Snowstorm in a forest

The Impressions from Białowieża portfolio belongs to the mature graphic works of Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936), who devoted more than thirty years of his artistic activity to graphic art, abandoning oil painting in its favour. He became interested in the graphic medium around 1900. Already as a mature artist he began to analyse the technical possibilities of etching, aquatint, algraphy, fluorophores and, above all, lithography. Thanks to the similar effects of a lithographic print and drawing and painting, and the possibility of experimentation, which best suited Wyczółkowski's preferences and temperament, lithography became his favourite technique. He published cycles of graphic works in low-circulation folders devoted to landscapes and architecture of Polish cities. The Impressions from Białowieża portfolio is characterised by an impressionistic vision of nature saturated with individual sensitivity. It consists of ten sheets created as a result of Wyczółkowski's trip to the Białowieża Forest in 1921. “I am a child of the forest” – said the artist about himself, fascinated with the beauty of the forest landscape and the anatomy of trees, which became one of the main motifs of his late graphics. The sketches and paintings created during his stay in the forest became the source of the graphic sheets of the portfolio published a year later in Krakow. The artist produced them using the lithographic technique, which he combined with stonework, giving the prints an effect of sharpened bright drawing and silvery tone. The asymmetrical composition of the sheet reveals the influence of Japanese woodcuts - the fragment of nature, surprisingly framed by Wyczółkowski, is an equivalent and synthesis of a forest landscape. The intentional reduction of form emphasizes the power of graphic expression enclosed in the contrast between the whiteness of almost ornamentally outlined trees in a snowy glade and the blackness of calligraphic shapes of branches emerging from under the snow. Blowing, bending frosted trees and diagonal lines, emphasizing the direction of the wind, become a sublimation of the forest hidden in the blizzard.

Anna Hałata