Władysław Kozicki's article 'Józef Mehoffer', published in the periodical 'Sztuki Piękne', 1926/1927, no. 10-11, pp. 364-411, presents Mehoffer's artistic achievements and his approach to art, comparing them with the achievements of other Polish artists, including Wyspiański. The artist's most important realisations in Poland and abroad are presented, including the completed stained glass windows in the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Freiburg (1895-1936) and the mosaic in the dome and pendentives of the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv (1912-1913). The above realisations are described in detail and the article itself is richly illustrated with reproductions of his works.

A modernised reading of the text

Józef Mehoffer.

Masaccia's LIFE begins with Vasari's general remark that 'nature, when it gives birth to a man in a certain field who is very eminent', usually does not create him alone but adds others to him, so that 'they may support each other by means of competition' and thus excite posterity in their work and in their pursuit of fame.With these naïve words, the old Arethenian spoke the real truth, ascertained by the course of the history of art, that geniuses and great talents never appear alone, like towering towers built in the desert, but grow together with others from the common ground, in which the fertile forces of a general intensification of artistic life in a certain country and in a certain epoch have gushed forth.

Apart from the rule of survival and extinction of certain trends in art and the emergence of new ones in extreme opposition to the previous ones, this is one of the few regularities in the history of hoffer's art which knows neither accents of tragedy nor ecstatic outbursts of happiness, which is far from any exal= tation and overgrown emotional subjectivism. This artist takes the world as it is. He considers it neither the worst nor the best, but something necessary from which to squeeze the greatest possible amount of satisfaction and beauty. Yes, beauty.

For it is also in this that Mehoffer comes close to the Renaissance ideal of art, in that it is not characterisation, not interior depth, not psychological expression, but beauty that is his artistic goal. Spiritually, he belongs to the same family as Ghirlandajo, Raphael, Poussin, Ingres.... The family of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rodin, Wyspianski, the tribe of mystics, metaphysicians and visionaries is not his. Of course, it would be superfluous to add that Mehoffer's beauty has nothing in common, from a formal point of view, with Renaissance or - as Wölf" flin calls it - Classical beauty, or with any other beauty at all.

His art is truly great precisely because it creates a world completely closed in on itself, separate and unlike any other. The beauty which emanates from his stained-glass windows with a fascinating, luminous and juicy range of colours and brilliant arabesques of decorative lines is a peculiar, exclusively Mehofferesque beauty. Mehoffer's concept of death is extremely characteristic of his artistic and life credo. In his conception, death is not the demon which in Wyspiański's work casts a gloomy and tragic shadow over all human feelings, thoughts and deeds, but a necessary element in the evolutionary process of life, an indispensable condition for its continuance, an unavoidable premise for the birth of new forms of existence.

The certainty of death must not paralyse the artist in his actions, must not obscure the clear horizons of his spiritual vision with the darkness of suffering. His task is to create works of art whose immortality takes away from death - in the artist's sense - its terror, renders it powerless and responds to the terrible clang of its scythe with the joyful smile of indestructible life. This is how Mehoffer tells this thesis in his beautiful stained-glass composition Vita somnium brève (made in 1901 for the Tuch and Ekielski, later S. G. Żeleński, stained-glass workshop), which I saw in his flat as apparently particularly pleasing to the artist.

On the mars lies the naked corpse of a young, pretty girl. Her body is partly covered by a profusion of flowers, a mantle of her magnificent light blonde hair and a black airy cuirass. At her feet are wreaths and two candles in candlesticks. The horror of death is further intensified by a hideous skeleton, whose head, supported on the tibia of an arm, is brought closer to the deceased's lovely head and stares at it with its gaping eyes. The gloomy impression of this macabre scene, however, is completely dispelled by the exuberant joie de vivre we see at the top. Perched on the background of the deep green landscape are three attired ladies, sunk in animated and cheerful conversation. They are the personifications of Sculpture, Poetry and Painting.

Mehoffer, overturning the previous tradition which established a canon of naked Greek statues for this kind of allegorical representation, dressed the three women in exquisite contemporary dresses, as if he wanted to emphasise that he meant living art and not marbled relics. The first of these ladies, a grey-haired woman with a small djade on top of her head, with a slim, sensible, extremely lively face, dressed in a black gown with dark green tones - one of those Mehofferian blacks, which William Rit- ter rightly admires, enhancing their colouristic qualities - she holds a statuette in her left hand and places the other on the hand of her neighbour, Poetry, a haughty and beauty-conscious brunette with a serious, Romanesque crown on her head.

Her dress, shimmering with light yellows and pinks, reflects with a remarkably successful colour contrast from the light = green outfit of her companion, a coquettish and inquisitive-looking blonde, who holds a palette and brushes in her hand and sports a fantastic black hat on her head. The graffles wrapping the figure of 'Sculpture' and the coat of yellow and light brown flowing off the shoulders of 'Painting' enclose the group into a whole compact and full of freedom. Behind her stands the Art Genius, a young man with golden, russet, flame-coloured hair, with enormous wings which, as always with Mehoffer, departing as far as possible from the template of bird's wings, are an ineffable fairy-tale poem of fantastic shapes and hot, strangely harmonised colours.

His gently melancholic face is in harmony with the inscription : Vita somnium ßreve, placed on a narrow yellow ribbon, which this beautiful symbol of inspiration holds in his outspread hands. But the emotional tone, mastering the entire composition, is the joyful indestructibility of life, which, finding its condensed expression in art, is more powerful than death. This is uttered not only by the allegorical-emotional factors of the composition, but also, and above all, by the colouring, whose orgjastic, dank, bright, healthy and lush vividness is the most splendid hymn to eternal life in serenity and sunshine. A similarly serene conception of death can also be found in Mehoffer's composed stained glass windows for the Opava cemetery chapel. Mehoffer represents the purest type of artist-artist.

His creative imagination is, to the highest possible degree, purified of all that we call literary elements in art. Much more so than even those naturalists who inscribed the fight against literature as a slogan on their banner. For they, while dealing with the human figure, went and had to go in the direction of expression, character, and thus gave what could find its completely congenial equivalent in literature, in a Zola, for example.

Mehoffer, on the other hand, as a purely decorative painter, suppresses and relegates to the background all psychic expression, that is, the field par exceífence literary, because he overshadows it with an intoxicating bounty of purely formal elements, an inexhaustible variety of decorative lines refined with Tuozian precision, moving like fire, flowing like water, arranged in the most fantastic arabesques and an exuberant, symphonic orchestration of juicy, shining, internally inflamed colours, which in the stained-glass windows play with the full range of a delicious collection of jewels: amethysts, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, turquoise, topaz and light greenish diamonds.

Musical rather than literary is the first impression made by the colourful magic of Mehoffer's stained glass. This music of lines and colours so captivates and dazzles the viewer that, at first, he or she is not at all aware of the iconographic content and does not even feel like looking for it. It is only after some time that the eye, amidst the tangled like ijanas thickets of lines and bursting with heat, kaleidoscopically accumulated, orgy-like lenses of colour, discovers the outlines of figures and entire large figural compositions whose unexpected, mysterious emergence creates an impression of sudden revelation. This is also one of the quite peculiar charms of these window slides. They emanate a source of imaginative poetry and great emotional power, the character of which, however, is not literary but rather visual. It is a poetry of decorative shapes and colours combined into decorative harmonies.

What is in art as a theme, iconography, or - as Mehoffer himself calls it - anecdote, is for him only a pretext allowing him to develop his exclusively painterly qualities and does not take up more space than is necessary to fulfil the religious purpose of his stained-glass windows and to prevent his art from being an art without object, as it is in the case of orthodox cubists and constructivists. The artistic content - to use Mehoffer's own term again - relegates the literary content to the shadows in his art.

Mehoffer sings whole incomparable poems, whose main charm, however, consists neither in narrative, epic effulgence, nor in psychological subtlety, nor in the lyricism of the od=feeling, or in the dramatic nature of the concept, in none at all of those elements which make up the familial atmosphere of the poetry of words and concepts, but in the inexhaustible richness of the painterly and decorative imagination, in that poetry of shapes and arabesque line ornaments in which the artist arranges the wings of his angels and the robes of his characters, in those luminous fountains of amethyst, dark blue, scarlet and black-green colours and many, many others, which always combine in his paintings in a well-thought-out colour composition of a strict, almost tectonic construction, in a way taking into account the weight of colours and the resulting laws of statics.

(Cf. the two stained glass designs for the Swietokrzyska Chapel on the Wawel Hill with the the=mat of the cross as a symbol of the Christian faith). This Mehoffer's visual line-art-colour poetry has - as William Ritter repeatedly emphatically states - an outstanding individual and at the same time national=racial physiognomy. Mehoffer, in his treatise full of deep reflections "Polish art in the past and today", considered individualism and the fullness of exuberant temperament to be the main national characteristics of our painting.

This is how he best defined himself, his individuality and his Polish temperament, expressed with such vitality in the richness and entanglement of his decorative lines and in the orgy of his colour harmonies, in which the wild rhythm of obereks and mazurkas, in which the colourful impetus of Polish folk ornamentation found artistic expression. By consciously subordinating the iconographic content to the artistic content which is incomparably more important to him, i.e. in this case the formal decorative values, Mehoffer feels perfectly at home in the world of allegories and symbols which he willingly uses as themes not only in church art, but also when he creates compositions not commissioned by anyone at all.

This is understandable and logical, since such representations, without forcing him to focus his efforts on mental expression, allow him to devote himself almost exclusively to the problem of decorativeness. At the same time Mehoffer has a perfect knowledge of Christian symbolism, he is no less familiar than some Traini or other Dominican artist with the allegorical didactics of the Catholic Church, the hagiography and iconography of the saints, whom he is supposed to depict, studies with the rigour of a scientist and moves in this field with such certainty and freedom that sometimes, departing from traditional convention, he introduces bold innovations, but always faithfully in the spirit of religion. (A new conception of the Holy Trinity in the mosaic of the Lions' Armenian Cathedral, the symbol of the Eucharist and the double representation of the same saints, the living and those who died a martyr's death - in the stained glass windows of Freiburg.

For this reason, people who primarily look for content in works of art often accuse Mehoffer's art of being cold, cerebral, intellectual, scholarly, almost scholastic. The accusation is quite wrong, because first of all the symbolically and allegorically complicated content is conditioned by the ecclesiastical and decorative purpose of the stained glass, and secondly, all their great emotional power lies not in the iconographic but in the artistic content, in the arabesques of lines and in the symphony of colours. Mehoffer's stained-glass windows have another, primary advantage, namely that they display a superbly pure stained-glass style, conditioned by the special technique of these works of art.

Stained glass flourished in the Gothic period and was the proper painting of that era. At that time, neither large glass panes nor technically flawless glass could be produced. For this reason, small pieces of glass of various colours, uneven thickness, rough surface and with empty holes containing air inside were used. These glass plates were cemented together with lead. From these elements, from the shape of the glass plates cut appropriately, from their colours, from the sparkle of the light passing through the uneven and rough glass, and finally from the ornamental course of the lead stripes, a unique character and charm of stained glass was born, which does not allow for the stained glass painting practised in the past, in the times of the decline of stained glass art, and even later, after its revival in the 20th century. The 20th century, painting on glass, limiting it to fine details of faces and hands, but requires the arrangement of transparent glass mosaics, making artistic use of the decorative values of lead frames.

In spite of the fundamental stylistic diversity of Mehoffer's and Wyspiański's stained glass works, however, they share a certain common feature. In both artists, human figures - contrary to the Gothic tradition - are drowned in a sea of flowers. Wyspiański's flowers, although stylised, do not lose their botanical morphological features, they do not cease to be irises, sunflowers, phloxes or roses. For decorative reasons, Mehoffer's flowers have to be stylised to such an extent that they lose their species characteristics and become flowers in abstracto, which brings them close to the similarly treated floral ornament in Gothic stained glass. . Wall polychromy - this is the second area, besides stained glass, in which Mehoffer's great talent was realised.

Unfortunately, he did not find a second Freiburg outside his homeland in this field, which would have allowed him to express himself fully. He had to confine himself to his homeland, where, on the one hand, the notorious poverty of our society, on the other, the ignorance and provincialism of our church administrators and, on top of that, an excessive to the point of morbid reverence for old walls, too often stood in the way of the realisation of his impressive projects. The result is that only one small interior has a complete Mehoffer de= coronation: it is the Szafraniec Chapel on the Wawel Hill, "a pearl of Polish polychromy".

The walls there remained plain, only the vault received a polychromy which is sensational and at the same time revolutionary in the history of Polish ornamentation. The artist broke away from templates, from any Romanesque, Gothic or Baroque styling, and freely introduced his own original motifs, inspired by the spirit of new art and new views on the essence of decorative art. With his work, Mehoffer proved that he understood it deeply, that he saw the mistake of the Renaissance, which treated wall decoration in the same way as a huge easel canvas. Certainly in the history of painting there is nothing more brilliant and profound than Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling.

But from the point of view of the requirements of modern decorative art, this gi= gantic painting completely fails in its task, for the simple reason that it can never be encompassed by a single glance, and when viewed in detail with mirrors and binoculars, only fragments are seen. It is only in the reproductions, observed closely, that all the spiritual grandeur of Buonarroti's masterpiece is present. But this is not the spatial art that wall polychromy should be in the first place. On the other hand, Mehoffer's polychrome in the dome of the Chapel of the Saffrons, made using the casein technique, fully meets the requirements of this art, abandoning the emotional mood, the immediacy and the power of the idea, and relying entirely on the optical possibilities of the viewer, whom it conquers solely by its purely decorative and imaginative qualities, by the very operation of a perfectly thought-out and sensitive set of colours and ornamentally framed shapes and lines.

This work was painted in 1906 and, keeping the whole four-field vault in a splendid rust tone, the artist covered it with a superbly constructed shell, on which he cast a huge, impressive ring of armed knightly angelic armlets, using in their positions the motif of repetition, extremely positive in its decorative effect. The artist painted the heads of these angels with his own hands. Mehoffer had the opportunity to decorate only one interior of Wawel Cathedral. The decoration of the Cathedral Treasury, begun in igoi and designed to be even richer and more splendid, was interrupted by the regrettable intervention of Count Karol Lanckoroński. Karol Lanckoroński, who in his famous letter protested against the completion of the paintings, on the basis of the world's most false assumption that the dignity of the architecture of the cathedral and the treasury would be severely compromised if they were decorated with polychrome which, with its splendour and the talent of its maker, would be primarily imposing on the eyes of the viewer.

Mehoffer subjected this attitude, stemming from a misunderstood love of art and summarised in the principle of not admitting true artists to the monuments of old architecture, and instead proteguing mediocrities devoid of any skills, to a calm, but devastating criticism with the infallibility of his arguments in an excellent brochure entitled "Notes on Art". But aesthetic superstition prevailed, the restoration committee headed by Cardinal Puzyna broke the agreement, and Poland was deprived of a work of art that would have given new splendour to the ancient Wawel sanctuary. In its present, unfinished state, the polychrome of the treasury is only a kind of ornamental frame for the great figural composition. Three large white fields have remained there, the largest of which, 9 m wide, was to house the decorative painting: Polish Knights singing the song 'Bogarodzica' before battle.

But even this, which the artist managed to produce, gives the most glorious testimony to the magnificence of his painterly decorative vision and the inexhaustible wealth of his imagination. The blue tone of the beautiful Gothic vault serves as a perfect background for the golden-black ribs, which have been given a rich ornamentation with Jagiellonian crown motifs at the base. At the bottom is a frieze of stylised flowers shimmering with celadon, garnet and gold. The artist painted with his own hands, in oil, the busts of juvenile angels on the vault, boys and girls, whose faces, while generally idealised, are always highly individualised, with nimbuses and wings, holding star rays in their hands, and further on, figures of young and old genii in so-called baskets, full of suggestive expression of suffering. The figures of the Archangel of Peace and the Archangel of War, prepared, like the four groups of genii drawn in charcoal, with separate cardboards.

In these archangels Mehoffer's artistry reached a peak, which he also reached at times later, but which he never surpassed. The first one, dressed in a peasant's white shirt and girded with a wide sash embroidered with flowers, wearing shoes with soft, lined uppers, with a girlishly subtle and sweet face, hands the disputing people a willow branch as a symbol of peace. The other one, in sandals worn on bare feet, in a multicoloured floral-patterned kaftan, fastened with a Podhale gasdowski belt, with a buffalo horn at his side, with a flaming sword in his right hand, steps forward briskly, but his beautiful youthful face shows an expression of anguish and years of compulsion, emphasised by a meaningful movement of his left hand, which is pressed to his forehead with the back of his hand. In the background, the heads of the two archangels have large golden, shimmering nimbus shields, and at their shoulders grow enormous wings, as magnificent as only Mehoffer can make them.

The unfortunate action of Count Lanckoroński had the further disastrous result for Polish art that the polychromy of the Płock cathedral, designed by the artist in 1901, which was exceptionally valuable, also came to nothing. E. Niewiadomski writes the following about this sad affair: "The history of the polychromy projects in the ancient cathedral in Płock is a scandal crying out to God for vengeance. Mehoffer's beautiful design, which could have turned it into a marvellous monument dear to every Polish heart, has been wasted due to the fact that in Poland people without artistic culture are appointed to positions of responsibility, who only accept banal and flat art to the measure of their own souls.

This is why the polychrome of this cathedral was entrusted to an unknown painter who was protégé of the Plock Inquisitors, who disgraced it with a painting of unspeakable banality, ineptitude and lack of style.The only detail of this polychronia which has become available to the public is a huge, four-metre angel from the vault, extremely subtle and refined in its drawing and expression of prayer, and powerful in its colouring, maintained in various shades of red, overlaid with gold and emphasised with sapphire streaks. A carton with this angel was made by the artist in 1903, and popularised by postcards published by J. Czernecki's bookshop in Wieliczka. The Armenian Cathedral in Lviv was also to be decorated in a grand style. Sketches of the polychrome were prepared by Mehoffer in 1907.

Unfortunately, here too the whole thing ended only with the mosaic in the dome and its pendentives. Its main motif is the Holy Trinity, executed according to the artist's huge canvas <4 m. in diameter) from 19)2. It is a variant of a composition from 1900, painted in the shape of a roundabout using the fresco technique on a wall. The artist, who was generally interested in various types of painting techniques, devoted himself at this time to a thorough study of wall painting. The motif of the angels from the treasury, executed on the wall with glue, also comes from this period. The concept of the Holy Trinity is marked by a bold and happy iconographic innovation. God the Father, shown in bust, with flowing grey hair, wearing a cloak studded with stars, holds the body of the tormented Christ on his chest, supported by angels.

A golden triangle shines in the background of his head. A huge dove of the Holy Spirit perches on his right shoulder. The highly imaginative composition forms a compact grouping, uniformly maintained in a mood of cosmic sadness.Many of Mehoffer's other large-scale decorative ideas did not wait to be executed. These include: 1) Sketches cfo a frieze on the outer walls of the Society of Friends of the Fine Arts in Cracow from the year igoo, with themes: Wawel, guarding the altar of the fatherland, Nature and Art, and two motifs of Pegasus with the Muses. "Nature and Art" was later developed by the artist as a separate decorative carton, depicting, on the left, a beautiful group of a magnificent female genii, leading a young winged boy of Art, and on the right, a less happy in conception personification of Nature in the form of a girl floating in the wind with her braids and skirt flapping in the wind, and with a bunch of sunflowers in her hand. 2).

Competition design for the poíicfironija of St Sophia's Chapel in Waweíia from 1900/1901, consisting of four paintings: the Queen in Majesty, the Queen taking the oath of purification, the Queen as the founder of the chapel and the King bidding farewell to his wife before leaving on a war expedition. 3) Sketches for the decoration of the frieze of the Vienna Parliament from 1907, based on motifs of naked genii, Roman Sphinx knights and various allegorical figures, maintained in a calm, almost classical, yet thoroughly modern style. The sketches from 1900 are the background for the decoration of the whole of Sobieski's chapel on the Kaklenkeig, consisting of the mass on the Kahlenberg with John III as altar boy (the artist worked on this subject separately the following year in a huge 6-metre-high canvas), the painting above the altar: "Innocent X in front of a symbolic tree", the painting above the entrance "Arch. Michael hovering over the battlefield" and the coats of arms of the knights who took part in the expedition on the wall above the window, - of the entire series of decorative ideas for Kahlenberg, only the design for the iron grille was realised.

Sketches for the decoration of the N. Panny Marja church in the Old Town in Warsaw. Mehoffer had the opportunity to decorate only two interiors entirely according to his idea, one only existing temporarily, the other permanently. Namely, the exhibition hall of the Twa "Sztuka" in the Munich Glaspalst in 1905 had a complete decoration of Mehoffer's idea, consisting of embroidery on the vehun, covering the upper light, the chairs, the shuttering of the portal and the so= praporta "Pegasus and Muses".

In 1906 the artist designed the decoration and complete furnishing of the meeting hall of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Krakow, namely the polychrome ceiling and walls, made using the casein technique, the ceiling beams, the panelling of the gallery and walls, the presidential tribune, the chairs and lectern, the forged metal device for electric light, the cast bronzes on the panelling, and finally the large decorative painting on canvas "The Taming of the Shadows".

This painting, as a whole, is one of the most beautiful creations of Mehoffer's artistic imagination. The centre of the painting is occupied by a superbly modelled nude of a completely naked young man who, in a baroque unleashing of his powerful body, submits the elements to his will. With his left hand he grasps the arm of the beautiful Water, whose huge hair flows downwards in exquisite twists, indeed like water. With his right hand he simultaneously clutches the robes of Air and Fire, two strangely winged terrified women, of whom only Air, too heavy and not noble enough in form and expression, slightly disturbs the harmony of the composition. A sketch of the decoration of the "Fairies" plafond for the palace in Okocim (<1889), maintained in rococo, Tiepolsque forms, completes this exhaustive list of the artist's decorative works.

Mehoffer's diligence and productivity is worthy of great admiration. His stained-glass windows and po= lichromes, executed or merely designed, would be enough to fill the long life of many an artist. With him, however, this is only part of his artistic output. Apart from these, there is a long series of easel paintings, portraits, landscapes and compositions numbering in the hundreds. The size of this study does not allow for a detailed analysis and aesthetic evaluation of these works. This would require a thick monograph.

Therefore, I will limit myself to a completely general characterisation. The most striking feature of Mehoffer's easel paintings is that the decorative talent par ex= ceffence of their creator also shines through clearly here. The more freely this decorative sense can express itself, the higher the artistic value of the painting. Where decorative motives are omitted, we get works of a very experienced and completely mastered naturalist, very precise in drawing, impeccable in tone, strong in characterisation, but devoid of individual, especially Mehofferian beauty.

Ultimately, they could also have come out from under the pencil of another talented artist, objectively referring to nature. This category includes the well-known "Jewish girl", the head of a country woman against a background of greenery, the portrait of a young girl in a bronze dress, the "War widow" and so on. The whole of Mehoffer, however, appears only when he can enliven and diversify reality by introducing decorative motifs. They find their outlet either in a more or less fantastic and ornamental conception of the model, or in a proper arrangement of the background and choice of accessories, or in a proper solution of the problem of colour, or finally - this is the most frequent case - in the combination of all these factors.

Of course, in portraiture, decorative elements do not eliminate or suppress such fundamental issues of this art as the question of the silhouette, likeness, expression, the fullness of life pulsating in the face and the whole figure. On the contrary, the combination of these two spheres creates works of first-rate value. This was already the case in the sculptor's potrecic of 189}, and especially in the famous "Singer", so enthusiastically described by William Ritter, vibrating from head to toe with a sense of triumph, which finds resonance in the admiration of men looking in from behind the curtain of the painting "Christ at Emmaus" of 1896, where Christ, seated with his disciples at a table on a terrace, is depicted against a background of a stunning profusion of flowers, combining with the other colourful details of the painting to form a sumptuous decorative mosaic.

A kind of pendant to this painting is formed by 'Christ in the Garden', painted in the same year together with Stanislavsky. In a more synthetic colouring is the "Muse" from 1895, a female figure dressed in white, flowing robes, with a lute in her hand, against a landscape illuminated by the setting sun. Among Mehoffer's most beautiful and well-known compositions is his 'Strange Garden', all born of the spirit of decorative art (1902/3). It is yet another tribute by the artist to his wife, with whom - as his work proves - he is linked by a particularly cordial and intimate relationship, based on a deeper spiritual coexistence.

Her sapphire costume is reflected in a dark spot against the bright green of the autumn sun-drenched garden, through which a garland of multicoloured flowers winds like a giant snake. A naked boy with a blond head in the foreground shakes the stems of blooming mallows as if they were Dionysian tulips. His colourful counterbalance is created in the background by the figure of a nanny in a folk costume. Above all this, a giant golden dragonfly hovers as a symbol of wonder, family happiness, the charm of nature and at the same time the decorative tendencies of the artist. Flowers and a separate, purely visual, poetry make up the charm of the strange painting from 1907, owned by the Oesterreicfiiscfie Galerie tv Vienna and called "The Dreaming Beauty".

On a chair, as if on a throne, sits a young girl in a black and white dress, covered with a greyish richly ornamented cloak. A wreath of field flowers adorned her fair hair. On her subtle face a deep emotional reflection casts a dream so intense as to be painful. The place of the courtiers of this queen of the fields is replaced by little country boys, who sit in a row beside her, holding in their hands, like sceptres, the stems of blossoming flowers. The delightful sweetness or naivety painted in their faces merges with the figure of their fanciful ruler into a fascinating mood of wondrous youth and youthful languour. Landscapes occupy a considerable place in Mehoffer's work.

They can be arranged chronologically and topographically into certain groups.' First of all, there is a collection of landscapes from Niepołomice from 1894, in which Mehoffer - as he jokingly expressed himself - was the Jan Baptist of Stanisławski, paving the way for the modern impressionist landscape, which originated in Paris. The large landscape composition 'Sunset over the Vistula' also dates from this time. A large number of landscapes were created in the village of Jankówka, which was the artist's property and residence for ten years (1907 - 1917).

Finally, 1925 saw a series of Roman landscapes and 1926 a series of landscapes from Kamienna on the Nida River. In Mehoffer's landscapes, the decorative artist also comes to the aid of the landscape painter and renders him a capital service, either by gathering flowers, blossoming trees and greenery of various tones into a patterned ornament, like an eastern loincloth, or by enlivening the landscape with decorative human or animal staffage. Mehoffer's larger landscapes impress with their com= position, expressed in the carefully considered balance of the painted masses and in the aesthetically fertile colour construction of the painting.

These qualities are possessed by, among others, "Storm in Spring", impressionistic in its variously coloured brightness, the classically cheerful "Golden Age" (1923) and the kia' sically serious "Roman Epic" (1925). And this is not the end of the song about the productivity of Mehoffer's artistry. His talent possesses a voracious curiosity which does not want to leave any area of painting and decoration fallow. He is therefore interested in theatrical decoration. Rostworowski's "Judas" (1912) was played in Krakow in decorations made according to his projects, projects of decorations for "Caligula" by the same author (1917) and drawings for the staging of his "Terrible Children" <192 > did not live to be realised.

In 1909 Mehoffer designed a mahogany casket with bronze and a diploma of honour for Dr K. Gałecki, and in 1911 Mehoffer made his design of the Wachtl family tomb in granite and bronze at the Jewish cemetery in Kraków. The artist has also produced a number of graphic ornamental works, such as a ticket and a poster for the Matejko lottery, a poster for the Grunwald exhibition in Lviv, an "Aerolot" poster, two designs for "Aerolot" postage stamps, a poster for the "Sztuka" exhibition: Modern Muse, Dancing with Birds of Paradise, a design for a rally ticket of the Bank of Poland, shares of the Commercial Bank, the Iron Ore, Locomotives, and so on. Full of painterly fantasy and decorative invention are the jegorys of the covers, namely for the individual notebooks of "Chimera", for Altenberg's "Polish Art", and further for the books: "Terrible Children" by Rostworowski, "The Miracle of the Vistula" by Ligocki, "Spring" by Kaden-Bandrowski, "In the Garden of Roses" by Ligocki, "Old Christian Art" by Fr. Kruszyński - as well as, nevertheless, drawings of cafeiiciarium and etc. in the catalogue of the printing exhibition in Kraków, and printing decorations of Fr. Bandurski's book about Jadwiga. Finally, Mehoffer successfully tried his hand at etching