Hutsul

The Hutsul Region, called the Slavic Atlantis by Stanisław Vincenz, a Polish ethnographer, essayist and expert on Hutsul culture, inspired many artists of the Young Poland period who were fascinated with folklore. The character of the Carpathian highlanders, their rituals and customs became the subject of paintings by, among others: Teodor Axentowicz, Władysław Jarocki, Fryderyk Pautsch, Kazimierz Sichulski, Leon Wyczółkowski. Among the most important illustrators of Hutsul folklore was Kazimierz Sichulski, who went to the Hutsul region for the first time at the turn of 1904 and 1905 together with Fryderyk Pautsch and Władysław Jarocki. An interest in the colourfulness and exoticism of folk customs, the cultural diversity of the Hutsuls representing the world of traditional values accompanied the artist until the 1920s, and resulted in a considerable number of portraits and genre scenes devoted to the culture of that region. In them, it was not so much the presentation of the compositional values of the painting as the grasp of life and sincerity of the message in expressing the deeply experienced reality. In the image of the Hutsul painted in pastels, Sichulski reveals his respect for the strength and vitality of the inhabitants of the Eastern Carpathians. The study is distinguished by a peculiar monumentality, emphasised by the melancholic, distant gaze of the man. The idealisation of the figure is accompanied by the simplification of form, intense colours and decorativeness of the Art Nouveau, wavy line. The sense of colour and the way of handling light indicates assimilation of solutions proposed by the Impressionists. Analysing the interplay of colours saturated with light - yellow, orange, red and brown, Sichulski juxtaposes them with the blue imposed in the shadow parts. A figure bathed in sunlight becomes a display of the artist's colouristic bravura and luminous sensitivity, as he makes use of the effects of luminous reflections gliding over the blazing face, hands and sergeant's jacket of the portrayed, intensifying the uniform plane of the background.

Anna Hałata