Fishing port in Hel (Fishing boats bysea)

Michalina Krzyżanowska, née Pietruszewska, had professional contact with art thanks to Miłosz Kotarbiński, who ran a private painting school for women in Warsaw. Established in 1904, the Warsaw School of Fine Arts was the first school of its kind in the former lands of the Republic of Poland to introduce equal access to education for both genders. Already in the first year of its existence, Michalina, a talented woman from Volhynia, began her studies in the atelier of the Young Poland modernist Konrad Krzyżanowski. Michalina, called Mysza by the master, married him three years later. While still a student, completed in 1909, Krzyżanowska embarked on artistic journeys, and in Paris she took a course with the nabist Maurice Denis at the Académie Ranson (1907). Denis's repeated maxim about the essence of painting (Remember that a painting, before it becomes a battle horse, a naked woman, or any other anecdote, is first and foremost a flat surface covered with paints in a definite order, Definicja neotradycjonalizmu [Definition of Neo-Traditionalism] [1890], in Artyści o sztuce [Artists About Art], ed. by Elżbieta Grabska, Hanna Morawska, transl. Hanna Morawska, Warsaw 1969, p. 70) externalized itself in Krzyżanowska's works of the 1930s. Contrary to the practice of the great Frenchman, her landscape compositions rejected decorativeness, analysis and synthesis, manifesting - as a prominent critic poetically yet accurately put it - a pantheistic attitude to everything (Nela Samotyhowa, Michalina Krzyżanowska, Pion. Tygodnik Literacko-Społeczny 1935, no. 51, pp. 4-5). Among the numerous marinas of Gdynia and its surroundings, the views of the harbour in Hel deserve special attention. The surface of these pictures is organised by strips of concrete breakwaters and fishing buildings in the foreground. One of such modern, flat-painted Baltic landscapes was shown at the World Exhibition in New York in 1939.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak