Fishing port in Hel (Fishing boats bysea)

Stefan Filipkiewicz's teachers included Józef Mehoffer, Józef Pankiewicz and Leon Wyczółkowski, but the young artist was most influenced by Jan Stanisławski. When he took over the chair of landscape painting at Kraków's School of Fine Arts in 1897, the school was undergoing thorough reforms in the spirit of Modernism, initiated by its new director, Julian Fałat. The beginning of Filipkiewicz's eight-year studies coincided with the institution obtaining the status of an academy and a symbolist breakthrough in Stanisławski's work. The master was one of the most popular and influential teachers, attracting to his studio over 60 male and female students (the latter within the framework of Tola Certowiczówna's School of Painting and Drawing for Women). In his approach, devoid of staffage and any literary allusions, a landscape was pure, and from the beginning of the 20th century, through a synthesis of observed motifs, also metaphysical. Studying nature in the open air, as the Barbizon and Impressionist painters did, revolutionised Polish artistic teaching and defined the shape of domestic landscape painting for several decades. Student excursions organised by Stanisławski to the Botanical Garden and Jordan Park in Kraków, to Tyniec and Zakopane, made students sensitive to the beauty of the Malopolska Region and the Podhale Region. Thus, Filipkiewicz, who came from Tarnów, made sure of the attractiveness of mountain themes, with which he debuted in 1899 in the halls of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts, and with which he powered numerous exhibitions (in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, London, Venice, among others) during his education. In 1913, he became a lecturer at the Industrial School in Kraków, and in 1930 at his Alma Mater. At that time, Baltic landscape appeared in his art, the study, immortalisation and popularisation of which resulted from the internal need of citizens of the Second Republic of Poland, but also the propaganda of the maritime state, which organized official plein-airs, exhibitions and maritime institutions.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak