Melancholy

Zbigniew Pronaszko started his art studies at the Kiev Academy and between 1906 and 1911 he continued education the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in order to eventually return to it as a rector almost forty years later. The artist ˗ painter, sculptor and stage designer ˗ fascinated with the works of Paul Cézanne and the accomplishments of Cubists and Futurists ˗ is primarily known as the co-founder and member of Formists (Polish Expressionists), namely an avant-garde art group of the inter-war period. The painting of the twenty-four year old Zbigniew Pronaszko in the collections of the Szczecin Museum, created during his studies in the studio of Jacek Malczewski, is a type of a self-reflection on the artistic creation where the echoes of the fin de siècle mood resound discreetly. It presents a quiet and modest studio with a woman peeking inside through a half-open door from behind a curtain, looking silently at the artist sitting by the easel in the foreground; he is a mature man lost in his thoughts, with his eyes fixed on the canvass. A painter in his studio ˗ a theme overgrown with many years of tradition, with diverse connotations (ancient and Biblical) ˗ offers Pronaszko a pretext to think about the creative process and forms an illustration for the frame of mind, the melancholia from the title, resulting from creative inertia and inability to overcome it.

Dariusz Kacprzak