Olga Boznańska. Kraków – Munich – Paris

Boznańska’s “Florists” (1889, Ill. 5), one of the artist’s earliest pictures of children and one of her rare genre motifs, was also shown at the same TPSP exhibition: it repeats Manet’s concept in his “Intérieur à Arcachon” (1871, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown), with the table at the window, the urban landscape behind, and an identical view of the wall and part of a window above. But the very many contemporary pictures of women sewing at a window, including those by Uhde (1883, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe) and the Finn, Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905) – by whom an eponymous motif could be seen at the International Exhibition of Art in Munich in 1888[17] – might also have served as models for Boznańska’s “Japanese Woman” completed in the same year (1889, Ill. 6) and oriented on Whistler’s “Little White Girl” with her white dress and similar characteristics. Even more comprehensively she copied Whistler’s painting “From a Walk” (1889, Ill. 7) in so-called “ symphonies of colour”, a narrowly reduced but richly variegated colour scale ranging from black to white and grey tones seen in his “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1” (1872, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), for the portrait of a mother. Boznańska seems to have taken her daisy blossoms from Whistler’s “Harmony in Grey and Green“, the portrait of “Miss Cicely Alexander“ (1872/74, Tate London); and the umbrellas on her lap from Manet’s “In the Winter Garden” (“Dans la Serre”, 1879, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin). In the same year Boznańska’s work was presented in Aleksander Krywult’s art salon in Warsaw. The critics’ reaction was lukewarm.

Between 1890 and 1892 Boznańska mostly painted portraits of women and children in Munich and Kraków. The large-scale, representative portrait of Zofia Federowicz (1890, Ill. 8), the daughter of a Kraków town councillor and wife of the merchant and politician, Jan Kanty Ferderowicz (1858-1924), reveals her as a gifted artist who did not shy away from unusual poses and backgrounds and was able to skilfully drape her in a white dress in the composition. The studio wall, on which paintings, reproductions and possibly Japanese coloured woodcuts could be seen, has also been compared to the composition in Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola (1868, Musée d'Orsay, Paris).[18] The walls in Boznańska’s studio, here presumably in Kraków, but also in Theresienstraße in Munich and, from 1894 onwards in Georgenstraße in the Munich suburb of Schwabing, were indeed covered in loosely hung drawings, reproductions, photos and maps, as is shown in a photo taken at some time between 1892 and 1894.[19] On the painting, as in the same studio photo, a reproduction of one of Diego Velázquez’s portraits of infantas can be seen, probably the “Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Pink Dress” (1653/54, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Boznańska might have seen the series of infantas in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna during a family trip to the World Exhibition in 1881. Two of her young friends from her time at the Baraniecki School in Kraków, Irena Serda (‑Zbigniewiczowa, 1863-1954) and Joanna Seiffman (‑Getterowa), who studied in Munich between 1895 and 1898, also wrote, as did Czajkowski, of Boznańska’s extraordinary interest in Velázquez, that would also later occur to Polish critics writing about her portraits.[20]

[17] Illustrated catalogue of the III International Art Exhibition (Munich Jubilee Exhibition) in the Königl. Glaspalaste in Munich 1888, Munich 1888, no. 920; online: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0000/bsb00002401/images/index.html?seite=00001&l=de 

[18] Exhibition cat. Olga Boznańska, Kraków 2014, page 170; Exhibition cat. Olga Boznańska (1865-1940), Warsaw 2015, page 111

[19] Olga Boznańska in her studio in Munich, 1892/94, National Museum in Kraków/Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, Inv. no. MNK VIII-a-rkps-1064/6, pictured in the exhibition cat. Olga Boznańska, Kraków 2014, page 312

[20] Ewa Bobrowska: Olga Boznańska and Her Artistic Friendships, in: Exhibition cat. Olga Boznańska, Kraków 2014, page 63-74