Cheremosh (Blue river)

Fryderyk Pautsch was born in Delatyń, on the north-western border of the Hucul region. He came from a Czech family, but throughout his life functioned at the junction of Polish and German-speaking culture (Austrian and Prussian). After artistic studies in Krakow and Paris he settled in Lviv, whose location enabled frequent trips to his beloved family's Eastern Carpathians. Expressive in composition and the way of applying paint and its saturated colour, far from ethnographic literalism, his works on the Hutsul theme brought Pautsch fame already in 1907. A year later he joined the Cracow Society of Polish Artists Sztuka, in 1911 the Lvov Society of Applied Art Zespół, and in 1912 the Vienna Hagenbund. Thanks to these contacts, he met Hans Poelzig, who offered Pautsch the leadership in the preparatory course of the reformed Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts in Wrocław. As its professor and German citizen, he became a member of the local Künstlerbund Schlesien (1913). After his wartime service as a front painter, he returned to the Wrocław academy and in 1919 moved to the Polonised city of Poznań, where he became director of the newly established School of Decorative Arts and Arts Industry. In 1925, he received a chair at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, with which he was associated for the rest of his life. The Hutsul Region and its borderland remained close to him. He returned to the views from Kosovo, depicting city fairs, the Huk waterfall on Rybnica, folk types in festive costumes and rafters at work. The motif of floating timber on the nearby Czeremosz River, taken up in several paintings from 1910, returned in the Szczecin composition. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, these lands were a well-promoted tourist product: In a word, everything is on the right track to make the Hutsul Region the second Podhale, wrote Jan Falkowski (Północno-wschodnie pogranicze Huculszczyzny [North-Eastern Borderland of the Hutsul Region], Lviv 1938, p. 62). As in the case of the Zakopane region, this culture was also claimed by the Nazis, who denied the Hutsuls any Slavic roots in their pseudo-scientific theses.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak