Odkrywanie krajobrazów południowej Francji – podróże kapistów w świetle badań, dokumentów i fotografi i

Abstract

DISCOVERING SOUTH FRENCH LANDSCAPES – KAPISTS’ ART TRAVELS IN THE LIGHT OF RESEARCH, DOCUMENTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

In September 1924 a group of young artists – students of the Fine Art Academy in Kraków – went to Paris to continue their artistic education there. The group established the Paris Committee (Komitet Paryski, abbreviated to “K.P.”, hence the name of the group – kapists) whose members represented a whole range of creative temperaments. Kapists came to Paris to gain artistic experience and complete their formal artistic education through the direct contact with the great tradition of French painting. They were yet another group of artists who became fascinated by French art through the influence of their teacher, artist Józef Pankiewicz. Already in the first months of their French escapade, kapists formed several smaller groups and went to diff erent locations scattered along the French Mediterranean coast to live the new, invigorating experience that the artistic dialogue with the nature of south France was. Kapists’ sojourn in Paris is well documented, while the history of their stay in south France is far less researched. Th e article attempts to present the genesis, programme and atmosphere of kapists’ pleinair sessions in the south of France which took place in 1925 and 1926. By combining the content of Hanna Rudzka- Cybis’s letters to her mother and the photographs taken during the two plein-air sessions from the collection of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków it was possible to partially reconstruct the course of these art travels which should not be regarded as a separate artistic phenomenon, but, rather, as part of a wider current in 20th century art associated with the artistic experiments of French avantgarde artists. Unfortunately, research has revealed that very few of kapists’ works painted during their plein-air sessions in south France have been preserved. Kapists’ art created at La Ciotat is represented by the few surviving paintings created by Jan Cybis, Hanna Rudzka-Cybis, and particularly by Artur Nacht whose works are deposited at the National Museum in Poznań. Collioure attracted many artists in the interwar period as a privileged centre of creative work associated mainly with the origins of fauvism. In the 1920s it was also visited by Polish artists representing various groups and circles, including the students of Józef Pankiewicz – Jan Wacław Zawadowski, Jan Rubczak, Szymon Mondszajn, painters Nina Aleksandrowicz, Helena Kwiatkowska and Mela Muter, Roman Kramsztyk (representative of the Warsaw art milieu), and kapists’ friend Tytus Czyżewski. The plein-air sessions of Jan Cybis and his wife Hanna Rudzka-Cybis at Collioure in 1926 were also part of the wider phenomenon that the artistic fascination inspired by that small French town was at that time. In the period when the kapists’ group was most active, discovering the south constituted one of the most vital, formative experiences, inevitable for the young painters’ artistic growth. Today we know that the south French adventures had a massive impact on Polish 20th century art, especially on the colourist movement.