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Tradition / Reception / Reception of Chopin / In painting

Chopin in Polish Painting
from Romanticism to Modernism
*


Likenesses of Chopin painted by Polish artists in the XIX and beginning of the XX century create a kind of iconographic complex, spanning two eras: romanticism and modernism. The then corpus, comprising a kind of gallery of paintings, sketches and drawings subject to various metamorphoses, points to just this, how the "figure" of a master, a musical genius, at the same time compatriot, national artist, was perceived in the no less than one-hundred year period. In Chopin's iconography, one can track numerous "variations on the subject" of Chopin's figure and his works, revealing the richness of motifs, meanings, contents, formal solutions; their artistic level depended on the talent of particular artists, but also on the tastes of the era accepted at that time.

During Chopin's life, his entire body, bust and head were drawn and painted, fixing his features, outline and personal characteristics, beginning with his youth and extending to his last months, by which time he was seriously ill1. After the composer's death, the faithful memory of him, the rapture and fascination in his music, caused trends of imaginary and visual depiction to strengthen in Polish art, he had become a legendary and myth creating figure over time for many artists (as well as the public at large). Some romanticists (e.g. Teofil Kwiatkowski), as well as modernists, created allegoric and symbolic compositions, seeing in the musician, the personification of a human genius. For this reason, Chopin's image was sometimes perceived as an "iconic sign" of a talent inspired gift, which captured the collective imagination, inspired areas of high art, but also pervaded to the zone now called mass culture (in the form of various non-artistic objects, e.g. kitschy postcards). At the turn of the XIX and XX cent. strange phenomena showed up in art devoted to Chopin, involving the transfer of his spiritual stigma to the depiction of other persons and their experiences, as well as to things, items and various symbolic accessories (like keyboard and string instruments, bells, apparitions, spectra, spirits) in addition to scenes being metaphors of human fate and to the setting of extraordinary landscapes. This type of phantasmagoria dominant in the neo-romantic art was largely associated with gleams of Chopin's music, which influenced the shape and idea-based conveyance of modernist paintings.

The early likenesses of Chopin were works by female amateur artists and by the painter Ambroży Mieroszewski, a friend of Fryderyk's family. In the fall of 1829, Antoni Henryk Radziwiłł invited the young (by then esteemed) composer to his rural residence in Antonin, where Chopin spent a week at the turn of October and November, feeling "like in paradise" there. He soon described this stay in a letter to Tytus Woyciechowski: "There were two Eves there, young duchesses, daughters of the count, Wanda and Eliza, extremely polite, good in music, sensitive beings". He then wrote to the count:

alla polacca with a cello [Polonaise C-major. op. 3]. There's nothing other than trinkets for the salon, for the ladies; I wanted, you see for duchess Wanda to learn. - This entire time I kind of gave her lessons. Young, seventeen - nice and upon my word, so much that it was nice to arrange her fingers [...]. I couldn't refuse sending them my Polonaise in F-minor [op. 71, no. 3], which duchess Eliza took up, so send it to me by post as soon as possible, because I don't want to be read as impolite. [...] You can imagine the character of the duchess, when I had to play her this Polonaise every day, and she didn't like anything as much as the Trio in A sharp major 2.

During this time Eliza drew a left profile bust in pencil in her friendship book (so-called Antoniński album, page 32, collections of the Fryderyk Chopin Society in Warsaw), affixed with text "Frederic Chopin. 4 Novembre/1829" - later copied by Pelagia Radziwiłł de domo Sapieha. In this same album, on page 13, there is another drawing by Eliza showing Chopin playing the piano, accompanied by the note: "Frederic Chopin. 1826". This date warrants some introspection. Currently, nothing is known about whether Chopin was a guest in Antonin prior to this, in 1826. Conceivably, this note was later written by mistake, from memory, or maybe Eliza Radziwiłł had been seeing Chopin before 1829 in other circumstances. Fryderyk wrote about these sketches in this same letter to Woyciechowski: "You wanted my portrait - if I could steal one from duchess Eliza, I'd send it to you, she made two drawings of me in this friendship book and people say it's a good rendition of myself. - Miroszewski has no time now". Both Eliza's amateur drawings express unassuming charm and authenticity of the moment. Additionally, they are marked by care and feeling of honest liking. Their author, seven years older than Chopin, faithfully conveyed in a simple, silhouette view, the characteristic profile and thin youthful figure, respected and admired by everyone in duke Radziwiłł's family (he himself was bestowed with musical abilities - among others he wrote songs and composed music to Goethe's Faust).3

An even more personal portrait of Chopin was painted by the musically and artistically talented, seventeen year-old Maria Wodzińska. Fryderyk had been close with her family for a long time, going back to his Warsaw days. In the mid-1830s he used to see them in Dresden and Marienbad; at which time there was a thread of liking between the two. This affection was crowned with secret engagement: on September 9, 1836 in Dresden, Chopin proposed to Maria Wodzińska "at dusk" and was accepted, provided he remain discrete and take care of his health "for the time of the trial", though Marynia's parents were afraid of his uncertain health condition. Due to their stipulations, this informal promise did not augur hope for a lasting relationship, and fell apart shortly thereafter. A pile of Maria's letters remained after this, on which the disappointed Chopin wrote "My poor", and his water color portrait - credible proof of the girl's fascination in her "carissimo maestro" (then repeated in lithography with a dedication for Fryderyk's parents). It is not known when this romantic "picture" was made - during the vacations spent together in Marienbad between July 28 and August 24, 1836, or shortly thereafter in Dresden on the occasion of their engagement. Maria created a casual effigy of Chopin sitting in a chair with his arms crossed that was full of "sweetness and gentleness" . With great reverence she recreated his features and the trace of his delicate smile on his mouth and in his eyes, who was looking at the onlooker intently and friendly. She harmoniously played out the color tonations of the water color, maintained in a range of black browns of his attire, an ochre background, distinctive accents of whites on the front of his shirt and the reds on the chair covering (collection of the National Museum in Warsaw).4

Before we look at the oil paintings of Chopin, work performed in other techniques that Polish artists devoted to him through the middle of the XIX century should be remembered. Certainly in the 1840s, the then known battle painter, a student of Horacy Vernet, January Suchodolski, drew an expressive sketch of Chopin's figure playing the piano, wearing a tailcoat, with longish hair and hands raised high above the keyboard.5 Cyprian Norwid also commemorated Chopin in a drawing. It is known how much the poet venerated the composer, how much he wrote about him and his music. He built a poetic monument to Chopin in the lyric Fortepian Szopena [Chopin's Piano] and in Promethidion, recounted him in Czarne kwiaty [Black Flowers], in letters and paid tribute to him in his obituary. He maintained closer contacts with him only beginning in the spring of 1849, visiting him at Square d'Orléans, and then in the summer flat in the suburbs of Paris at rue Chaillot 74. At that time Chopin's condition was already very serious. Then (possibly in the second half of August or the beginning of September), "[I]n the shade of a deep bed with curtains, resting on pillows and wearing a scarf, he was very beautiful, like always, in the most ordinary commotions of life, having something finished, something monumentally drawn". On October 17 "Chopin died - I wasn't present at his very death, because too many satins and crowns surrounded the sufferer's bed, but a few days earlier I saw him and paid last tribute to him.6

Norwid drew Chopin twice. Once he depicted him as a youth sitting at a music stand with notes laid on the instrument, illuminated in the splendor of the star and crowned with a laurel wreath. The conventional, not too successful sketch, was surely to be - in the author's intention - an ideal effigy of the great artist and an allegory to his music (pen, date unknown, lost). In 1850 the poet drew a completely different scene in the album of duchess Marcelina Czartoryska, evoked "from the nature of reminiscence", in which he presented several persons from the then Paris community; there, in the symbolically drawn interior, Thomas Tellefsen plays on the piano, Wojciech Grzymala and Stanisław Szumlański stand adjacent, and on the right hand side, sits the tired, sick Chopin in casual household clothes, his face covered by his left hand, concentrating on the what his student is playing. This missing drawing was long known by the name Musical evening at Duchess Marcelina Czartoryska, though Juliusz W. Gomulicki questioned its title and the subject, since the depiction of the suffering musician points more to his presence in his own home, surrounded by friends; Chopin would not permit a visit to the salon of the duchess in such poor condition and unkempt clothing. This work by Norwid was an artistic record of some specific event in which the poet participated. The sick composer no longer had the strength for intensive work, concerts, social contacts, though he still accepted friends, confirmed in part by the note in the diary of Eugène Delacroix: "Saturday, 14 April [1849]. -Evening with Chopin, he was tormented, breathless. After a while, my presence permitted him to get back to himself. He told me that boredom is the cruelest torture".7

Ambroży Mieroszewski painted the earliest oil painting of Chopin in September 1829 in Warsaw, who also did the likenesses of his parents, sister Ludwika and Izabela, as well as Wojciech Żywny. Fryderyk wrote about these paintings to Tytus Woyciechowski on October 3, 1829: "When you come next month, you'll see our entire family in paintings, even Żywny, who frequently mentions you, surprised me, he told me to have a portrait done of myself. Miroszesio was so accurate, that it's amazingly similar".8 All the images done by Mieroszewski are maintained in the traditional memory "portrait" convention. Chopin is presented as a serious youth, spiritually totally mature, but his family and teacher are equally serious, and admirable persons from the Warsaw intelligentsia community, well known artistic representatives of the capital's circles.

The next, only noted "Polish" portrait of Chopin was painted in 1835 in Paris by Józef Kurowski (November uprising activist who spent more than twelve years in Paris). No reproductions or copies of it remain, we only know of it from the letter of Józef Bem to Chopin on February 27, 1835:

Dearest Chopin! Yesterday your portrait was at duchess Czartoryska, and there were many people there. It was well liked. The duchess was the first in line for our Kurowski to start painting. Though your portrait first has to be framed before it is entrusted to others' hands, because even yesterday it was almost dropped, I'm sending it to you today; but I'm asking your permission when it's framed, because the duchess wants to show this at the manor house. Love and kisses J. Bem.9

Thirteen years later Antoni Kolbert (the brother of Oskar and Wilhelm) created an oil painting marked with the wording: "Portrait of Fryderyk Chopin, original painted from nature in Paris in 1848 by Antoni Kolberg". This artist came from a family that was very close to the Chopins. In 1832 he drew the interior of the salon in their Warsaw flat. He spent 1847-1848 in Paris, where he renewed his old friendship with Chopin. His painting was taken to be a work that excellently conveyed the physiognomy and personality of the musician. The composer Ignacy Krzyżanowski claimed that the "similarity of features and facial expression are exceptional" and this "portrait presents Chopin just like he saw him last in London in 1848. [...] When I look at this portrait - Mr. Krzyżanowski says - I could swear that I can see Chopin alive, there's so much truth and character in it".10 In this image, Kolberg casually treated the dress and hands of the model, giving his illness-distorted face an individual distinguishing feature - a moving expression of contemplation, his eyes fixed on his own interior, pointing to the depth of experience and as if a final belief in his music, like in his youth, when he didn't talk to others about his worries, but "to the piano". Kolberg's painting burned in Warsaw in 1944, a copy was made around 1900 by Kazimierz Mordasewicz (collections of the Fryderyk Chopin Society in Warsaw, this painter also authored several other portraits of Chopin).

During Chopin's life and soon after his death, many foreign artists painted portraits of him. Among those who drew and painted him, included Carl Hummel, Pierre-Roche Vigneron, Eugène Delacroix, Luigi Calamatta, Jakob Goetzenberger, Louis Gallait, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Charles-Henri Lehmann, Giuseppe Fagnani, Albert Graefle as well as an amateur drawing by Paulina Viardot-Garcia and George Sand. Chopin was admired, liked, loved not only for his musical brilliance, but also for features of his character, personality, charisma, fragility, delicateness and charm. In general the artists who painted him didn't flee from solemnity, pathos or strong exaltation of the outstanding artist. In comparison with this, what Chopin's daguerreotypes show us - an anonymou one from around 1846 and another by Louis Auguste Bisson from 1849, his features were of course "smoothed out", beautified and in a romantic manner, idealized. More official or representational images (e.g. by Louis Gallait) also showed up, but they maintained a certain air of gentleness, serenity or even laughter (like the portrait by Guiseppe Fragnani) and the "sentiment" characteristic of the era.

The paintings by Ary Scheffer were just like this, a known painter of upper society and friend of Poles, who painted an allegory of the fall of the November Uprising (Polonia knocked to the ground by Cossacks, 1831) and many portraits of personages from the Polish aristocratic community, including the family of Zygmunt Krasiński, the Potocki family, Branicki family and Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. Chopin came to Scheffer's workshop in 1847, which he wrote about to his family in a letter from March 28 - April 19 of that year: "I've sat down to this letter four times, April 16, and I don't know whether I'll finish it, because I have to go see Scheffer today and pose for my portrait and accept five lessons".11 The composer appreciated the commitment of his portrait painters, but he most liked the authentic, free likenesses grasped "on the fly" in his daily life, such as the unpretentious sketch by Winterhalter and two drawings by George Sand, in which the writer captured him at work, leaning over a manuscript, dressed in an ordinary shirt. On June 8, 1847 Fryderyk again reported to his family:

Yesterday I posed again for Scheffer, the portrait is progressing. - Winterhalter also did a small pencil drawing for my old friend Planat de la Faye (that I once wrote to you about). - Very similar. Surely you've heard of Winterhalter, good-natured and decent, and highly talented. Lehmann (who you should also know) did my small portrait for Leon - but nothing is as good as the likeness, what Ludwika has by Madame Sand.12

The Portrait of Chopin, carefully worked out by Scheffer, is characterized by great simplicity, harmony and charm. The painter immortalized Fryderyk in this portrait as a rather melancholic artist with sad eyes looking directing at the viewer, a sensitive intellectual, beautiful aristocrat of spirit. During the session at his workshop, the first oil image of the musician was done in a take to his knees sitting on a chair (the painting was the property of Izabela Barcińska, went missing in 1863 during a fire at the Zamoyski tenement house in Warsaw; known only from the daguerreotype). The artist painted a second canvas later in a version reduced to a bust (property of the Dordrechts Museum in Dordrechts). His student, the painter Stanisław Stattler (son of Wojciech Kornel) who died young, skillfully copied the original version of Scheffer's works (limited to the bust) at the request of duchess Marcelina Czartoryska, signing this copy: "d'après Ary Scheffer / Staś Stattler / pour le 9 Janvier / 1858" (property of the National Museum in Kraków, Czartoryski Branch).13

The known oil painting of Eugène'a Delacroix from 1838 depicts this entirely differently - a double portrait of Chopin and George Sand, preceded by a composed sketch and pencil study of the musician's bust, later barbarically slashed. Shown by the first, two-person sketch and woodcut of Alfred Robaut, done in 1873 before the barbaric cut of the canvas, the composer was depicted therein playing (improvising?) on the piano, with his girlfriend standing beside him on his left. Kept in the Louvre, the unfinished portrait of just Chopin appears as a personification of inspiration. The painter captures in him what is invisible and inexpressible (but devoid of signs of sham, pathos, ceremony, or signs of popularity or fame): the deep spirituality of the master and gleam of the music, which stigmatizes the painful face of Chopin and his eyes gleaming of light. Delacroix beautifully signed this work in the romantic trend, correspondance des arts, in which painting, poetry and music are integrated into their genetic union for the benefit of exalting the universum - ideal, the expression and depth of experience based on the metaphysical element.14 The energy radiating from this sketch portrait, "thrown" on the canvas in an outburst of emotion, testifies to the personal emotional "tonation" and the strong bond between the two artists. It can also be said pursuant to this, that Delacroix reached a creative transformation of "colors of sound" in his painting, filling them with musical harmony and coloring. It is known that the painter was surrounded by the cult of Mozart and Chopin and was enamored in their kunst. He knew Fryderyk well; frequently met with him and had never-ending conversations. Chopin appeared as an imbalanced "charming genius", a person of an excellent heart and and mind, the truest artist belonging to those rarely met people you can revere and admire, a chaplain of a living god, "since God himself descends to his divine hands by his music". After Fryderyk's death, Delacroix couldn't get over the loss of his "angelic friend", "who the heavens envied the earth", a Seraph "now inspiring rapture of the celestial spheres." 15

The 1838 portrait was not the only work by Delacroix associated with Chopin. Most likely between 1846 and 1847, the artist drew Chopin's bust as Dantes, with the head covered by a Florence hood and surrounded by laurel wreath (signed "Cher Chopin", property of the Musée du Louvre). During the forties he worked on the Plafond d'Homère at the Senate Library of the Luxemburg palace; he moved Chopin there under the figure of Dante, which Vergil presents to Homer, leading him to the circle of the Immortals. On April 1, 1847, Delacroix, Chopin and George Sand watched the the copula with this fresco all together.16

In addition to paintings of Polish painters, we also point out the works of foreign artists, since they came into the confines of our culture and functioned in the Polish collective consciousness. Over the decade, reproductions of Chopin's portraits reached Poles living at home and abroad, distributed in various graphic techniques and published in the press. Hence, for example, his image created from a oil portrait by Vigneron (printed on notes of the Rondo in C-minor, op. 1) was popularized in lithographic prints, sold for 10 zloty in 1834 in Warsaw, and then placed in weeklies "Przyjaciel Ludu" and "Muzeum Domowe" in 1836). The known portrait by Scheffer was copied many times, as well as in miniature, at the request of duchess Marcelina Czartoryska. It was also reproduced in drawings, lithographs and popularized in the photograph of Marcin Olszyński from 1862. The drawing by Winterhalter and copy of Goetzenberger's drawing ended up in the collection of Jagiellonian University. Chopin's portrait by Delacroix was reproduced in drawings starting in 1838, and later Leon Wyczółkowski made a beautiful lithography of it.

Among Polish artists, Teofil Kwiatkowski deserves the title "first portrait artist of Chopin". An outstanding representative of romanticism in Polish painting, who spent nearly his entire life abroad. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Warsaw under Antoni Brodowski and Antoni Blank. He fought in the November uprising, in 1832 he emigrated to France, receiving more education, inter alia, with Leon Cogniet. He created oil paintings of Provence and Bourgogne landscapes, saturated with a romantic air as well as many light, dreamlike sketches, drawings and water paintings of incomparable delicateness: nature scenes, genre scenes, costume, patriotic and allegorical, as well a portraits and compositions associated with Chopin.17

It is not known when Chopin and Kwiatkowski first met (maybe in the thirties?), only the year "1843" is inscribed by the artist on certain images of the musician confirm their intimacy, similarly to evidence of persons who knew Kwiatkowski, including Frederick Niecks, Wojciech Gerson and Eugène Delacroix, who talked about him as Chopin's friend.18 The painter discretely accompanied him in life, meet with him on musical evenings, was a frequent guest at his home and was with him to the end. He also kept several of Fryderyk's manuscripts, including an personal album autograph dating back to 1838 of the song Wiosna WN 52 to the words of Stefan Witwicki, with a dedication to "Beloved Teofil Kwiatkowski September 4, 1847. Paris F. Chopin".19

Kwiatkowski performed about one hundred likenesses of the composer in various views and circumstances. Most likely in 1843 he painted his oil portrait, formerly erroneously attributed to Luigi Rubio; the lithograph by Hermann Raunheim with an inscription changing the author of the original, undoubtedly points to the Polish artist as the author. Besides the painting by Delacroix, this, what could be said is the most private and authentic image of Chopin, deprived of all decorative effects and visual "enhancements", rivets attention to the beautifully shaped, gentle, calm, and at the same "eloquent" face of the musician and warm expression of feelings conveyed in this work that the painter nurtured for his model (collections of Alfred Cortot). Kwiatkowski drew and painted small, cozy portraits of Fryderyk in water color, he captured moments when Chopin was playing, immortalized the view of the saloon in his last flat on Place Vendôme 12. In 1843 he established - later this was repeated many times - a kind of allegorical image, which would disclose the particular personality characteristics of the "Ariel of the piano": spirituality, detachment from daily life, burying oneself in art. In this, Kwiatkowski created an "emblematic" figure of the romantic imagination - Chopin shown in a sitting position, with his hands supporting his head, barefoot, dressed in fanciful attire and "suspended" in undefined space, submerged in pensiveness like Mickiewicz "on Judah Hill" from the painting by Walenty Wańkowicz (the earliest water color from this cycle dated "1843 - Paris", around 1900 it was the property of Lucjan Wrotnowski in Warsaw).

In the late summer of 1849, Chopin's health got considerably worse, there was no longer any hope he would recover. At his request, Ludwika Jędrzejowiczowa came to Paris in August. Cared for by his sister, he spent the last weeks in the company of close friends and family. Soon the idea emerged for a painting known by the name Chopin during his last illness or Chopin's last moments. Kwiatkowski painted five versions of this composition: one water color (exhibited in the Paris salon in 1850) and four oil paintings, of which only one survived, the most expanded version, conceived as a collective portrait of participants to the drama (collections of the Fryderyk Chopin Society in Warsaw). Those standing at Chopin's bedside included his sister Ludwika (painted according to the daguerreotype taken this same year in Paris), the duchess Marcelina Czartoryska, father Aleksander Jełowicki, Wojciech Grzymała and standing behind him, Teofil Kwiatkowski. On October 17, 1849 at two am, the painter was present at Chopin's death. That same day at dawn, work began on his postmortem image, according to tradition, three water colors were painted within two days, deemed as prototypes of numerous later replicas. These after death portraits, painted under pressure of the emotional experience, credibly replicate the sharpened features of the deceased, the shape of his head and his hair scattered on the pillow. Over the next few years the painter frequently repeated this representation in various perspectives, mainly affixed with the composer's date of death and dedications for acquaintance and friends.20

Kwiatkowski is highly indebted to the Czartoryski family: to begin with duke Adam helped him obtain funds to live and study, and later he assumed the role of the painter's representative. The artist did portraits of his family and created dozens of commemorative water colors, frequently with patriotic overtones (especially referring to the Polish uprisings), thereby supporting the ideological program of the duke. In the years 1849-1860 he worked on a serious of presentations known as the Polonaise Chopina or Bal w Hôtel Lambert w Paryżu, combining the apothesis of the former, noble and knightly Poland with the then emerging Chopin legend and the contemporary life of Polish emigration.21 The merging of these threads caused this multi-figured composition (done in several versions) to become a XIX century "national allegory", a romantic message speaking of the spiritual strength of Poles fighting for independence, disinherited, doomed to life outside the homeland. Kwiatkowski closed the most expanded version of the painting in the confines of one specific event: a great costume manor ball of the Czartoryski family (one of many organized by duchess Anna Czartoryska de domo Sapieha), but moved to the interiors of a huge temple reminiscent of the fantastic architecture of theatrical decorations. A throng of selected figures from various times was brought into this symbolic space. On the right side of the picture, leaning over the keyboard and fixed on a musical score, Chopin plays a polonaise ; he is surrounded by several persons: duchess Marcelina Czartoryska with her son Marceli, Adam Mickiewicz, George Sand, a young lady and the author hidden in the background of the picture, as well as a small barefoot girl with long braids, Fryderyk's peasant muse.22 The left side of the composition is taken up by a group of ball hosts, the "king of emigration" duke Adam Czartoryski covered in a long coat, behind him stands Izabela Działyńska with her husband Jan (in arms), then Anna Czartoryska (dressed as Barbara Radziwiłłówna), the son of Duke and Duchess Władysław (in Polish attire) with his wife Maria of the Ampar family and Maria Czartoryska, de domo Grocholska, wife of Witold Czartoryski (in the dress with motives of the Lithuanian Pogoń emblem). A dancing procession of gentry in kontusz sash is moving around the center of the hall, figures evoking the past, led by Zawisza Czarny and fellow knights - the winged cavalry, frozen in a polonaise pas . It's not known if these are guests of the Czartoryski[s] in disguise, or ghostly figures of ladies, knights and heroes (this basic, water color version, dated 1859, is held in collections of the National Museum in Poznań). The then national spectacle, joining such different worlds, touches the truth of that time in its own manner, the life of these emigration communities, which cultivated traditional values. However, its true spiritual ether was the invisible breath of Chopin's music. At the same time this symbolic Bal at the Hôtel Lambert became an unintentional farewell to the era of romanticism, saturated with an atmosphere of melancholy, decline, departure. Its participants, stopped in the half-step in the painted frames, are frozen in a somnambulistic trance, like actors of an imaginary shadow theater. Half a century later Stanisław Wyspiański orders guests to dance Wesele [The Wedding] a similar dance of oblivion.

Over the years in the Chopin iconosphere, the balanced tone and decorum of romantic "portraits" underwent radical changes, overcome by the polarization of artistic attitudes of successive generations of artists, who, after the musician's death, came to trust the impulses that created his legend and particularly his own imagination. In the second half of the XIX century and at the beginning of the XX, academic painters, realists, neo-romantics, and symbolists, created illusory compositions evoking the memory of Chopin and his music, anchored in this, what is native, and that what is universal.23

In 1877 the famous painter Henryk Siemiradzki, enamored in antiquity, took up - rare in his creativity - the Polish subject illustrating Chopin's concert in the salon of the Radziwiłł[s]. With "academic realism", he conveyed the story of this event in a typical scenario of the aristocratic residence, where the young musician plays for the duke's family and his guests. Those gathered around the piano include: duke Antoni Radziwiłł, his daughter Eliza and Wanda (the "two Evas" adored by Fryderyk), further back, the duchess Luiza Radziwiłł, Aleksander von Humboldt (with his head resting on his hands) and the remaining guests. This representational picture was painted with great deftness of the brush, especially in conveying the details of the interior and attire, nevertheless offends the trite, conventional presentation, especially in the elaboration of Chopin's figure, stiff, awkwardly posed and perspectively shaken(in private hands).24

In turn, two works by Wojciech Gerson, based on anecdotic themes, paintings from 1894: Chopin zamyślony nad Utratą [Chopin lost in thought over the Utrata River] and Chopin w Żelazowej Woli wsłuchający się w śpiew wiejskiej dziewczyny [Chopin in Żelazowa Wola enraptured by the singing of a village girl] (lost); celebrations of the unveiling of his monument in Żelazowa Wola on October 14 of this year were the inspirations for these representations. Both works were reminiscent of the well known and often mentioned ties of the composer with the indigenous Polish folk creativity and fascination in native folklore experienced from the youngest years.25 The great visionary Witold Pruszkowski, apologist and restorer of the romantic literary and historiosophic ethos, devotee of archetypes present in folk beliefs, rituals, stories also alluded to these native elements. In 1888 he painted a painting appearing under various titles, including Wyjątek z nokturnu Chopina op. 37 no. 2 [Exception from Chopin's nocturnes] and the Diabeł zakochany w starej wierzbie [Devil in love with the old willow], lost, known only from the description: "The landscape full of fantastic charm sinks in the twilight, and in the center of the canvas - a dry willow, which the legendary devil is hugging, only barely marked by the misty, gray-blue outline of shapes".26

It was precisely Pruszkowski - perhaps the first - to connect the nocturne motif with the "cult" tree associated with traditional mental and emotional habits. In the world of symbols, the willow was assigned multiple meanings, expressing its positive and ominous properties alternatively: vital strengths, health, power, joy, wisdom, flexibility, perseverance, longing, sadness, death, grief, but also resurrection. At the same time it is a characteristic "figure" of the Polish melancholic landscape, a secret visual sign evoking various sentiments, moods and feelings, such as nostalgia, melancholy, incantation, magic, the insubordination of Rokita, the peasant devil of "temptation", the joy of the revival of spring and Easter. Much later, the eccentric sculptor and painter Bolesław Biegas painted Chopin searching for inspiration in a willow tossed by the wind (oil painting, 1929, collection of Claude Kechichian), and it was this one, sculpted on a monumental scale and lifted to the ranks of a symbol, that protects the musician by the branched "hand" on the sculpture by Wacław Szymanowski in the Royal Baths Park. In the middle of the XX century Tadeusz Trepkowski beautifully interpreted the motive of the Mazovian willows in a known poster prepared for the V International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Festival in 1955.

At the turn of the century, "gleams" of Chopin's music became an important inspiration for many Polish artists. Władysław Czachórski, Michał Elwiro Andriolli, Józef Wodziński created scenes with ladies playing nocturnes (popularized on woodblock press prints). Edward Okuń was the author of several musical compositions, including the painting <<Chopin-Nocturno>> with a figure of a violinist standing inside, next to a window against the background of a night sky (1901 or earlier, missing) and the much weaker Mazurek Chopina (from 1905 or 1906, lost), presenting a procession of villagers dancing to the beat of a melody played by a dreadful violinist.27 Józef Męcina-Krzesz invoked eschatological themes - after 1905 he created an impressive canvas Ostatnie akordy Chopina [Chopin's last chords], an example of the youthful Polish imagination, fond of amazing moods and terror, expressed here with trivial motives of a burning down candle and the specter of death the languid Chopin was suffering (collections of the Fryderyk Chopin Society in Warsaw). The drawing Marche funèbre by Zygmunt Badowski was maintained in a similar convention, depicting a woman with an urn and the figure of the musician swathed in wisps of smoke (reproduction "Świat" 1910, no. 52, p. 12).

Just how much artists intently listened to the Chopin inspirations is demonstrated by the last work of Władysław Podkowiński, Marsz żałobny Chopina [Chopin's funeral march], started in the fall of 1894, unfinished, because it was interrupted by the artist's death. The impulse for creating this symbolic composition was a poem by Kornel Ujejski Marsz pogrzebowy [Funeral march] from the series Tłumaczenia Chopina i Beethovena [Translations of Chopin and Beethoven]. The poet's story about a man in despair after loosing his love was brought to several metaphorical signs deprived of any literalness - to a somber, forested landscape, outlines of bells, birds and angels, clouds of mist and the figure of a man with his hands spread and face twisted with spasmodic grimace, showing faintly in the depths. Independent of the literary inspirations, the young painter, harassed by attacks of progressive tuberculosis, concluded a metaphor of his own fate in the work - the battle with pain, fear and intense sense of dying. Cezary Jellenta, an outstanding critic, author of the theory of intensivism, thoroughly analyzed this canvas, writing that Podkowiński, like no one else, understood that "despair, when it fills the entire essence of a person, takes away his sight and ability to comprehend - and plunges him into one terrible, stone deaf muddle of impressions". Marsz żałobny Chopina was a modernist masterpiece of "intensity of feelings" and spoke to this, what Jellenta thought was most important, and what manifests through:

unity and speed, immediacy, lightning fast impressions, that great painters can sometimes achieve, who audaciously blended all the minor effects and shapes into a single, mighty painting, into one enormous accent and mood: clash, whirlwind, thunderbolt, distress, danger, vividness.28

In 1904 Antoni Potocki, initiated entries to a competition for a drawing composition "taken from the works of Fryderyk Chopin" in the columns of the Parisian "Sztuki". On August 15 of that year, the competition court comprised of: Olga Boznańska, Józef Pankiewicz i Antoni Sygietyński, selected and awarded projects, among which the distinguished work was sent under the "Gołąb" emblem (with a girl playing a work of Chopin, accompanied by a spirit) and the second under the "Zbyszko" emblem (with a specter of death sounding measures of the Marsz żałobny [Funeral march] on a swinging bell). The first prize was not awarded. Eli Nadelman received the third for the drawing Chopin, which was a "total surprise to everyone". The outstanding sculptor transformed the ingenium of Chopin to a metaphor of human fate, comprehended in the spirit of literary phantasmagoria of Stanisław Przybyszewski. He showed a peculiar vision of human emotions, passions and ecstatic experiences in sculpture, treated as outlines of two naked figures, a man and a woman intertwined in a spasmodic embrace, in which Potocki perceived the telling testimony of "the pain of humanity".

Second prize went to Gustaw Gwozdecki for the drawing Ballade in F-major of Chopin, a mysterious and difficult to decipher scene, in which the personal experience of Fryderyk's work was shown (but remember, that Gwozdecki himself was a pianist and music expert). The figure of a man in a strange hat seized by a defensive gesture or one of prayer, occupies the center part of the composition; on the right side a grave cross is visible, and on the left a winged cavalryman reveals itself. Antoni Potocki thus described this "fantasy".

Some mourning pilgrim at a village grave; an armored figure in the clouds. [...] Palls in the forefront, ghostly darkness, further back the dead paleness of a pilgrim's face, the silhouette shadow of a cross and finally the background of the clouds, softly soaked alternatively with brightness and darkness. The entire huge harmony of black and white tones - the harmony of grief.29

This drawing was designed as a part of a triptych. The second composition of Gwozdecki, the etched print in 1910, presents a "melancholic" Chopin lost in thought, wandering through the expansive landscape, whose only accent is a cross identical to the previous drawing (property of the New York Public Library). If these two works are treated as a whole (we know nothing about the third part of the planned triptych), one can presume that they are a "transposition" of the musical structure, of the narration and mood of the Ballade in F-major to an iconic sphere, to an artistic "story" about this work based on the sharp contrast of two themes: the peaceful, epic, idyllic and the stormy dramatic, catastrophic, arousing shivers of anxiety. In 1909 Jan Ciągliński transformed another musical work to the visual arts: he painted Fryderyk Chopin - Scherzo in B-minor, maintained in a rather "demonic" convention, that was to reminisce of the expressive tension and dramatic sound of this scherzo (property of the National Museum in Warsaw).

It should be reiterated here, that in the first decade of the XX century, neo-romantic phantoms (sometimes with quasi-romantic origins) underwent various transformations and entered broad social circulation. Sentimental "pictures" appeared at the time, reproduced on post cards, kept in the common poetics of fantasy, dreams, worthless "treasures" of mass culture, dazzling the public with a repertoire of various visual motives based on terror or tender emotion. The then lively cult of outstanding artists caused the authors of such objects not to spare Chopin, Mickiewicz or Słowacki. The pretext to such manifestation was supposed to be, inter alia, the painted "interpretations" of specific works of Chopin (with excerpts of scores added). Hence, for example, Zygmunt Badowski showed the Polonaise in A-flat, with the march of persons in Polish outfits, the Berceuse in D-flat major with an angle over a child's cradle, the Nocturne in F-sharp major with nymphs spinning in front of the Place in the Bath Park, and the Prelude in B minor with a playing Chopin and pitiful kneeling woman. Around 1910 Tadeusz Korpal painted the musician sitting at the piano between a walking skeleton in armor and a female apparition flowing from the window on a moonlight trail, while Adam Setkowicz put the Apoteoza Chopina together with a funeral march walking to the beat of the Funeral March.30

Other compositions, aimed at fixing the memory about the composer in a lofty manner, were not so primitive, though clearly stereotypical and naive, e.g. Mazurek by Feliks Michał Wygrzywalski (oil painting, 1910, Mazovia Museum in Płock) with a playing Chopin, dancing couples in the background and the specter of a naked woman rising over the piano, or the Portret fantastyczny Fryderyka Chopina absorbed in peasant song and melody played on a pipe by a shepherd boy, the brush of Stanisław Zawadzki (oil, 1919, Museum of Art in Łódź).31

In 1910 Stanisław Brzozowski wrote, that admittedly the spiritual constructions of romanticism dazzled the modernists, yet "the romantics attempted to overcome the ghost in themselves, [but] the ghost was the depth and the truth of neo-romanticism".32 At the turn of the century Chopin was one of the icons of collective consciousness, embodying the neo-romantic myth of the artist, who exhorts reality, by his spirituality and art, transferring it to the sphere of metaphysical experience. Serious, outstanding artists of this period responded to the need of such mythologization: Nadelman, Podkowiński, Gwozdecki, and above everything Wojciech Weiss, who sought out new forms of expression and discovered Chopin anew, recreating his image in a certain symbolical order, hanging between melancholy and madness. For this generation, the lesson of Stanisław Przybyszewski was particularly important (who followed the thinking of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche). Hence, inter alia, owing to him, the symbolism then became a philosophy of art, creating modernistic utopias being the evocation of human "first things". The basis of the aesthetic thoughts of the author of Confiteor were psychological theories of the "naked soul", unfathomable loneliness, the drama of existence and passing is translated into art, which, according to the convictions of the "sad Satan", was to be a sign of the "free ego" and evoke new worlds from nothingness.

Przybyszewski wrote several texts about Chopin in which he conveyed the neurotic picture of his personality. To him, Fryderyk was an "exponent of disturbances of sick nerves, festering agony, unlocalized pains and trembling fears", a person of incessant shocks, fizzy unrest, feverish deliriums, collapsing ecstasies and deranged reveries", an artist of the music of the highest energy, manifesting over the last few years as the "heel of psychosis of fear" and in first order, that which is "inexpressible, mysterious, passing and dreadful in a person".33 The early creativity of Wojciech Weiss was shaped in such a climate, influenced by mental phantasms and (surely) night alcohol "recitals" by Przybyszewski took up the subject associated with Chopin. The young painter was fascinated by the figure, work and legend of the composer (similar to Gwozdecki, he received a musical education and played on various instruments). In 1899 he completed a series of drawings, including several sketches of Chopin's bust and face, as well as two studies of his figure paced in an unreal place and time (drawings in collections of the artist's family; one that is missing was reproduced in "Życie" 1899, no. 10, p. 186, and no. 19-20, p. 351). The last two sketches, picturing Chopin playing the piano, and distinguished by an intensified expression (emphasized even more by the ghostly outlines of women's heads), manifested themselves as distinctive "signs" of the age. Making use of a fluid, supple, and active stroke, Weiss created his own language of forms corresponding to the visualization of the music; he made the material of the presentations unreal, showed Chopin as a bodiless apparition endowed with extrasensory energy and personification of the pianist's "spirit", which simultaneously extracts crazy sounds from the keyboard with his diverging hands. The above sketches were kind of "exercises" to the final picture Szopen given to Przybyszewski. The lost work hung - along with works by Munch and Wyspiański's Skarby Sezamu [Treasures of Sesame] - in the author's Kraków flat (at the time of the financial crisis he attempted to sell the "wondrous painting" Eliza Pareńska). Weiss achieved a culmination of his musical vision enhanced by the silent shout of the playing Chopin lying on the fringes of an expansive landscape in a state of extreme feeling of ecstasy or death(?). His figure is "panoramic", which became an organic part of the space, like a huge hill filling up the forefront of the composition.34

In 1900 Stanisław Lack wrote about this painting: Szopen is a "work which bizarrely and almost definitively exposes the secret essence of this artist, his manner of creating and expressing the subject". The words of Stanisław Przybyszewski most distinctively fit the multiple meanings contained in this work by Weiss:

[Chopin] lay outstretched on the stars in heavy reverie, because a terrible moment had come, in which the unknown hand of an unknown God ordered him to fall to the ground and become a body.

All the worlds swirled huge circles around him in a crazy rush. And enormous globes flew in front of his eyes, red like hot iron, green and shiny, like scales of poisonous snakes, dead worlds, covered in eternal snow, full of depths of chasms and coniferous crests of terrible rocks, worlds adorned with blossoms and drowning in oceans, but his eyes indifferently shifted through all these blue wonders. [...]

Nothing is capable of conveying the might, enchantment, vision and dreams of Szopen.

One has to penetrate the secret of his sounds, remembering that every single tone of his is not a disconnected musical symbol, but a bare hear, beating, live, torn from the chest, one has to plunge into pain and suffering of this great master; such at his depth, until both souls, the artist's and the listener's, merge together; in a single word one has to feel the music outside the music: feel metamusically.35

And that's how we passed through the gallery of pictures, from which, in the course of the decade, the ever different faces of Chopin living in the space of art emerge - as Zbigniew Herbert said - he has to exist, "since the world without pictures would simply be incomprehensible".

 

Aleksandra Melbechowska-Luty

English translation:
Philip Stoeckle


 

 

* First publication of the article in: M. Goląba, ed. Chopin w kulturze polskiej, Wrocław 2010 [editor's note].
I would like to thank Hanna Wróblewska-Straus as well as Małgorzata Biernacka, Zofia Chechlińska, Maria Gołąb, Hanna Kotkowska-Bareja, Małgorzata Sobieraj and Andrzej Dzięciołowski, for their time, consultations and other assistance in obtaining the illustrative material. [A.Melbechowska-Luty]

1 Chopin's iconography from his youth to the end of is life has been elaborated by: R. Bory, La Vie de Frédéric Chopin par l'image, preface par A. Cortot, Paris 1951; M. Idzikowski, B.E. Sydow, Portret Fryderyka Chopina, Kraków 1952; iidem, Portret Chopina. Antologia ikonograficzna, Kraków 1963; M. Tomaszewski, B. Weber, Fryderyk Chopin. Diariusz par image, Warszawa-Kraków 1990; E. Burger, Frédéric Chopin. Eine Lebenschronik in Bildern und Dokumenten, München 1990. See also H. Wróblewska-Straus, Katalog zbiorów Muzeum Towarzystwa imienia Fryderyka Chopina. Ikonografia, pamiątki i sztuka użytkowa, Warsaw 1970.

2 Letter of Fryderyk Chopin to Tytus Woyciechowski in Poturzyn, Warsaw, Saturday, 14 XI 1829, [in:] Korespondencja Fryderyka Chopina, collected and elaborated by B.E. Sydow, vol. 1, Warsaw 1955, p. 112-113. [date of letter erroneously indicated: 14 I 1829].

3 J. Wegner, Odnalezione portrety Chopina (ze zbiorów antonińskich), "Muzyka" 1954, no. 3-4, p. 36-44; H.F. Nowaczyk, Chopin na traktach Wielkopolski Południowej, Kalisz 2006, p. 59-85.

4 Chopin's biographical data comes from: M. Tomaszewski, Chopin. Człowiek, dzieło, rezonans, Poznań 1998; T.A. Zieliński, Chopin. Życie i droga twórcza, Kraków 1998. About Chopin's portrait by Maria Wodzińska, see Artystki polskie, exhibition catalog, concept, scenario as well as the research version of the catalog by A. Morawińska, National Museum in Warsaw, Warsaw 1991, p. 360

5 Property of the Czartoryski XX Foundation, National Museum in Kraków, Czartoryski collections. Idzikowski and Sydow date this sketch from around 1844  (Portret Chopina. Antologia, p. 87).

6 C. Norwid, Czarne kwiaty, [in:] idem, Pisma wszystkie, pub. J.W. Gomulicki, vol. 6, Warsaw 1971, p. 178: idem, Letter to Cezary Plater circa 25 X 1849, ibidem, vol. 8, p. 80-81; A. Melbechowska-Luty, Sztukmistrz. Twórczość artystyczna i myśl o sztuce Cypriana Norwida, Warsaw 2001, p. 195-197.

7 J.W. Gomulicki, Norwid i Chopin, "Współczesność" 1969, no. 18, p. 7, no. 19, p. 11; idem, Słownik biograficzny adresatów Norwida, [in:] Pisma wszystkie, vol. 10, p. 366; idem, Pierwszy pobyt Norwida w Paryżu, 1849-1852, [in:] Pisma wszystkie, vol. 11, p. 60, 166; E. Delacroix, Dzienniki, vol. 1 (1822-1853), compiled by A. Joubin, translated by J. Guze and J. Hartwig, Wrocław 1968, p. 178.

8 Korespondencja..., op. cit., vol. 1, p. 108. In this letter and in previously cited from 14 XI 1829, Chopin twice gave the name of the painter as Miroszewski and the diminutive Miroszesio. Surely, the spelling error of the last name was repeated in Chopin literature; the artist was named Ambroży Mieroszewski and that's how he signed his paintings. Portret Chopina was lost during WWII; Anna Chamiec made a miniature reproduction of it in 1968.

9 Ibidem, vol. 1, p. 254.

10 H. Dobrzycki, Kilka słów o portretach Chopina, "Tygodnik Ilustrowany" 1894, bi-annual I, p. 124.

11 H. Dobrzycki, Kilka słów o portretach Chopina, "Tygodnik Ilustrowany" 1894, bi-annual I, p. 124.

12 Correspondence ..., ibidem, p. 206.

13 About Ary Scheffer's paintings see L.J.I. Ewals, Ary Scheffer i Polska, [in] Romantyzm. Malarstwo w czasach Fryderyka Chopina, concept of an exhibition and academic editing of the catalog A. Morawińska. Royal Castle in Warsaw, Warsaw 2000, p. 37-45, 302.

14 B.E. Sydow, Chopin i Delacroix (Historia jednego portretu), "Kwartalnik Muzyczny" 1949, no. 26-27, p. 15-26; J. Starzyński, O romantycznej syntezie sztuk. Delacroix, Chopin, Baudelaire, Warsaw 1965, p. 30-36, 78-90; M. Poprzęcka, Chopin i malarstwo, [in:] Romantyzm, p. 23-31.

15 E. Delacroix, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 127, 178.

16 Ibidem, s. 130; J. Starzyński, op. cit., p. 78-90; Romantyzm, p. 98.

17 A. Melbechowska-Luty, Teofil Kwiatkowski 1809-1891, Wrocław 1966.

18 F. Niecks, Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician, vol. 2, London 1888, p. 11, 165, 167, 170, 202; W. Gerson, Ś.p. Teofil Kwiatkowski - artysta malarz, „Tygodnik Ilustrowany" 1891, bi-annual II, p. 327; E. Delacroix, op. cit., p. 354.

19 K. Kobylańska, Rękopisy utworów Chopina, Katalog, vol. 1, Kraków 1977, p. 436.

20 A. Melbechowska-Luty, Teofil Kwiatkowski, p. 63-73; M. Grońska, Teofil Kwiatkowski 1809-1891, w stulecie śmierci. Monographic exhibition from Polish collections, Towarzystwo im. Fryderyka Chopina w Warszawie, Warsaw 1991.

21 A. Melbechowska-Luty, Teofil Kwiatkowski, p. 92-98; eadem, Poloneza czas zacząć..., [in:] Mowa i moc obrazów. Prace dedykowane Profesor Marii Poprzęckiej, Warsaw 2005, p. 83-85.

22 Based on the trace of a manuscript visible in the largest version of Polonaise Chopina (61,5 × 125,7 cm); Józef M. Chomiński expressed the opinion that it could be the in Polonaise A-major op. 40 no. 1.

23 M. Wilczkowska, F. Chopin w plastyce polskiej na przełomie XIX i XX wieku (Catalog), "Rocznik Chopinowski" 1981, p. 97-126.

24 S.R. Lewandowski, Henryk Siemiradzki, Warszawa-Kraków 1911, p. 84-86; J. Dużyk, Siemiradzki. Opowieść biograficzna, Warsaw 1986, p. 424-426; J. Lamparska, Nieszczęśliwy anioł, "Zabytki - Heritage" 2007, no. 6, p. 64.

25 Wojciech Gerson 1831-1901. Katalog wystawy monograficznej, compiled by J. Zielińska, National Museum in Warsaw, Warsaw 1978, p. 95, 159. Gerson also authored a drawing Głowa Fryderyka Chopina, pencil, about 1894 (property of the National Museum in Warsaw).

26 A. Majerska, Witold Pruszkowski 1846-1896, "Sztuki Piękne" 1934, p. 96.

27 M. Biernacka, Literatura - Symbol - Natura. Twórczość Edwarda Okunia wobec Młodej Polski i symbolizmu europejskiego, Warsaw 2004, s. 24-25, 43-44, 173, 247, 262, 272, 295.

28 C. Jellenta, Galeria ostatnich dni, Kraków 1897, p. 311, 320; E. Charazińska, Władysław Podkowiński. Katalog wystawy monograficznej, National Museum in Warsaw, Warsaw 1990, p. 32-33, 137-138; M. Gołąb, Ut pictura musica. O wybranych wątkach idei muzyczności malarstwa w estetyce, krytyce i sztuce polskiej przełomu XIX i XX wieku, [in:] Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis litewski malarz i kompozytor, Muzeum Śląskie, Katowice 2006, p. 93-97.

29 A. Potocki, Konkursy "Sztuki". O konkursie, „Sztuka" [Paris] 1904, p. 321, 325-328 and 4 reproductions (oryginals of the distinguished work were not found); A. Lipa, Zaklinacz lalek. Życie i twórczość Gustawa Gwozdeckiego, Warsaw 2003, p. 70-71; eadem, Gustaw Gwozdecki 1880-1935. Wystawa monograficzna, catalog edited by M. Gołąb, National Museum in Poznań, Poznań 2003, p. 47, 160, 180.

30 Młoda Polska. Sztuka druku i ilustracji. Katalog wystawy, compiled by D. Bro­mowicz and M. Jaworska, Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Kraków 1994, p. 87, 92-93; M. Biernacka, op. cit., p. 43.

31 M. Poprzęcka, Polskie malarstwo salonowe, Warszawa 1991, p. 30.

32 S. Brzozowski, Legenda Młodej Polski. Studia o strukturze duszy kulturalnej, Lwów 1910, p. 178.

33 S. Przybyszewski, Z psychologii jednostki twórczej. Chopin i Nietzsche, przeł. S. Helsztyński, [in:] idem, Wybór pism, compiled by R. Taborski, Wrocław 1966, p. 11, 15, 17; idem, Szopen (Impromptu), [in:] Na drogach duszy, Kraków 1900, p. 89-104; idem, Szopen a naród, Kraków [1910].

34 About work by Wojciech Weiss associated with Chopin, see: W. Juszczak, Młody Weiss, Warsaw 1979, p. 62-78, 81-82; idem, Wojtkiewicz i nowa sztuka, Kraków 2000, p. 61-65; Z. Weiss-
-Albrzykowska, Fryderyk Chopin w modernistycznej wizji Wojciecha Weissa, „Rocznik Chopinowski" 1986, p. 173-183; Ł. Kossowski, Totenmesse, [in:] Totenmesse. Munch - Weiss - Przybyszewski, exhibition catalog compiled by Ł. Kossowski, Museum of Literature in Warsaw, Warsaw 1995, p. 80-83; M. Gołąb, op. cit., p. 98, 103.

35 S. Lack, Wojciech Weiss, "Życie" 1900 no. 1, p. 327; S. Przybyszewski, Szopen (Impromptu), p. 89, 104.

 

 

 

 

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