Landscape

Wilhelm Wyrwiński was a soldier of the Legions who took part in the First World War, during which he was killed. In his short artistic career he left a few works that testify to his great talent. Already in the 1920s, a monograph on the artist's work was written by Przecław Smolik, a social activist from Łódź, together with Władysław Strzemiński, organiser of the Museum of Art in Łódź – the first museum of modern art in Europe. What interested Smolik in Wyrwiński's work was his consistent search for new forms replacing the realism of the previous century with stylised and decorative painting.

Pejzaż [Landscape], described here, is an important testimony to these transformations. It combines a dark patch of brown shore with a lightened fever of blues, pinks and yellows, defining an open landscape of a lake melted with the sky. This play of colours has been combined with decorative effects – the flowing line of the shore, the arabesque of the branches of a leaning tree, the supple pattern of waves spreading on the surface of the water, complemented by dense ornaments of clumps of plants on the shore.

Pejzaż conveys an atmosphere of rest combined with the feeling of an open landscape. Relaxation results from the harmony of softly passing colours and subtly conducted line, replacing realistic study with subtle rhythmisation of space. Smolik rightly observed Wyrwiński's arduous search for a new type of imagery. And although his work was situated between Young Poland secession and modern abstraction, the decorative arrangement of forms accentuating a shallow surface already belonged to 20th century expression.

Marcin Lachowski