STRYJEŃSKA
Zofia Stryjeńska, 1920s, Illustrated Concern Daily Courier - Illustration Archive, National Digital Archive
Zofia Stryjeńska and her Slavic deities in a suitcase.
She was said to be a strange bird. She seemed like an alien from Mars. In the 1970s she dressed with an elegance worthy of Coco Chanel, in highly anachronistic tweed suits stressing her unnatural thinness, in gloves and a worn-out hat—in summer with a low-cut crown. She kept her hats in the icebox. With scissors, she cut the sleeves off her sweaters and blouses above the elbow, so they wouldn’t get in the way when she was painting. She often roosted at the legendary Parisian café Le Tabou, surrounded by barefoot women in sweaters that “lay on them like a tailcoat on a dog.” She felt at home there.
Zofia Stryjeńska, glove designs, 1930s, private collection, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Zofia Stryjeńska, glove designs, 1930s, private collection, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Zofia Stryjeńska, glove designs, 1930s, private collection, courtesy of the artist's heirs
During the interwar period she was hailed as the princess of Polish painting. Critics dubbed her a Slavic goddess or sorceress. And just as often as about her art, they wrote about the scandals she was linked with. How her husband deceitfully had her locked up in an institution for the mentally ill, or how her exhibition was seized by creditors. She had the reputation of a brilliant madwoman. Someone who out of jealousy would cut up a tailcoat into tiny pieces, who would run around Paris with a revolver in her hand, and on her wedding day would disappear without a word and have people search for her hundreds of kilometres away. All because, as she herself wrote, she was sometimes seized by a powerful mania.
Paulina Ołowska, Slavic Goddesses Gloves after Zofia Stryjeńska, 2018, courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery
Her curly black hair was bobbed at the line of her chin. She also had black eyes—unfortunately, because instead of “windows onto a sultry abyss, where the soul trembles before nothingness,” she would prefer a view of the sky. She dressed elegantly. From time to time she wore something in a national style, a patterned knit vest or a blouse with cross-stitching. When she travelled to Munich to study art, she cut her hair short and for a year wore her brother’s clothes. Madly in love, she borrowed dresses, including one with a huge pink bow, and transformed herself into a coquettish nymph. When she was pregnant she concealed her bump under a painter’s smock converted into a fantastic vest. When she was painting, she sometimes went days without bathing. And in a creative frenzy she would roll on the floor.
Zofia Stryjeńska, Seasons. July-August (Procession III - with a cow), 1925, collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Zofia Stryjeńska, Seasons. November-December (Procession I - with a deer), 1925, collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Her fondness for fashion began atypically, with gloves. Stryjeńska’s father operated a shop on ul. Św. Anny in Kraków. The firm was called F. Lubański and specialized in gloves. Short, long, made to measure. As a child Zosia often drew here, typically on a topic suggested by her father, sometimes indeed gloves.
Over a decade later Stryjeńska would design a whole series of avant-garde glove/bags, with playful pockets on the back of the hand. One pair would be highly abstract, nearly constructivist, another more decorative, with a motif of a stylized thistle blooming within a geometrically divided construction. She precisely specified the colours and types of material, and even the stitching. But she never realized them. That would be done only decades later by Paulina Ołowska, an artist who would revive the dust-covered ideals of Stryjeńska, bringing to life a Slavic utopia.
Polish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris, 1925, postcard
Her father the glovemaker also played another role. Every morning he took her shopping, and the pair would return from the Kraków market square with a wealth of diverse loot. It was here Stryjeńska for the first time was inundated with Slavonism and homespun folk culture, which with time would become a leitmotif of her work. She encountered tradeswomen in starched skirts and colourful headscarves, mountaineers in traditional costumes, and peasants in hats decorated with trinkets. An endless fête and booths with wonders. Costumes whose colours evoked an enchanted meadow, and drunken shows when the same skirts would flutter upward and sinful swellings would flash before an amphitheatre of onlookers. She described all these impressions in her diary. Years later she said that she would spend her life painting this vision from her early youth. But also that none of its cheap pretences could match the enchantment and delight in squeezing through the crowd of colourful figures.
Zofia Stryjeńska, Dziedzilia, Pepperuga, Marzanna, Pogoda, from the portfolio 'Slavic Gods', 1934, National Museum in Warsaw, collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Zofia Stryjeńska, Dziedzilia, Pepperuga, Marzanna, Pogoda, from the portfolio 'Slavic Gods', 1934, National Museum in Warsaw, collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Zofia Stryjeńska, Dziedzilia, Pepperuga, Marzanna, Pogoda, from the portfolio 'Slavic Gods', 1934, National Museum in Warsaw, collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Zofia Stryjeńska, Dziedzilia, Pepperuga, Marzanna, Pogoda, from the portfolio 'Slavic Gods', 1934, National Museum in Warsaw, collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Folk costumes and this specific, unpretentious atmosphere would become a private obsession for her. She would paint the seasons, the elements, and the most diverse Slavic rituals. She juxtaposed folk culture with fashionable art deco, and geometrical form with a synthetic blemish. She cultivated her own style, which with time became a national style.
When Jerzy Warchałowski invited her to paint six panels for the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, Stryjeńska hesitated. It was June 1924. She had just given birth to twins, and she was to paint the works in Warsaw. She agreed, but immediately changed her mind. She bought a ticket then tore it to shreds. She wouldn’t go, she wouldn’t serve the Slavic deities. Or perhaps she was too easily “selling her lute for comfortable serenity”? After all, the gods would have their revenge. She worked for several frenzied months. She painted the seasons embellished by Slavic mythology, a personification of the months in fantastic costumes. Processions of folk figures in caps like crystals, in crowns of sheaves of wheat, in linen robes decorated with geometrical patterns, in embroidered bodices and jackets. The boisterous openings and the works themselves around the pavilion did not amuse her. She returned from Paris with four grand prizes.
Zofia Stryjeńska, costume design - Harnaś V, Narzeczona, Góralka to the ballet Harnasie K. Szymanowski, 1934, collections of the Theater Museum - Grand Theater - National Opera in Warsaw, special collections of the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Zofia Stryjeńska, costume design - Harnaś V, Narzeczona, Góralka to the ballet Harnasie K. Szymanowski, 1934, collections of the Theater Museum - Grand Theater - National Opera in Warsaw, special collections of the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Zofia Stryjeńska, costume design - Harnaś V, Narzeczona, Góralka to the ballet Harnasie K. Szymanowski, 1934, collections of the Theater Museum - Grand Theater - National Opera in Warsaw, special collections of the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, courtesy of the artist's heirs
But the gods wouldn’t cease tormenting her. Stryjeńska issued the first two portfolios devoted to Slavic deities in 1918 and 1922. The third and most visionary, comprising works on paper, drawn with chalk and underpainted with gouache, was issued in the mid-1930s, together with a brief notation, like the previous ones. She wrote that this was an artistic vision intended to stimulate interest in a forgotten world. She not only treated historic sources loosely, but would also think of writing her own mythology of the Slavs, even more turbulent. But the painting did not come easily to her. All the apparitions would be born in agony. Stryjeńska sought inspiration in spiritualist séances. She put questions to the gods, but they stubbornly remained silent. She was tormented by nightmares and during the day tore at her hair. Dziedzilia, Dogoda, Varvas of Rügen, Sviatovid, Marzanna, Lelum and others: they were of various ages, with distinct facial features and attributes. They appeared in costumes painted directly on their bodies, often in gradient, sensuous dress of webbing, with tribal ornaments on linen robes, translucent skirts, straw ruffles, and jewellery shot with all the colours of the rainbow. But mostly in monstrous, sometimes geometrical and sometimes more vegetative constructions. Amazing head coverings. Stryjeńska elaborated and perfected the gods to the smallest detail. When she was finished, the whole captivated with its strength of expression and pagan sensuality.
Zofia Stryjeńska, costume design - goddess Marzanna to the ballet Korowaj. Ballet, or wreath of rites in three scenes, 1934, special collections of the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, courtesy of the artist's heirs
At the same time, Stryjeńska was also working for the theatre. At the insistence of composer Karol Szymanowski, she created the costumes for his ballet Harnasie, a sensuous tale inspired by mountaineers romping in the bushes and brawling against the night landscape of the Tatras. Stryjeńska played with the shape and form of traditional costumes, studying not only the profiles of the bandits, shepherds and braves, but also types of Podhale fabrics, belts, embroidery, and even hairstyles. Although she was inspired by folk painting on glass and woodcuts, she modified all this musty iconography, simplified and mixed it, and gave it a touch of homely elegance, but also spiced it with a pinch of the exotic. The cooperation with the composer ended bloodily, with his hand slashed by a broken glass. Nonetheless, Stryjeńska displayed the Harnasie costumes in an exhibition, and showed them again a few years later in a similar version in Warsaw, New York and Brussels.
Zofia Stryjeńska, costume design - Autumn phantom for the ballet Korowaj. Ballet, or wreath of rites in three scenes, 1934, special collections of the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, courtesy of the artist's heirs
In the 1930s, momentum also carried her to prepare settings for two other ballets. She created Pascha, a divine poetic romance and also an Easter tale, infused with the Slavic spirit and a touch of surrealist folklore, and soon after that the ballet Korowaj. She wrote in her journal that they arose at nearly the same time and that she had barely finished them when she felt a third one in her gut: a universal, humorous Nativity play which would once and for all put an end to ethnography. The third was never written, and the first two have never been staged. “Again a dog has died with hopes and a scent of heaven,” Stryjeńska summed up this failure. But at the same time she asked, “Where can you find the dancers and faces I see in my dreams?”
Zofia Stryjeńska, design of the soloist's costume for the Korowaj ballet. Ballet, or wreath of rites in three scenes, 1934, special collections of the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, courtesy of the artist's heirs
But Korowaj, a Garland of Rituals in Three Scenes, also in its own way put an end to folklore. It did not repeat folklore, but rather sampled, updated, and reinterpreted it. The homespun folk mixed there with the imaginative vision of Stryjeńska, “Bengali caprices of form and a proton of madness.” The figures wore surrealist masks, the costumes riveted the gaze with their contrasting sets of colours and textures, and there were colourful furs, silver and copper, as well as phosphorescent and abstract-form ornaments. In the final act the motley of colours gave way to a game of light and shadow, only to immediately transform into a harvest festival, to enter a space of Virgilian bucolics, where the divinity, a phantom of autumn in a primitive carriage, rode onto the stage in a lemon-yellow coat with an embroidered interior and monumental crown of leaves, fruit and grass.
Zofia Stryjeńska, design of the Angel costume for the ballet "Slavic Passover", 1935, private collection, courtesy of the artist's heirs
In her journal Stryjeńska wrote that painting stole her youth in exchange for scraps of reviews and a little money. Or even less than a little. Often she was forced to sell off her furniture and clothing for a song. But as soon as she was flush again she would buy new ones. During the war she sold lithographs and used the proceeds to buy her daughter shoes with bright-coloured soles.
Zofia Stryjeńska left Poland in 1945, and would return just a few times. Just before one of those visits she wrote to her mother that she would return home as usual, with one suitcase in her hand, but how she would be dressed! “I have flat shoes (the most fashionable!) with bows, a black suit with richly trimmed sleeves, green-tinted glasses covering half my face, a Geneva haircut, and a coffee mill on my head. Mamusia, you will also go crazy when you see me!” On the train she would enchant her fellow passengers with her Slavic vitality.
Zofia Stryjeńska, 1932, private collection, courtesy of the artist's heirs
Paulina Ołowska, Slavic Goddesses - A Wreath of Ceremonies, photographic documentation of the performance in The Kitchen, 2017, © Paula Cour, courtesy of the artist and The Kitchen
She was constantly moving about in the 1950s and later. She shuttled between Geneva and Paris, lugging a mountain of suitcases. All through the war she prayed that they would survive, particularly one of the bags, in ash grey. In it she keeps her scenarios, designs, portfolios with graphics and paintings. Every now and then she checked them at station waiting rooms or pawned them at hotels. Sometimes she didn’t have the money to redeem them. Other times she simply returned to collect them. One of these bags, with all her sacred items, was lost in Paris. Inside there was a canvas of Slavic gods that Stryjeńska had refused to sell to anyone. Yet once she pawned them in Zurich, saying, “Let the Slavic gods fend for themselves.”
The gods would emerge from this bag one more time: in 2017, at the gallery The Kitchen in New York, thanks to Paulina Ołowska, who in six performance scenes not only revived the ghosts, but also squeezed juice from them, giving them not just new life but another future. The gods became a revelation.