Portrait of Henryk Opieński

The rich artistic output of Stanisław Wyspiański, a playwright, painter and designer of applied forms, testifies to his fascination with modernist ideas of a total work of art embracing all areas of culture and permeating everyday life. A reflection of the issues of genre syncretism or synesthesia, fashionable at the turn of the 20th century, which used to combine the experiences of various senses in a single work, is visible in the image of Henryk Opieński. This artistically gifted Krakow resident was one of Wyspiański's closest school friends. He studied music with Władysław Żeleński for two years, but his parents chose a profession in chemistry. It was thanks to the persuasion of the fourth bard that Opieński, at the beginning of his career as a civil servant, decided to undertake additional studies of instrumental music, composition and musicology in Paris and Berlin. From 1901 he was already prominent in the cultural life of the country - he worked at the Municipal Theatre in Lviv, as well as the Philharmonic Hall, the Grand Theatre and the Polish Theatre in Warsaw. In the field of theory, he was active as founder of the periodical Kwartalnik Muzyczny and author of textbook studies on the history of universal and Polish music. The double plane depiction of the likeness of the later monographer of Fryderyk Chopin and Ignacy Jan Paderewski suggests the multi-view motif inherent in a spatial work. The realism of the foreground figure was juxtaposed with the symbolic representation of a hand superimposed on a score visible in the background of the composition. This characteristic trick was used at the time by many Central European artists interested in a synthesis of music and visual arts. The double contour, encircling Opieński's bust and increasing the 'sonorousness' of the painting, was characteristic of early Expressionist works. The unexpected musical contrast of the blue line and the ochre background of the paper proves the mastery of the pastel technique, which Wyspiański used exclusively from 1894 onwards.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak