Fruit

From 1890, Wojciech Weiss took part in drawing courses held at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He decided to study there between 1892 and 1896. After a short fascination with Jan Matejko's historicism and his first trips to the capitals of the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, he was accepted into the master class of modernist Leon Wyczółkowski. The catastrophic vision of the world taken from Stanisław Przybyszewski became a hallmark of Weiss's decadent period. Between 1900 and 1901, the artist visited Paris twice, and a sojourn in Italy between 1902 and 1903 helped him bid farewell to the Expressionist style and adopt the fresco palette of the old masters. In 1910, he became a professor at Krakow's academy, of which he was subsequently rector three times (in 1918/19, 1933/34, 1935/36). Both his return to the school's walls as a lecturer and the growing pan-European wave of New Classicism strengthened Weiss's personal search. Awareness of the arrival of a period of full maturity was manifested in the allegorical composition Owoce [Fruits]. A muscular, post-impressionistically painted male nude replaced the previously referenced image of a boy and a young man. The painting, awarded the Probus Barczewski Prize of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, became part of the tradition of the Arcadian motif of a naked man picking fruit, represented in more recent art history by Hans von Marées's fresco from the building of the Naples Zoological Station (1873). The haptic nature of the depicted body foreshadowed his practical interest in sculpture between 1915 and 1920, it is only through sculpture that the painter acquires a true vision of form, and expands his painterly concerns (Szkicownik Wojciecha Weissa [The Sketchbook of Wojciech Weiss], op. by Aneri Irena Weissowa, Stanisław Weiss, Kraków 1976, p. 75).

Szymon Piotr Kubiak

From 1890, Wojciech Weiss took part in drawing courses held at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He decided to study there between 1892 and 1896. After a short fascination with Jan Matejko's historicism and his first trips to the capitals of the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, he was accepted into the master class of modernist Leon Wyczółkowski. The catastrophic vision of the world taken from Stanisław Przybyszewski became a hallmark of Weiss's decadent period. Between 1900 and 1901, the artist visited Paris twice, and a sojourn in Italy between 1902 and 1903 helped him bid farewell to the Expressionist style and adopt the fresco palette of the old masters. In 1910, he became a professor at Krakow's academy, of which he was subsequently rector three times (in 1918/19, 1933/34, 1935/36). Both his return to the school's walls as a lecturer and the growing pan-European wave of New Classicism strengthened Weiss's personal search. Awareness of the arrival of a period of full maturity was manifested in the allegorical composition Owoce [Fruits]. A muscular, post-impressionistically painted male nude replaced the previously referenced image of a boy and a young man. The painting, awarded the Probus Barczewski Prize of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, became part of the tradition of the Arcadian motif of a naked man picking fruit, represented in more recent art history by Hans von Marées's fresco from the building of the Naples Zoological Station (1873). The haptic nature of the depicted body foreshadowed his practical interest in sculpture between 1915 and 1920, it is only through sculpture that the painter acquires a true vision of form, and expands his painterly concerns (Szkicownik Wojciecha Weissa [The Sketchbook of Wojciech Weiss], op. by Aneri Irena Weissowa, Stanisław Weiss, Kraków 1976, p. 75).

Szymon Piotr Kubiak