On beach in Orłowo

In 1923, Wacław Wąsowicz joined the Rytm Association of Polish Artists. This organisation, bringing together various creative attitudes, was characterised by combining formal innovations developed by modernism with the tradition of classical art - an attitude that led to the crystallisation of the art déco style in France. In Garliński's salon in Warsaw in spring 1925, next to folk motifs, Wąsowicz showed arcadian scenes with musicians and designs of salons and boudoirs. A trip to Paris on the occasion of the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts intensified his interest in the old masters of colour painting, as well as the precursors of modernity: Eugène Delacroix, Maurice Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy. Also in their works, created under the influence of Giorgione and Titian, Wąsowicz found idyllic fêtes champêtres and fêtes galantes with naked muses on a meadow and bathing in the open air. In 1926, the Polish artist visited Gdańsk Pomerania, staying longer in Gdynia. His stay by the Baltic resulted in numerous landscape sketches, genre scenes and port compositions. The painting Na plaży w Orłowie [On the Beach in Orłowo] depicts a group of three contemporary muses in swimming trunks, namely, figures forming a Renaissance triangular arrangement in the foreground. The sea with a steamboat shown in the background is enclosed on the right by a tall tree. On the left, Wąsowicz immortalized the Görtz family's curhaus and fishing house, today known as Żeromski's House due to the writer's holiday hospitality in 1920. In the Szczecin collection there is also a watercolour variant of this composition and a watercolour entitled Przed hotelem w Orłowie [Before the Hotel in Orłowo], which shows the bathing beach from a slightly further perspective.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak