Rozewie at sunset (view on Hel from Rozewie)

The return of Stefan Filipkiewicz - a graduate and now a lecturer - to the walls of Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts coincided with an increased interest in Pomerania and the Baltic landscape among professors and their students. In the 1920s Władysław Jarocki, Stanisław Kamocki, Henryk Uziembło and Leon Wyczółkowski visited the Baltic sporadically. A fresh graduate of the academy, Marian Turwid, recalled years later the formation of the academic Maritime Committee, which from 1930 was to promote the replacement of the summer open air from the traditional Podhale to the new, unknown northern provinces. He ironised: We have had enough of mountains and mountain pastures. We don't want to paint Morskie Oko any more, only the sea depths. And that from Gdańsk - all the way (in the meantime) to Krokowo. (Pierwsza fala [The First Wave], Arkona 1946, no. 11, pp. 12-13). Filipkiewicz belonged to those representatives of the landscape school of Jan Stanisławski who started to come regularly to the region of Jastrzębia Góra, Rozewie and Hel. He recorded the surroundings of the cape and the peninsula in numerous paintings, constructed in an almost identical way: with a cliff overgrown with lush bushes in the foreground and the sea background, composed on a diagonal line and contrasted in terms of colour or value. In accordance with the principles instilled by the master, the staffage appears extremely rarely, minimised to a fisherman's boat pulled onto the beach or a lonely sailing boat against the blue background. Similar motifs appeared in Filipkiewicz's monographic exhibitions held in the 1930s, as well as in the three Maritime Exhibitions held in 1937, 1938 and 1939, alternately organized by the Warsaw Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts and the Society for the Friends of the Fine Arts in Kraków. The critics were usually mild in their assessment of the works, although voices on the use of an outdated formula of the beginning of the century and Filipkiewicz's routine were not isolated. The artist was followed in Jastrzębia Góra by other graduates of the Kraków Academy: his younger brother Mieczysław, Ignacy Pieńkowski and Wojciech Weiss.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak