Forest

Leon Wyczółkowski is one of the leading representatives of Young Poland. He began his education in Warsaw in 1869 under Antoni Kamiński, Rafał Hadziewicz and Wojciech Gerson in the Drawing Class (until 1875). Then he went to the atelier of Alexander Wagner in Munich. Between 1877 and 1879, he honed his skills with Jan Matejko at the School of Fine Arts in Kraków, where he began teaching in 1895. He taught there until 1911. In the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin, there is a painting entitled Las [Forest], painted around 1910, a year before he finished his work at the Kraków Academy. In the foreground, one can see a dark-grey trunk of a spruce tree with few branches, while in the background, tree trunks drowning in darkness. An atmosphere of mystery has been created as a kind of invitation to enter the forest at night, which one does not want to accept due to the fear of the unknown. The same view presented at a different time of day would have a completely different symbolic load, which the artist uses to build the uniqueness of the work. Nature for Wyczółkowski was a vital source of motifs for artistic processing. He treated it directly, emotionally - not objectively.

Beata Małgorzata Wolska