Dance

Rafał Malczewski, the son of the symbolist painter Jacek Malczewski and a keen mountaineer, studied between 1910 and 1915 at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University and at the Higher School of Natural Resources and Applied Biological Sciences in Vienna. From 1917, he was associated with Zakopane, the most important Polish mountain resort and the unofficial summer capital of national art of the early 20th century. He recorded the lively social life there in the painting Taniec [Dance], first presented at the Regional Exhibition of the Podhale Art Society in 1924. In contrast to the patriotic and popular interests of most of his colleagues from this group, Malczewski reached for a motif close to both the Italian Futurists and the German Expressionists, whose works he admired during his stay in the cosmopolitan capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Taniec, freed from the conventions of traditional form, became then a synonym of modernity. North American jazz, which originated in Black Africa, or Latin American tango were particularly often evoked by the inter-war avant-garde. To its moderate wing belonged precisely the young Malczewski, for whom balls in Zakopane were what parties in Baden-Baden were for Max Beckmann (Tanz in Baden-Baden, 1923, Sammlung Moderne Kunst, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich), although a similar atmosphere was also shared by many Polish artists (Wacław Roguski, Dancing, c. 1922, National Museum in Poznań). Here, the sculptural and highly simplified silhouettes of the couple, entwined in the figure of the tango, fill the whole height of the composition, and the perspective da sotto in sù adds to their monumentality. The jazz band shown in the background is obscured by musical attributes which, by reducing the shapes to flat circles of various sizes, intensify the impression of spinning. The whole is complemented by crystalline faceted broken stuccos in the background. The crowdedness of the representation and the way the main characters are portrayed seem to expand the frame of the painting, reflecting the vitality of the crazy 1920s.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak