Artist and muse (Allegorical scene)

Between 1905 and 1909, Wacław Borowski studied at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts under Józef Mehoffer and Stanisław Wyspiański. Their fascination with Polish folklore and the world of antiquity was shared by many of his students. Staying in Paris until the outbreak of the First World War, Borowski supplemented his historical and artistic knowledge with ancient, medieval and oriental originals. Frequent visits to the Louvre, Musée de Cluny and Musée Guimet were interspersed with trips to Italy, which deepened the artist's interest in the Renaissance period. These patterns then formed the basis of the theories of Maurice Denis, an amateur-folklorist and Neo-Classicist who seemed to have invented a new formula for pan-European aspirations. From these fresh inspirations came the Allegorical Scene - with a muse in a folk robe and a nude of a young male exotic. The field of an elongated vertical rectangle is filled almost completely with a figure of a woman in a blue shawl, a white dress with sleeves ending in buffets and falling cuffs, and a geometrised floral border visually merged with field flora in the lower part of the composition. The motif of closed eyelids and the head of the protagonist tilted back, an expression of artistic exaltation, appeared at the time in the works of several Polish Parisians. The group included Xawery Dunikowski's sculptural portrait of Leopold Gottlieb (in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin) and Gottlieb's painting of Borowski (in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw). It is the latter that allows us to identify Borowski's Szczecin canvas with his symbolic self-portrait: the painter's hair has darkened and the beard has given way to a neatly groomed face, but the strongly defined eyebrow arches, almond-shaped eyes, sunken cheeks, full lips and prominent chin are characteristic features of the artist's physiognomy. The painting combines two painting styles, i.e. model-like, haptic treatment of the complexion with a stylised and demonstrably flat landscape.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak