Landscape

Mountain landscapes became Franciszek Rerutkiewicz's favourite painting theme from the time he settled in Zakopane in 1918. His work from that time, characterised by the use of a darkened, muted colour palette, was at the same time characterised by textural diversity of the painting surface. The artist developed the problem of expressionistic representation of nature as an expression of emotions, experience, and individual sensation.

In Pejzaż [Landscape], painted before 1920, a road climbing upwards, framed by a black contour, diagonally cuts across the surface of the painting. Its course is marked by sun-scorched grass, shown in rusty tufts in the foreground, and a diversified line of trees closing the background of the painting, developed in the hilly landscape and in rough strokes of the glowing sky. The individual parts of the painting acquire a different notation. Short brush strokes mark the diagonal path of the foreground and the blue sky. Swirling shapes define a part of the green treetops, and finally, softly frayed strands of paint create a varied terrain stretching away to the horizon. The artist diversifies the imagined scenery, shaping it with various painting textures, composing closer plans more clearly and expressively, and treating the line of hills running away into the distance more gently and freely. The painting thus acquires an ambivalent character, combining the austere image of nature as a violent element and the calm landscape seen from afar with harmoniously depicted cold and warm colours.

Rerutkiewicz's mountain landscape is a record of his subjective experience of nature, but it is also a combination of various conventions defining the development of painting in the first decades of the 20th century, interpreting landscape as a painterly, geometrised construction and an effect of expressive expression. These different references testify to the artist's search for a modern form.