Sea landscape

Teoria widzenia [Theory of Vision], one of Władysław Strzemiński's most important theoretical works, was written when the artist was living in poverty after being expelled from university for failing to adhere to Socialist Realist doctrine and progressing tuberculosis. Thanks to his students, it was published in 1958. Strzemiński was preoccupied with the issue of the consciousness of seeing and its historical transformations. The most important was the answer to the question of what visual awareness is. According to the artist, it is one of the degrees of reflection of the reality of the world that a given society has achieved at a given level of its historical development. The components of form are nothing else but means used to express a given visual awareness (W. Strzemiński, Teoria widzenia, Łódź 2016, p. 133). What does this mean? Teoria widzenia is a concept that speaks of conscious seeing and makes clear its transformations determined by cultural and civilisational changes, emphasising the interplay. There are two works by Strzemiński in the Szczecin collection: Pejzaż z łódkami [The Landscape with Boats] (c. 1950) and Pejzaż morski [The Seascape] (c. 1950). These works are an example of how the representation of reality on canvas could look like if the theoretical guidelines formulated by Strzemiński were adopted. First, there is an attempt to reflect the spatiotemporal perspective which assumes that the gaze is mobile and dependent on many factors. Moreover, in a specfifc way referring to the ideas of the Impressionists, he paints a picture using dashes, elongating the components of the representation, which determine the way of perception.

Beata Małgorzata Wolska