw).

Sichulski has been exhibiting his works since 1903, i.e. for almost twenty-five years. His current exhibition at Warsaw's Zachęta Gallery could easily be considered an anniversary exhibition, were it not for the fact that it was not at all retrospective in character.

Of the eighty or so works on display (including some 40 easel paintings, painted in oil and tempera, and one only in pastel), none represented the first stages of Sichulski's artistic development as a painter, nor was it a mere repetition of themes which the artist had already explored and dealt with in his own distinctive way. Here and there, we could see secondary echoes of analogous motifs already worked on in the past - such as several colourful genre scenes from the life of the Hutsul region - but these motifs were for the artist a kind of pretext for posing new problems related to the painterly form.

Arguably, such themes as: "In the Poloniny", such as "Return of the newlyweds from the Orthodox Church", "In Pokucie", such as the oil triptych entitled. "These are by no means new subjects, unprecedented in K. Sichulski's work so far. These themes are by no means new or unprecedented in Sichulski's oeuvre; what is fresh is the artistic content of these paintings, whose texture and style - in spite of retaining some basic and specific features of Sichulski's artistic expression - bear little resemblance to the orgiastically explosive, barbarically bold and bright canvases of this famous painter, both in their colours and in their characteristics, created more than twenty years ago.

When, in 1905, Sichulski made his first appearance with a larger collection of his works at the Lviv Society of the Friends of Fine Arts, the leading critic of the time, Marian Olszewski (who died in Lviv in 1915, during the Russian invasion), dedicated a separate column to him in Słowo Polskie (No. 138, 17 June 1903), entitled "The Unbridled". "Unbridled". It was an excellent description of the artist, characterising very aptly this first phase of Sichulski's development as a painter. Unbridled in every respect were his first works. A baroque, restless and capricious contour line, an impetuous romantic drive, breaking all the fetters of classical and academic art, a dazzling orgy of luminous colours, as well as an extraordinary gift of observation and synthetic grasp of the shape and character of objects - these were the main features of Sichulski's paintings at the time, especially his oil paintings.

Many of his pastels showed clear traces of affinity with the pastel paintings of St. Wyspiański - affinity, not borrowing. This was already pointed out by M. Olszewski at the time, and in the article quoted above he expressed his conviction in the following words:

"Wyspiański, like few, renders the material. In Wyspiański, like in few others, one is immediately struck by the individuality of form: thick contours, nervous undulations of lines, decorative colour planes, changing in tone within one and the same colour, free accentuation of form, here and there, and elsewhere nothing at all - an understanding of chiaroscuro as a distribution of colour patches of various intensity and quality of these patches, as if uncertainty, nervousness, freedom: something that inscrutably, mysteriously pursues its own paths and does not explain itself, does not confess: why? - it does not justify, but this justification must be - the thoughts of many only so profound, so difficult to understand! And then: this depression, this medieval exaltation and precociousness! It does its own thing. To climb to the heights of this great expressiveness, this great pre-movement, to capture so Psyche in the face! But - is it necessary for this to be the genesis of Sichulski's pastels, such an origin directly from Wyspiański? Having seen them, everyone will assume it. But is not an analogy possible? Analogy so far-reaching that his Huculi are not only a set of Piast characters - so much dignity in them, so much eternity, as in Matejko's set of Polish kings (Matejko gave birth to Wyspiański), not only such lack of meat, bones, soil as in Wyspiański's, not only the same perfection in rendering the materials, those sheepskins in particular - the same contour, the waving of lines, decorative colour planes within one and the same colour, changing in tone, any accentuation of form here and there, the understanding of chiaroscuro as colour spots, these spots, as if uncertainty, nervousness - but also a similar winding line of the signature, but also the decoration of the room on the model of Bolesław's common room".

Juxtaposing Matejko, Mehoffer and Wyspiański with Sichulski, as one who comes closer to them in the way of seeing and rendering what he sees, M. Olszewski counts Sichulski as a direction growing out of the Matejko tradition - this direction: "perhaps it is a Polish style!". This is how the Lviv critic characterised the ground and hallmarks of Sichulski's art, considering first his pastels.

"Sichulski's oil works are different". - M. Olszewski wrote. - 'Here analogies are hard to find, because the oil works of Wyspiański are unknown. Sichulski's oil is therefore almost entirely different and looks more uninhibited. With a broad brush, he leads his way across the canvas in an undulating motion. His brushstroke technique speaks of unbridledness, frenzied temperament, bravado, making nothing of himself. There is strength, certainty, nonchalance.

Likewise in his choice of motifs: he likes big contrasts, but not bright ones - he casts red patches of sheepskin on the lilac snow, puts a Hucul in the gates and casts strong sunlight from behind him, interrupts the snow banks with the dark yellow of the path. Mountains, snows and primal, sheepskin and giant sheepskin caps wrapped figures - freshness, purity, mountain air transparency.

A temperament, a purely painterly system. Just as he sees everything on the plane in front of him - so he renders: he repeats the colourful planes, and the modelling of the figures, the perspective of the air already comes by itself. He does not construct it. This may result in a certain lack of drawing accuracy, which would still raise the value of the painting - but its strength lies in something else: in the bravura casting of ordered colour patches and in character.

Less reflection, no experimental, painstaking method - instead unloading an excess of power, feeling, great satisfaction, delight in bravura. And this is precisely what is extremely sympathetic, appealing about him, something that makes him of value in our art. Here Sichulski paints freely, as he pleases, and his power will undoubtedly captivate, convince many. He sets no limits to his freedom. He follows the urge.

His exhibition holds promise, and it will be extremely interesting to see how he develops and whether or not he will incorporate drawing construction in his future work more than he has done so far. And it seems to me that in his work he should soon come to this problem and somehow solve it."

Sichulski encountered the issue of the drawn, linear construction of a painting a little later - he must have encountered it at the time when he first began to create compositions of the so-called - generally, and not quite rightly - "decorative" kind, to develop designs for stained glass and mosaic.

At that time, in the first phase of his painting work, he became known mainly as a painter of colourful scenes from the life of the Hutsul region and as such became famous not only in Poland, but also abroad - at exhibitions in the building of the Viennese Secession, the Viennese association of artists under the name of Hagenbund, at international exhibitions in Venice and at other foreign exhibitions organised by the Polish Artists' Association Sztuka.

In 1907, he exhibited a painting entitled Orphans in Venice and it attracted the attention of foreign critics. A number of foreign periodicals, including the Milanese L'Azione, in a report entitled Impressioni sulla VII-a Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Città di Venezia, dealt with this painting, which was the only one Sichulski exhibited in Venice at the time, raising its value.

The gift, already mentioned by me above, of artistic perceptiveness and synthetic treatment of shape, with a great, innate passion for blunt characterisation, allowed Sichulski to become above all an excellent cartoonist.

As such, he will be handed down to posterity through various humour magazines - with Chochoł and the unforgettable Liberum Veto at the forefront, the walls of the "Jama Michalikowa" in Kraków, hundreds of cartoons, loose drawings, pages of various, specially published albums and whole cycles of caricatures from the literary and artistic, theatrical, political, military and diplomatic world.

However, these were only crumbs of his great talent, poured out by the artist's generous hand to feed on the broad masses of the intelligentsia, who always approached them with universal applause and enthusiasm. Sichulski himself never attached much importance to them, as his artistic aspirations had long reached further and deeper.

The Hutsul Region attracted Sichulski with its completely separate character, the freshness of ethnographic, purely folk elements, brightly coloured costumes and the charm of the wild landscape - the mountains and the Polonies.

However, this same artist, passionate about painting the raw primitiveness of the Hutsul world - an artist who was sometimes so tough and unyielding in his art that he seemed brutal by nature to many - was also able to work on such highly subtle motifs as flowers, women's and, above all, children's portraits with equal understanding and strange sentiment. He understood the poetic charm of blossoming orchards like few other painters, intuitively guessed the specific properties of the most diverse flowers, felt the soul of the awakening spring, the soul of a child - even an infant.

In his pastels in this thematic area, he was able to do away with any austerity of form - his artistic insight and gift for vivid characterisation found artistic expression through a muted range of pictorial means: harmoniously toned colours, light, softly and gracefully drawn contours.

At the present Warsaw exhibition, "Zim", painted in tempera, and the pastel Portrait of a Lady Sitting in a Garden Against a Background of Greenery gave only a faint idea of this area of Sichulski's painting.

On the other hand, the four portraits of children exhibited in Warsaw - Krzysia z sanitarnym (tempera), Juras z pajacem, Krzysia z fajką and Juras na koniu (the last three painted in oil) - were a truly virtuoso display of purely painterly imagery and texture.

Mentally deepened images of children are a genre in which few in Poland manage to match this artist. The small figure of a peasant angel child with a violin in his hand, placed in the foreground of the composition entitled Nativity scene, is a veritable miniature poetic tale, full of a tender, purely Polish sentiment. Such were the eyes of the poet Leopold Staff in Rainbow of Tears and Blood, when he described the memorable Autumn and recalled:

"...the Vistula
Unhappy sky,
Blue and dreamy, like Slavic eyes...".

A poetic motif also characterises the artistic content of Sichulski's numerous compositions, woven around the life of the Hutsul region. This poetic element is by no means to be found in the subject of the paintings themselves, nor in their literary anecdote, as this kind of novelistic, descriptive or symbolic element is completely alien to the artist.

In general, these are so-called 'genre scenes' from the life of the Hutsul people, depicting seemingly everyday moments and devoid of drama - such as The Road to the Poloniny, The Return of the Honeymooners from the Orthodox Church in the Hutsul Region, The Lirnik, The Carpathian, or the perfectly characterised Baba with a Rooster (from near Kraków). However, thanks to his specific, ingenious and highly artistic way of approaching the subject, appropriately selected painting texture and full use of plein-air effects - in which Sichulski specialises - these paintings arouse great interest, acquire almost symbolic features and make us reflect on the power of nature, the charm of mountains, the love of life and its manifestations, both joyful and tragic. The reflection can also be on the old traditional song of the lyricist, or on the fate of the village axeman during the spring miracle.

Sichulski's gift for vivid, astute and succinct characterisation of people and things finds its most appropriate use in such works. The landscape, which is by no means an inferior element, is treated by the artist in an almost expressionistic manner, as he is able to extract from it a maximum of artistic expression. It forms an inseparable whole with the depicted scene - without this natural background, the human figures would lose their clarity and expressive power, like a plant uprooted from the soil in which it grew. In terms of colour, Sichulski's Hutsul paintings are boldly and ingeniously harmonised symphonies of colours. The artist is extremely fond of using a whole range of tones of one and the same colour, especially green.

Nowadays, he has mostly abandoned the way of painting large, uniformly coloured areas - often in carmine tones - which used to be a characteristic feature of his first Hutsul compositions. Now he expresses himself rather through a system of smaller, freely scattered patches of colour - restless in arrangement but strong in colour intensity, shining from afar. Sometimes he does not hesitate to use misty-grey, cold and even 'dirty' tones to heighten expression - as, for example, in some landscapes.

On the basis of Sichulski's artistic activity to date, as shown by the works collected at the Warsaw exhibition, it should be noted that several dozen paintings brought from Lviv remained unshown - for lack of space in the rooms of the Zachęta Gallery. Some of them were even placed on the walls of the vestibule, where they hung mainly as decorative projects. If we consider not only easel paintings of various themes and diverse artistic content, but also decorative cartoons, architectural sketches, numerous projects for stained glass, mosaics, frescoes, church polychrome, textiles (Battle of Beresteczko, Death of Father Józef Poniatowski), we can see not only the artist's amazing diligence, but also his extraordinary versatility. It is a talent that eludes all attempts at systematic classification.

Let us add that Sichulski's artistic curiosity seems to know no bounds - he is interested in almost all styles and epochs, as well as all fields of painting and various techniques, also in the context of applied art, often wrongly called merely "decorative". Traces of deeper historical and historical studies, museum research, involuntary filiation and reminiscences, as well as conscious attempts to move into the spirit of past eras are visible in his work at almost every turn. From the primitivism of Old Christian art, through Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic stylisations, the Italian Renaissance and Baroque (including Rubens), to French Rococo, Empire Classicism, the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix, French Impressionism and German Expressionism - right down to certain traits of Futurism and Cubism - we find all this, more or less clearly, in his paintings. The effect, however, is sometimes ambiguous.

This wealth of forms sometimes borders on chaos. Just like in a broken mirror, which colourfully reflects fragments of hundreds of objects but cannot be assembled into an organised and unified whole, so it is sometimes difficult to find a coherent core in Sichulski's work. Too wide a range of artistic interests, too varied aspirations - both technical and stylistic - distract his creative powers. They prevent what even the greatest talent needs: focus and internal consolidation. His museum passion and collecting instinct are sometimes the cause of dangerous creative twists.

His fascination with the old monuments of the art industry, his excessive preoccupation with the forms of the past, can hinder his own inventiveness, lead to eclecticism and in time even blur the distinctive features of his separate, personal artistic physiognomy.His love of folk art, and in particular of old wooden buildings, leads the artist to repeat in several designs for the Exhibition Pavilion architectural forms that have long since been exploited, once alive, now rather museum-like.

He refers to the stylistics of rural, Baroque churches and Orthodox churches, preserved in the Carpathian landscape in places - but he uses these forms not as creative inspiration, but as almost literal quotations, without adapting them to the spirit and function of modern architecture. Such a direct transfer of old patterns to modern art, an attempt to adapt historic structures that were built in different times, for different purposes and in a completely different environment, to modern needs - such as a utilitarian exhibition pavilion - cannot be considered a rational approach. The very premise, which is based on the mistaken belief that a form, ripped out of its own context, can perform a new function without prejudice, is false.

The artist's intention is understandable: he wanted to construct a building that, without inscription and without state emblems, would by its very form appeal to everyone as a Polish work. The deliberate repetition of structural and decorative elements was undoubtedly intended to facilitate the achievement of this task. Yes, probably, but this kind of work has no artistic justification: it is not an original work of contemporary architecture, nor does it even have the value of a copy, since it is not a faithful copy either.

Similarly, in my opinion, the artist is completely mistaken when, composing a design for a cardboard box for a tapestry embroidery entitled "The Death of Prince Józef Poniatowski", he semi-consciously succumbs to the charm of antique fabrics, old Polish belts and kilims woven in the past in the Borderlands, and creates a frame composed of ornamental motifs reproduced vividly from those very fabrics. The different character of the fabric, the different arrangement of the ornament, made for a different purpose and with a different technique - as a result: the border gives the impression of an ill-composed and uneven ornament, it does not enclose the image strongly enough and does not separate it sufficiently from the rest of the plane, i.e. the wall, which is the natural background for the whole fabric.

With regard to a number of easel paintings, such as Prometheus, the altar painting Christ, the Centaur or Nymph with Satyr, one could also raise a number of aesthetic objections for similar reasons: these works are the result of a compromise between contemporary and original creative individuality and some traditional principles of art of previous eras, as a result of which they are not a pure product of Sichulski's artistic invention and his own technical means of expression.

In a word, these numerous and, in recent times, so frequent museum wanderings of the artist along the old paths of his art, deepen his culture and bring him honour, but at the same time hinder the final crystallisation of his talent and the finding of his own specific form. Ignorant of the fact that in Poland there is almost literally no demand for true works of religious art, Sichulski, with his innate passion of a sincere artist, with a kind of fierce obstinacy, has been devoting his best efforts to this very field for a number of years. He also lived to see some of his ideas and designs put into practice in St Elizabeth's Church in Lviv, although only in recent times. This Lviv church, which has allowed its interior to be decorated today with original works of art by a contemporary and Polish painter, is a somewhat commendable exception in this respect. In general, for the purposes of religious worship, it is sufficient almost everywhere.

Ugly trash of foreign origin, much of which can be found for very cheap money in any of our devotional trade. Unfortunately, this is not only the case in our country, where the plastic arts play almost no part in the life of our society - it is even the case in France, that undying source of modern art. This is stated by a whole series of writers, priests, artists, with Maurice Denis at the forefront.

In France, a special "genre sacristie" has become widespread and has found its justification in a bizarre and peculiar prudishness that has nothing to do with the true spirit of the Catholic religion, but defends the access to the church of honest, lively and creative art. In his book, Maurice Denis states that there are no works in contemporary French art that correspond to the mental constructions of writers such as Léon Bloy, Paul Claudel, Péguy or Sertillanges, or like Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Hello, Huysmans, Bourget, Francis Jammes, who succeeded in awakening respect and veneration for religion even in those spheres of the thinking intelligentsia that were most hostile to Catholicism. "We Catholic artists," writes Maurice Denis in a chapter entitled: "Décadence ou renaissance de l'art sacré?" - "we will no longer put up with our mother, the Church, the ever-young bride of the eternal Christ, being dressed in ridiculous ways according to outdated fashions, by peddlers of pseudo-Romanesque and pseudo-Gothic!".

Sketching the evolutionary line of modern painting in general and religious painting in particular, M. Denis argues that there is no work of art that is truly aesthetic, truly moving, that is not also symbolic and explains, in the perspective of past artistic directions, what Puvis de Chavannes' symbolism was based on. Symbolism, which was discredited a short time ago by some poor artists, has, according to M. Denis's understanding of it, nothing to do with allegory, nor with the whole system of hieroglyphic imagery used in catacomb art.

Symbolism in the visual arts is the art of expressing feelings and thoughts not through a more or less idealistic representation of any objects or subjects, but through technical means of representation, imagery. In this type of art, form itself (shapes, colours, solids) becomes a direct means of expression, thanks to the simple and natural interdependence that exists between our sensory impressions and our emotional states, between the visible, material world and the invisible, mental world.

After all: "Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent...". There is no definite canon of Christian art, and symbolism, expressed in shape and colour, allows the use of the experience of all ages and all directions. "I only exclude that which is not art and that which is not expression". - confesses Maurice Denis, while adding: "I curse academism because this direction sacrifices emotion to convention and artificiality, because it is theatrical and soulless, - but I will not be unfair to the 17th century, nor to works of Baroque art that express a deep, strong and passionate inner life, similar to the inner life of the great Spanish mystics.

In the same way that I would not have the right to banish St Francis de Sales or Bossuet from Catholic literature, nor would I be able to condemn the admiration of St Teresa in ecstasy by Bernini, or the magnificent chapel of the palace of Versailles. I curse Jansenism because it is the death of art, coldness and boredom.". All this digression is by no means an involuntary digression, but a necessary realisation of the principles and criteria without which it is impossible to take an appropriate and rational stance towards Sichulski's religious compositions. The stained-glass windows, frescos and mosaics with religious themes designed by our artist are intentions on a monumental scale; they are the product of an unusual artistic effort, especially in our circumstances, and are characterised by a sincere longing for the Polish style and for his own, separate religious expression.

There is not much left of the former "unbridledness" in these compositions, as the artist deliberately takes up more and more different issues, clearly reckoning with the demands of a strictly tied form. Sometimes, here and there, an artistically unjustified blotch breaks out of a systematically and planar plane, sometimes a line, itself too nervous and vivid, introduces anxiety into the composition. There is also sometimes a lack of strict stylistic consistency, when certain fragments are treated e.g. naturalistically, while others are clearly formist, so that the convexity of the shapes, the painterliness of the texture is somewhat at odds with the whole arrangement of lines, carefully arranged on the plane according to the principles of the composition of flat ornament.

Sichulski's drawing - always strong, vivid and vigorous in expression - often brings various surprises, is sometimes capricious and unpredictable. What, then, shall we call it bad or wrong? "Il n'y a pas de dessin exact ou inexact, il n'y a que du dessin beau ou laid", Ingres claimed. Sichulski's line is his excellent means of expression, which he always uses reliably, in this or that way, depending on the stylistic premise and character of the composition.

A group exhibition of Sichulski's works in Warsaw was an unusual, quite exceptional event in the artistic life of the capital city. Not because it was a revelation of unqualified masterpieces themselves, but mainly because it presented the abundant creative output of a great talent, an artist of indefatigable enthusiasm, an unbelievable scale of endeavour and admirable diligence.

And one more thing! This exhibition awakened the artistic conscience, because it evoked a longing for Polish art, monumental, with its own distinctive expression.