Were they really “rebels”? The Munich exhibition “Silent Rebels. Polish Symbolism around 1900”

His successor Ferdynand Ruszczyc saw the fragmentation of mankind embodied in the drama and dynamic of nature. In his paintings, he pursued a “pictorial vision of Earth”[36] and symbolised the uncontrollability of nature. The obvious proximity of his painting “The Cloud” (1902, Fig. 13 . ) to the almost identical subject matter painted in 1896 by the Swedish landscape artist Prince Eugen,[37] whose works expressed national romantic ideas in relation to the Swedish landscape, is evidence of Ruszczyc’ appreciation of Scandinavian painting. Similarly, Wojciech Weiss, who was Rector of the Kraków Academy from 1907, was inspired by Edvard Munch to create landscape images in which expressive light symbolism reflected inner states of the soul. His bleak autumn and winter landscapes, which embodied death and transience, were influenced by literary themes of Stanisław Przybyszewski. For many artists, the Tatra mountains and the spa town of Zakopane at their foot became a place of longing for pure, unadulterated nature and for an original sense of “Polishness”. In paintings such as “Foehn Wind” (1895, Fig. 11 . right) Stanisław Witkiewicz, who moved there in 1890, created images of his vision of a “symbolic meaning of the majestically lying rocks”[38] in the form of a national pictorial epos. 

To date, childhood and youth have hardly been acknowledged at all as a separate theme in European Symbolism, although there is sufficient evidence in favour of doing so. While since the early industrial period, children had been brought up as small adults in bourgeois circles, or out of simple necessity were maltreated as work slaves within the poorer levels of society, at the turn of the 20th century, childhood was perceived as being a separate phase in life, with youth as the flourishing of life. Finally, the Lebensreform movement (Fidus: “Light Prayer”, 1913) viewed children as powerful figures of light. This change in attitude is also reflected in numerous Symbolist works. In Hans von Marées work showing “Life Ages” (1873/74), children play a central role. Puvis de Chavannes had crowds of children playing naked and outdoors with sheep in the presence of their mothers (“Summer”, 1873). For Elisabeth Sonrel, they became a symbol of blossoming life (“Procession of Flora”, 1897), and Maurice Denis also rarely passed up on an opportunity to include children in his pictorial scenes (“Holy Women at the Tomb”, 1894). Magnus Enckell depicted a naked boy pondering over a skull as a symbol of human fate (1892). In Max Klinger’s and Edvard Munch’s works, children sit or stand at the bed of their dead mother, or for Walter Crane are mown down by the “Reaper” (1900/09). Jens Willumsen shows a boy running under a blazing sun after his anguished mother, whose husband has died a seaman’s death (“After the Tempest”, 1905). For Segantini, children in a tree symbolise the “Angel of Life” or the “Child Murderer” (both 1894). Young adults at the crossroads between innocence and awakening sensuality are portrayed by Franz von Stuck (“Innocentia”, 1889) and Ferdinand Hodler (“Spring”, 1901). “The Strange Garden” (1903) by the Polish artist Józef Mehoffer, which is displayed and acknowledged early on in the exhibition has given rise to various different interpretations of the naked boy with raised hollyhock stems: from Puck in a Polish “Midsummer Day’s Dream”[39] to the “notion of a carefree existence far removed from all time and civilisation”, as Godetzky writes in the fourth contribution to the Munich catalogue in an essay entitled “Street Children of the Atelier”.[40]

To the credit of the Munich exhibition, it dedicates an entire section to this topic (exhibition room text: “Spring Awakening”), filling it with works from Polish museums that are rarely shown (Fig. 14 . ). Similarly to the Symbolist works from other European countries which associate childhood and youth with themes such as “innocence, purity, incorruptibility, new beginnings, life force, religious piety, the natural world and, above all, spring”,[41] Wojciech Weiss showed a youthful figure at the threshold between childhood and sexual awakening (“Springtime”, 1898, Fig. 15 . ), while in the background, naked adults chase each other in the open fields. During this same period, Weiss studied the writings of Przybyszewski, in which he discussed sexual awakening and erotic desire as the real impulses for tensions within society.[42] Malczewski portrays himself as a satyr with cloven hoofs, abducting two street urchins (“My Models”, 1897, Fig. 16 . ) into the realm of fantasy, surreal dreams and creativity on the path leading to his atelier. This atelier, according to reports by the contemporary writer and art critic Konstanty Górski, was “a place of libertinism and frivolity”[43]. Malczewski’s pupil Wlastimil Hofman depicted “Spring” (1918, Fig. 14 . left centre) as a childlike faun or satyr, a typical creature from the Symbolist world of Arnold Böcklin,[44] thus portraying childhood as a time of uncontrolled, unpredictable animalist impulses.