Drowning person

Alfred Geisler attended the Warsaw School of Fine Arts in 1905/1906. In the following year, he went to Paris, where he immediately presented himself as a talented landscape and portrait painter. Compositions based on the representational patterns of the Renaissance and Mannerism became a frequent motif in his work. During an exhibition of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1919, Geisler presented the painting Topielec (The Drowned). A year later he joined the Central Institute of Propaganda in Warsaw, for which he made posters, placards and banners. In the early 1920s, Geisler also published satirical drawings in the magazines Szczutek, Łazik and Ochotnik. These caricatures testified to the expressionistic predilections of the author. Geisler's paintings were attributed to French influences, noticeable in the colour palette characteristic for the successors of Cézanne. In the painting from the Szczecin's collection, the artist returned to the genre motif immortalized already in his youth. However, the arrangement of the figures evokes clear associations with the iconographic type of mourning for Christ, well-established in Christian art. The women in Breton bonnets are the contemporary Three Maries, while the men in fisherman's capes, supporting the greenish body of the deceased in a white perizonium, play here the role of Saints John, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. The combination of religious and maritime motifs allows us to place this canvas in the tradition of modern French painting, initiated by the Norman works of the realist Pierre-Marie Beyle and culminating in Georges Rouault's Christological paintings with fishermen from the late 1930s. The work of the latter, in particular, seemed to inspire Geisler's expressive treatment of colour and strong formal simplifications, giving the representation a strong emotional charge.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak