A sad clown, a faun in a farmyard, sprites and nymphs - welcome to Polish Symbolism, a function of the nation's history of wars and foreign domination, writes Aidan Dunne
A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland, Paintings from Poland, begins with the sombre image of an iconic figure: the sad clown. Jan Matejko's painting depicts a historical character, Stanczyk, court jester "to the last rulers of the Jagiellon dynasty", when, in the first half of the 16th century, Poland "was at the apex of her political, economic and cultural powers". Indifferent to the revelry proceeding in the background behind him, Stanczyk sits slumped in thought. A dispatch on the table beside him notes the loss of Smolensk to the forces of Muscovy. Looking far into the future, the prescient jester is the only one to realise that the fall of Smolensk is the beginning of the end, that the party is over even as it begins.
Matejko made the painting in 1862 and in the process he turned Stanczyk into a figure of mythological import in terms of Poland's historical identity. The Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth had finally collapsed at the end of the 18th century and Poland was divided up between Russia, Prussia and Austria. While the country ceased to exist as a political entity, a sense of national identity remained strong and even grew in intensity, with successive uprisings against the ruling powers. In looking backwards Matejko was also addressing the patriotic issue of the moment. In fact, a rebellion against Russia was imminent.
MATEJKO'S PAINTING IS a key work for Dr Dorota Folga Januszewska, director of the National Museum in Warsaw and co-curator of Paintings from Poland. The work's layers of symbolism, its roundabout way of addressing its themes are, she argues, typical not only of Polish art but also the Polish character, related to the widely acknowledged richness of the Polish language. Indirection also stems partly from the reality of Matejko's situation: Poland was a kind of virtual nation, existing in the heads and hearts of its inhabitants and exiles, and the sentiments he was expressing could only be addressed obliquely. That has been Poland's lot throughout much of its history since the collapse of the Commonwealth.
Finally reconstituted after the first World War, Poland was then occupied by Germany and Russia during the second World War and became a communist Eastern Bloc country until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. "Yet even though things have changed," Januszewska says, "even when there was no longer any need to speak metaphorically, everything still tends to be interpreted as if the real meaning is beneath the surface, no matter how straightforward the statement."
Hence the narrative around which she has built her account of Polish painting from 1880 to 1939. The show's subtitle is Symbolism to Modern Art, but her introductory essay extends that title, pointedly adding: " . . . and back to symbolism". When the Symbolist movement emerged in France it had an enormous impact throughout Europe. For the Poles, Januszewska writes, it was "like the discovery of the source of truth and prophecies". Enthusiasm for symbolism led to some strange, visionary inventions, such as Jacek Malczewski's Allegro, featuring a fantasy hybridised creature - part woman, part tiger. Januszewska sees her as an allegorical representation of an actual woman, Maria Kinga Bal, who had a catalytic effect on the painter's life. On a more expansive scale, Wojciech Weiss's Obsession, in which a seething mass of figures merge in the lurid glow of unearthly red light, is an apocalyptic vision of an orgiastic world's end.
MORE TYPICALLY, PERHAPS, symbolism is employed in the context of Poland's fortunes. Ferdynand Ruszczyc's Nec Mergitur depicts a brightly illuminated galleon, a ghostly-looking vessel, negotiating huge seas under starry skies. The ship of state that will come through eventually? Presumably something like that is the work's intended message, though there are various ambiguities and complications attendant on any single interpretation. Ruszczyc's characteristic theme was the power of natural forces, and his painting Old Apple Trees, a view of the bent and twisted forms of the fruit trees by night, is a fine painting with a message about time, endurance and regeneration. There isn't necessarily a political message, though as Januszewska notes, nationalistic relevance could, with a little ingenuity, be discerned in pretty much any subject.
Jozef Chelmonski's beautifully spare study of partridges in a snowy expanse was seen as reflecting the plight of Poles dispatched to Siberia, and in Józef Pankiewicz's almost abstract view of Swans in the Saxon Garden in Warsaw at Night the fine creatures could similarly be seen as representing the nation under foreign rule. Even views of moody interiors and melancholy figures are laden with symbolic import.
There is a taste for the fantastical and whimsical that runs through the entire show. One gets used to allegorical or mythological figures loitering in landscapes and settings that seem to be - and indeed are, Januszewska confirms - otherwise purely naturalistic. A little boy faun chats matter-of-factly to a girl in a farmyard; a huge golden dragonfly appears in an orchard; flowers seem to float magically around a girl, naked save for a pair of woolen socks, as she brushes her hair; sprites and nymphs appear in the landscape as a painter dozes beside his easel.
Just as the west of Ireland came to be perceived as the prototypical Irish landscape and the repository of its essential cultural values, Poland found its own "rustic-national style" in the Tatra Mountains and the decorative traditions of its people, as cultural figures began to congregate in the one-time resort of Zakopane. There was, as elsewhere, an element of the construction rather than the mere discovery of identity involved. As Januszewska dryly notes, the myth gradually became the reality and even Tatra dwellers came to accept artists' versions of their traditions as their own.
IN THE MEANTIME, the Modernism of the School of Paris was making inroads, and there was a vigorous contest between artistic factions in Poland in the years between the two World Wars. During the heyday of Modernism, this debate would have been seen in terms of the success or failure of a progressive international style set against local conservatism. In postmodernity, things are no longer regarded in quite that light. However, the modernist work Januszewska has included in the show is more than enough to indicate that Polish artists could be modernists without compromising their identity.
There is, for example, a generous selection from the sketchbooks of Henryk Stazewski, "the senior figure of the Polish avant-garde", who lived until 1988, and was clearly a first-rate, fascinating artist. Januszewska points to an obvious difficulty in studying and evaluating his work: virtually everything he made prior to the second World War was simply destroyed. The Nazis regarded abstract art as degenerate and physically obliterated it when it fell into their hands. Artists and intellectuals were shot. Then there was devastating bombing. Purely documentary material, archives, were also vulnerable. If they were not destroyed they were often shipped abroad for safe keeping, and more often than not their guardians were wary about returning them, given the political turn of events in post-war Poland.
Since 1989, many archives have resurfaced. As Januszewska puts it, she has her work cut out for her: "My museum is trying simultaneously to build up a collection and an archive." Well before the calamity of 1939, Polish painters had turned to symbolic representation with renewed interest, finding themselves, in Januszewska's words, "imprisoned by meanings and symbols". Yet, as the example of Jan Matejko's Stanczyk indicates, there were profound reasons for this: a history of foreign domination, the traumas of war. Add to that a relish of linguistic subtlety, and Polish painting, she suggests, with its "pansymoblism became an island where treasures were hoarded".
• Paintings from Poland: Symbolism to Modern Art (1880-1939) is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Millennium Wing, Clare Street, Dublin until Jan 27. More details on 01-6615133, www.nationalgallery.ie