Painter, draughtsman and graphic artist, representative of the expressionist current of the Young Poland art movement and of coloristic tendencies in 1920s and 1930s art. Born 1875 in Leorda, Romania, died 1950 in Cracow.

Life

Wojciech Stanisław Weiss was born 4 May 1875 in Leorda, Bukovina, Romania. He was the son of Stanisław Weiss and Maria nee Kopaczyńska. In 1888, he was sent to study in Lvov, where he attended the St. Joseph Gymnasium. At the end of 1890, the parents move to Płaszów, a suburb of Cracow. Wojciech can continue his education at the St. Anna Gymnasium in Cracow. He also attends, as an unenrolled student, evening drawing classes at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, where he formally enrols in 1892. He completes his studies in 1898, receiving a gold medal and the Franciszek Urbański scholarship. Influenced by Jan Matejko, he paints historical compositions; in 1891, "Bolesław Chrobry Entering Kyiv", and during his studies, "Evocation of the Spirit of Barbara Radziwiłłówna" (1894). In 1896, he makes his first trip around Europe, visiting Wrocław, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. In the autumn, he enrols in Leon Wyczółkowski's master's class. Next year, he spends three weeks in Paris, visiting the Louvre, the Luxembourg Gallery, Versailles. He paints "Self-Portrait with an Apple" and, upon his return, "Schoolgirls in the Park". In 1898, Weiss receives a government prize - gold medal. He paints "The Melancholic and The Consumptive". He shows the former at the 2nd Exhibition of the 'Sztuka' Polish Artists Society.

In 1898, after meeting Stanisław Przybyszewski, Weiss starts a collaboration with the Cracow-based periodical "Życie". He joins the 'Sztuka' Polish Artists Society.

In 1899, he attends a plein-air in Strzyżów and it is there, at the turn of the centuries, that his most expressive landscapes are made: "Kiss on the Grass", "Radiant Sunset", "Poppies", "Evening", "Shallows", "Ghost in the Willow". In August, he attends with Wyczółkowski and Tetmajer a plein-air in Zakopane, and in October goes to Paris. He takes up the graphic arts, making his first etchings. During that time, the artist's parents move to the Cracow neighbourhood of Podgórze, and Wojciech completes the academy as the top student. He paints his famous "Portrait of Parents".

In 1890, he spends time in Paris again, making also a three-week trip with friend Tadeusz Okoń to Treport, Normandy, In Paris, he makes a series of works that are catastrophic images of a turn-of-the-century metropolis, the most well-known of which are "Self-Portrait With Masks", "Café d'Arcourt", and the aquatints "Morgue" and "Luxembourg Gardens at Night".

That autumn, Weiss paints a lot in Strzyżów. He receives a scholarship from Count Tyszkiewicz. At the Paris Exposition Universelle, the "Portrait of Parents" wins the gold medal. Weiss uses the Count Tyszkiewicz scholarship to finance a trip to Italy. In 1901, he stays in Florence and Venice. He makes friends with Antoni Procajłowicz, Wilhelm Mitarski, and Włodzimierz Perzyński. That autumn, he paints landscapes and fantastic compositions in Strzyżów and Odrzykoń. In 1902, while in Rome and Florence, he creates the landscapes "From the Palatine Hippodrome", "In a Florence Bower", "Pierrot and Colombina".

He collaborates with the Warsaw-based periodical "Chimera" and exhibits at the Krywult salon. In 1903, Antoni Łada Cybulski and Konstanty Górski characterise his practice in a booklet published by Sztuka Polska and financed by H. Altenberg in Lviv. In 1904, he paints the pieces "Demon", "City Funeral", "Musicians", "Cello Player". Weiss and his father buy a house with an orchard in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. He rents a studio at Podzamcze street, near the Wawel Castle, where he paints some brilliant nudes, chiefly male ones.

The year 1906 marks the beginning of Weiss's 'white' period, lasting through 1912. Between 1905-1906 he is a member of the Vienna Secession. He is active on the Board of the Society of the Friends of Fine Arts in Cracow, having been appointed its member in 1907. He paints "Scares". In 1908, he is elected president of the 'Sztuka' Polish Artists Society. That year, he marries his student, Irena Silberberg, who becomes his favourite model and the subject of many of his portraits. In 1909, he has his first solo exhibition in the salon of the Society of the Friends of Fine Arts (TPSP) in Cracow. In 1910, he is nominated associate professor of the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. He goes to plein-airs in Poronin in the Tatra mountains with his students. In 1913, he is nominated full professor of the Cracow ASP. He makes a trip to Italy. He receives the Probus Barczewski Polish Academy of Learning award for the painting "Fruits".

Following the outbreak of war in 1914, he goes to Vienna, where he is decorated the Bavarian Order of St. Michael and the Austrian Medal of the Iron Crown. He makes Cézannesque watercolours and oil landscapes. Between 1915-1918, he often paints in Kalwaria, mainly landscapes ("Orchard in Kalwaria". "Summer", 1916, "Afternoon Tea in the Garden", 1916, "Autumn. Parents Under a Pear Tree", around 1920), as well as compositions with mythological staffage ("Ceres", 1916), representations of Kalwaria-region religious rituals ("In Front of Pilate's Town Hall", 1916, "Kidron", 1916), and family portraits.

In the 1918/1919 academic year, Weiss is appointed independent Poland's first vice-chancellor of the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. He will also serve in this position again in the academic years 1934/1935 and 1935/1936. He undertakes the effort of reorganising the academy, amending its statutes, and allowing women to study in the artistic faculties. He goes with his students to plein-airs in Zakopane, Bukowina Tatrzańska, and Puławy. Between 1924-1934, he sits on the editorial board of the periodical "Sztuki Piękne", which in 1925 publishes a comprehensive description of his work by Stanisław Świerz. That year, Weiss becomes full member of the 'Zachęta' Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. He is appointed presidium member of the First National Congress of Polish Fine Artists in Warsaw. He exhibits a lot during the interwar period and wins numerous prizes for his works, including the 1919 Polish Academy of Learning prize for "Floriańska in Mourning", and the 1924 Warsaw Arts Society Salon award for "Helen". On his fiftieth birthday he is awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. In 1934, he stages the largest of the post-war solo exhibitions, where he also presents his disciples. He wins the jury's award of the 1st National Salon in Cracow, and a year later the gold medal for "Advertising" at the TPSP Jubilee Salon in Warsaw. He actively participates in the organisation of the exhibitions of the Society for the Promotion of Polish Art Among Foreigners, until 1939. In 1937, he receives an award for lifetime achievement, and in 1939, a honorary prize for "Fishes" (Art Propaganda Institute exhibition, Warsaw) and a honorary mention for "Storm" (3rd Maritime Exhibition, Zachęta).

Following the outbreak of war, Weiss continues as vice-chancellor of the Cracow Academy through December 1939. After the war, he returns to the academy and makes sure its collection is safe. In 1946, he is pensioned off. He paints a series of compositions referring to the new reality: "Strike", "Look, Wonderful Peace March", "Manifesto". In 1948 he receives the City of Cracow award for lifetime achievement, and in 1950, the first prize in the field of painting for "Manifesto" at the 1st National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He dies on 6 December 1950.

Work

In 1882, at Jan Matejko's personal recommendation, Weiss is admitted as student at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. During the first four years his professors are Florian Cynk, Marcin Jabłoński and Władysław Łuszczkiewicz (drawing), and Józef Unierzyski (painting). Between 1895-1898 he attends the so called Meisterschule, a master's class run by Leon Wyczółkowski. Following Matejko's death in 1893, the Academy is reformed. The new vice-chancellor, Julian Fałat, hires new professors, introduces modern teaching methods and propagates impressionism. Of the various artistic models and conventions available, those that influence Weiss most strongly are Jacek Malczewski and Leon Wyczółkowski.

During that period the artist paints a number of landscapes from the area of the Płaszów train station. The single most important piece of the period is "Heat" (1898), showing a fragment of the railway track in merciless white heat under a narrow strip of a leaden sky. In the summer of 1896 Weiss goes on a school excursion to Europe. He visits Wrocław, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, and in April 1897 goes through Vienna and the Swiss Alps for a three-week stay in Paris. In the museums he is particularly beguiled by the paintings of Holbein, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Van Dyck. It is precisely through this juvenile selection that we should view Weiss's early portrait exercises. His dialogue with the Old Masters is now beginning, and will continue throughout the artist's entire career. Weiss begins his portrait practice at the highest level of artistic references, which is why the majority of his early portraits bear a 'museum trait', the characteristic downplaying of all opposites and contrasts, the, in the good sense of the word, 'academic' colour culture. Such are the student-era portrait of a girl (1895), "Portrait of Antoni Procajłowicz" (1895), "The Melancholic" (1898), "Portrait of Parents" (1899), or the slightly later "Portrait of Feliks Jasieński" (1902). By the end of his master's course, in 1898, Weiss has fully matured as an artist. He has won a number of academy awards. In May 1898, his "Melancholic" is selected by the demanding and despotic Jan Stanisławski for a 'Sztuka' exhibition, where the artist, a fresh graduate, presents his works among those of his professors.

In September 1898 Stanisław Przybyszewski arrives in Cracow from Berlin. The author of "Confiteor", his philosophical views and artistic preferences have an immense influence on the young Weiss. It is through Przybyszewski that such inspirations become visible in Weiss's art as Munch, Vigeland, Goya, Rops. But even more important are a catastrophic vision of the world and an existential vision of man contained in Przybyszewski's writings.

Weiss makes a series of compositions that can be linked to specific works by Przybyszewski, sometimes literally illustrating them: "Chopin" (1898), showing the musician being consumed by the elements of music and death, "Sunflowers" (1904), painted in a minor key, "Scares" (1907) - a shepherdess chased by scarecrows, the ecstatic "Dance" (1899) and "Possession" (1899). As bleak themes inspired by Przybyszewski's prose filter through to Weiss's work, his landscapes become ever more visional, inner, recreated from the imagination rather than from nature. The result is a thoroughly Young Polish landscape, hollow and empty, whose emptiness is actually emphasised by lone willow trees, secretive little lakes, distant mountain ranges. It is like the space of the slightly undulating Strzyżów landscape, cleansed of redundant elements, into which the artist introduces from his imagination swirling human processions.

The 1901 trip to Italy marks a spectacular turning point for the nature-sensitive artist. He likens the Italian landscape to 'frescoes' and precisely such are his Italian landscape paintings: filled with light and yet fresco-style muted, with decorative compositions of colour patches ("Courtyard of Florence Palace"). He makes some of his most beautiful pastels ever. In diffused light there endure silhouettes of cypress trees, ancient colonnades, ruins ("Ruins and Cypress Trees", 1901). Ecstatic colours calm down to slowly arrive at milder, more melodious compositions. Colour mutes down and becomes purer. Grey and limestone white slowly begin to dominate. Such is the tonality of the pieces painted following the artist's return home: "Musicians" (1904), "City Funeral" (1904), "Autumn" (1905).

The affirmation for nature is accompanied by a mature affection. In 1906 eighteen-year-old Irena Silberberg, student of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, arrives in Cracow from Łódź. In 1905, the artist's father is pensioned off. He fulfils his long-time dream by buying a small house in Kalwaria set picturesquely in an old orchard. Some time later, Wojciech moves in there with his wife. From then on, the house in Kalwaria becomes for him the family Arcadia, a theme of countless paintings in which he represents the house with its immediate surroundings, the garden, the wooded hills of Kalwaria with the dominant outline of the monastery above them. It is in Kalwaria that Japanese inspirations become visible in Weiss's art. He picks up a penchant for Japanese art from its leading collector and propagator in Poland, Feliks Manggha Jasieński.

The enchantment with the art of Japan seems to be the key to understanding this period of Weiss's practice. It pushes his colour schemes towards a matte, silvery gamut. In Kalwaria, this gamut starts to radiate and opalesce. The result are landscapes that are overfilled with light, ceremoniously bright. In 1906, a white period begins, ending around 1912. During that period, white becomes the key colour in Weiss's palette, and the fragmentary compositions are like haiku poems written by the artist in nature's honour. Between 1910-1912 Weiss makes in Kalwaria a series of visional sunsets - watercolours and pastels. The white-dominated colour range gradually becomes more vivid, around 1915-1916 reaching a fullness in representations of the sunlit Kalwaria orchard.

During that period Weiss again engages in a dialogue with classical themes and the work of the Old Masters. That dialogue, started with the student-era "Odysseus in the Vaults of Hades", and continued through illustrations of mythological motifs in "Bacchanalia" (1903), "Perseus" (1904), or "Abduction of Nymphs" (1911), reappears in Kalwaria in the piece "Ceres" (1916). The nature represented in it is a sunny orchard, governed by the goddess of harvest and abundance. The classical theme is also exemplified in the artist's work by a dozen or so sculpted female nudes and busts made between 1915-1920. Between 1916-1918, in turn, he creates compositions that are classicist by definition, with their choice of motif and the manner in which it is treated. These are above all painted nudes, spread on white blankets ("Venus", 1916, "Venus and Cupid", 1917), clearly referring to Old Master examples. The 1916 "Venus", for instance, is a travesty of Diego Velasquez's "Toilet of Venus". "Three Graces" too refer to Renaissance or Baroque interpretations of the theme, such as Boticelli's or Rubens's. The classicist thread in Weiss's interwar work concludes with the 1927 "Muses". In the decade-earlier "Ceres", the goddess of harvest appearing at the edge of a forest accompanies luxuriant nature, serving as an allegorical sign complementing it, referring the viewer to the ideal harmony of the world of art that also pervades the art-created nature. In "Muses", situation is reversed. This time it is nature that accompanies art. Classicist motifs will recur in Weiss's art many times yet. They will be coupled with a vision of fertile nature, giving people fruits, wine and joy, as in the paintings "Parcae Cutting the Thread of Life" (1931), "Fruits" (1936), "Drunken Girl "(1937), "Grape Harvest" (1937).

Many recipients of art associate Weiss's name chiefly with his interwar work, and above all his 'colouristic' landscapes and sensual nudes. In 1923 the artist makes his first trip to Nice, where he stays with his sister-in-law, Maria Sperling, also a painter. From then on he travels almost every year to the south of France and to Italy. In the 1930s, a regular subject of his plein-air work will be the Baltic coast. He will also continue painting Kalwaria landscapes throughout his career. The landscapes painted in the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, mainly in Venice, incorporate a silvery-blue color gamut that captures the humid atmosphere. Just as thirty years earlier, the painter remains enchanted with the beauty of the Italian landscape. Also during that time he creates series of woodcuts in which he achieves painterly effects, capturing the changeability of natural scenery. Simple contrasts of black and white render dazzling reflections of light on rapidly flowing water. During plein-airs in the south of France Weiss creates dozens of Côte d'Azur oil landscapes, watercolours, woodcuts and monotypes. The oil pieces astonish with the intensity of color, the woodcuts - with 'bird's eye-view' images of seaside boulevards lined with rhythmic rows of palm trees, the watercolours - with the transparency of tone, the use of accidental paint splashes and the white space of unpainted paper, the monotypes - with the amorphousness of the shapes recorded. In the 1920s and 1930s prints act as a complement of Weiss's painting, a parallel field of artistic experimentation. He artist achieves particular mastery in the techniques of aquatint and monotyping.

In landscapes made in Jastrzębia Góra on the Baltic coast the artist unifies two elements: skies and earth. In the Italian, French or Baltic landscapes important changes occur in the way color is treated. The colour structure becomes looser. Linear rhythms are quietened down. The role of the main means of expression is taken over by the colour patch achieving particular saturation and textural density. In the 1930s and 1940s landscapes are made in Kalwaria and Ojców marked by a blunt oil technique and rich texture. In the late, Kalwaria landscapes, the color patch is sometimes broken into fragments of pure colour: purple, violets, Paris blues, oranges.

The second current of Weiss's interwar practice are nude paintings. These are kind of still lifes, representations of creatures lacking any psychology, faceless bodies, whose beauty the artist admires. Beginning from the mid-1920s a certain dichotomy occurs in Weiss's art. On the one hand, his close contact with nature brings him in the 1930s to an openly pantheistic position, while on the other, he secludes himself in the atelier where he paints the nudes and still lifes. Isolated from family life, deprived of the sunny radiance of real nature, locked away in the shallow space of the studio amid the piles of canvases and stretchers, he analyses the media of his art. He paints a series of compositions featuring this theme between 1920-1934, concluding it with "Crisis" (1934), a representation of a mannequin abandoned on scattered stretchers - a symbol of useless art. The picture's pessimistic message is in conjunction with another 1934 work, "Advertising", whose title was later changed to "Ecce Homo". The latter resounds with an even more accusatory tone than "Crisis", an accusation that is no longer about the tragic fate of the artist and art, but about the suffering of the simple man exemplified in the monumentalised figure of an old paperboy.

Weiss will achieve such monumental expression again in the picture concluding his oeuvre, "Manifesto" (1950), for which he wins the first prize in the 1st National Exhibition of Fine Arts.

In the last phase of Weiss's work the theme of Cracow returns. During the war he paints views of the Barbakan and the Floriańska Gate from the windows of his academy studio facing Basztowa street. This series of paintings is complemented by monotypes representing the St. Anna and Dominican churches in morning mist, woodcuts - e.g. "Morning In Front of St. Mary's Basilica", and finally a panoramic woodcut "Cracow From Afar", where above the rolling hills there appears on the horizon a skyline of the city that the artist has bound himself to for all his life. It is a return to the starting point, to Cracow, a city he chose as his permanent residence as a mature artist and professor of the Cracow academy, which he represented in many of his works, which he filled with his art. This series of Cracow motifs created towards the end of the artist's life represents an ultimate confirmation of the scale of values the artist has been faithful to all his life, it is a farewell with the immense store of national tradition, culture and history that the city has offered him, and which tradition has proved defining for his art.

Author: Irena and Łukasz Kossowcy, September 2005

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