Between: arts and crafts movement

Showing posts with label arts and crafts movement. Show all posts

Sunday, 16 April 2023

Artlyst: Why Critics Have A Problem With The Pre-Raphaelites?

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is on 'The Rossettis' at Tate Britain:

'The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to go back to the future – back to the art before Raphael – to create something new in the present. As such, they were medievalists, although with a romantic view of medievalism that has gone on to shape elements of Fantasy Art. Their truth-to-nature ethos made them precursors to hyper-realism, while their love of narrative and Symbolism made them precursors of Symbolism. They were aligned with the spirituality of the Oxford Movement with its High Church and Roman Catholic commitments. This also connected to their interest in social action and socialism, both of which informed the beginnings of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which sought to democratise the Arts and restore or decorate churches—in addition to the Arts and Crafts Movement, which emerged directly from Pre-Raphaelitism, the Aesthetic Movement, as this exhibition explores, also emerged from their initial revolt.'

See here and here for Church Times reviews relating to John Ruskin and here for more on the influence of the Rossettis and Pre-Raphaelites.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Florence and the Machine: Cosmic Love.

Saturday, 1 January 2022

Art and faith: Decades of engagement - 1880s

This is Part 1 in a series of posts which aim to demonstrate the breadth of engagement there has been between the Arts and religion within the modern period and into our contemporary experience. The idea is to provide a brief introduction to the artists and initiatives that were prominent in each decade to enable further research. Inevitably, these lists will be partial as there is much that I don’t know and the lists reflect my interests and biases. As such, the primary, but not exclusive, focus is on artists that have engaged with the Christian tradition.

My listing begins in the 1880s as that decade is generally taken as the beginning of modern art. However, in terms of my interests, the Pre-Raphaelites and the beginning of the Catholic Literary Revival precede my chosen starting point and I have, therefore, sought to reflect that in some of the early entries.

The introduction to the series can be found here.

On 22 March 1877 William Morris, Philip Webb and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood hold the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Bloomsbury, London. In 1879, Morris and SPAB join John Ruskin in the fight to save St Mark's Basilica, Venice from restoration and dilapidation.
The term Arts and Crafts Movement is first used at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887, although the principles and style on which it was based had been developing in England for at least 20 years. It was inspired by the ideas of architect Augustus Pugin, writer John Ruskin, and designer William Morris. Morris's thought later influenced the distributism of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Following the first Arts and Crafts church, St Martin Brampton built by Philip Webb in 1878, many more follow, including Broughty Ferry Baptist Chapel (1881), St Chad Hopwas (1881), St Mary Partington (1883), Holy Trinity Bothenhampton (1887).
In 1880, the Most Holy Governing Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church rules that the church censor could approve the publication of sacred music without the input of The Imperial Chapel. This decision has ground-breaking implications – for the first time in many years, it becomes possible for Russian composers to create sacred music, without being subjected to bureaucratic review. This decision is prompted by the publication in 1879 of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.
Antonin Dvořák's first piece of a religious nature, his setting of Stabat Mater, was premiered in Prague in 1880. The Stabat Mater is an extensive vocal-instrumental sacred work for soli, choir and orchestra based on the text of an old church hymn with the same name. The inspiration for creating the piece was the death of the composer's daughter, Josefa.
Life of the Virgin murals are created from 1880 to 1887 under the direction of Desiderius Lenz, Gabriel Wuger, and Lukas Steiner for the Benedictine Abbey of Emmaus in Prague.
In 1881, D.L. Moody and Ira B. Sankey make their second visit to Britain involving mass rallies with full houses in a large number of cities. In 1876, in collaboration with Philip Bliss, Sankey had published a gospel songs collection Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs, consisting of 131 numbers. Over the next 15 years, working with various associates, he produced five supplements to this work, and a complete edition of all six parts in 1894, this last containing 794 numbers.
In 1881 Wilfrid Meynell accepts Cardinal Manning's invitation to edit the Catholic Weekly Register and continues to do so until 1899. Meynell later founds and edits (1883–94) the magazine Merrie England, in which, in 1888, he discovers and sponsors the poet Francis Thompson, rescuing him from destitution.
‘God’s Architect,’ Antoni Gaudi designs a Benedictine monastery and a church dedicated to the Holy Spirit in Villaricos (Cuevas de Vera, Almería) for his former teacher, Joan Martorell, in 1882. He begins work on the Sagrada Familia in 1883.
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly publishes Une Histoire sans Nom (The Story Without a Name) 1882, and Ce qui ne Meurt Pas (What Never Dies) 1884. Barbey d'Aurevilly also re-publishes Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils) in 1882, a collection of short stories originally published in France in 1874. Each story features a woman who commits an act of violence, or revenge, or some other crime. It is considered Barbey d'Aurevilly's masterpiece, but he was sued for an affront to public decency when it was originally released. He agreed to remove the book from sale and the charges against him were dismissed. Léon Bloy, a defender of and proof-reader for the novelist, said that Barbey d'Aurevilly was, "The man to whom I owe the most, after my mother and father".
Hilma af Klint studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden from 1882 – 1887. There, she meets a group of artists who share her ideas. "The Five" (De Fem) are Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman, and Mathilda Nilsson. They embrace a combination of the Theosophical teachings of Helena Blavatsky and spiritualism. They open each meeting with a prayer, followed by a meditation, a Christian sermon, and a review and analysis of a text from the New Testament. This is followed by a séance. From 1896, Klint creates experimental automatic drawings, leading her toward an inventive geometric visual language capable of conceptualizing invisible forces both of the inner and outer worlds. Her paintings are now considered among the first abstract works known in Western art history.
Coventry Patmore and Gerard Manley Hopkins correspond from 1883-1888.
Joris-Karl Huysmans' 1884 novel À rebours begins a return to Catholicism.
In 1885, James Tissot has a revival of his Catholic faith, which leads him to spend the rest of his life making paintings about Biblical events. He travels to the Middle East in 1886, 1889, and 1896 to make studies of the landscape and people. His series of 365 gouache illustrations showing the life of Christ are shown to critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences in Paris (1894–1895), London (1896) and New York (1898–1899), before being bought by the Brooklyn Museum in 1900. They are published in a French edition in 1896–1897 and an English one in 1897–1898, bringing Tissot vast wealth and fame.
The Victorian Association of Spiritualists in Melbourne arranges an exhibition as a celebration for the 37th anniversary of the birth of Modern Spiritualism which had begun with the Fox sisters in 1848. The event took place from 31 March to 2 April 1885 and includes original spirit drawings by Georgiana Houghton, Houghton, who had died in 1884, created under the guidance of 70 archangels which reflected her faith as a staunch Christian Spiritualist. The subjects of her work, taken as a whole, included The Trinity, The Lord, The Apostles, God, Spirit, Peace, Wisdom, Truth, Love, Salvation, and Unveiling of the Heavens.
Birmingham born Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones designs windows for St Philip’s Birmingham (now Birmingham Cathedral) beginning in 1885 with The Ascension window and continuing two years later with The Nativity and The Crucifixion. The windows are manufactured by William Morris & Co.
In July 1886, the Austrian Emperor decorated Anton Bruckner with the Order of Franz Joseph. In addition to his symphonies, Bruckner wrote Masses, motets and other sacred choral works, and a few chamber works, including a string quartet. Bruckner died in Vienna in 1896 at the age of 72. He is buried in the crypt of the monastery church at Sankt Florian, immediately below his favorite organ.
Paul Claudel experiences a sudden conversion at the age of eighteen on Christmas Day 1886 ‘while listening to a choir sing Vespers in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris: "In an instant, my heart was touched, and I believed." La Vierge à Midi (The Virgin at Noon) is a poem by Claudel inspired by his conversion but with the setting of the poem moved to midday.
Léon Bloy's first novel, Le Désespéré, published in 1887, is a fierce attack on rationalism and those he believed to be in league with it.
Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem is first performed in 1888. It is not composed to the memory of a specific person but, in Fauré's words, "for the pleasure of it." Fauré also said of his Requiem, "Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest."
James Ensor takes on religion, politics, and art with his 1888 scene of Christ entering contemporary Brussels in a Mardi Gras parade. After rejection by Les XX, the artists' association that Ensor had helped to found, the painting is not exhibited publicly until 1929. Christ's Entry Brussels in 1889 is a forerunner of twentieth-century Expressionism.
From 1888 – 1891, Stanisław Wyspiański starts his career by working together with Józef Mehoffer, under the supervision of Jan Matejko, on St. Mary’s Basilica in Kraków. He also restores late medieval frescos in the choir of Holy Cross Church.
In an 1888 letter to his close artist friend, Emile Bernard, Vincent Van Gogh confesses to “a longing for the Infinite, of which the sower and the sheaf are the symbols still enchanting me.” In a letter to his brother Theo from the same year, he wrote “When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.“
In 1888 Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin work together in the village of Pont-Aven experimenting with a new style that emphasized suggestive colour rendered in flat planes surrounded by dark outlines, which came to be known as Synthetism. Bernard painted The Pardon (Breton Women on a Meadow) and Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), both depicting the Catholicism of Breton women.
In 1888 Paul Sérusier shows the painting now known as The Talisman, made under the guidance of Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven, to the group of young painters called The Nabis (The Prophets). As well as Sérusier, The Nabis comes to include Maurice Denis, Paul Ransom, and Jan Verkade, all of whom work with spiritual themes.
Oscar Wilde writes The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888. Taught by Walter Pater, his circle includes Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John Gray, each of whom joined the Roman Catholic church in either 1890 or 1891.
During the summer of 1889, Émile Bernard was alone in Le Pouldu and began to paint many religious canvasses. He wrote about symbolism saying it was of a Christian essence, divine language.
Paul Gauguin's exhibit at Les XX in 1889 is an important early display his works, and adds to the recognition that he had begun to receive in 1888. The exhibition includes the first showing of his Vision after the Sermon, the painting that, in his 1891 article on Gauguin, leads Albert Aurier to identify an 'idealist, even mystical, reaction' to naturalism and claim that Gauguin is the leader of symbolism.
Hubert Parry received many commissions which included choral works such as the cantata Ode on Saint Cecilia's Day (1889), the oratorios Judith (1888) and Job (1892), and the psalm-setting De Profundis (1891).
Gerard Manley Hopkins dies in Dublin in 1889.

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Rhiannon Giddens - Calling Me Home (with Francesco Turrisi).

Tuesday, 31 August 2021

Arts and Crafts influences within Britain, Hungary and Poland

Several exhibitions this autumn explore the unexpected example of cultural exchange between Britain, Hungary and Poland through the influence of John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts Movement.

The Beauty of Utopia. Pre-Raphaelite influences in the Art of Turn-of-the-century Hungary at the Hungarian National Gallery is a complement to Desired Beauty, their exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate Collection. Art in nineteenth-century Hungary was primarily shaped by Austrian, German, and French influences. However, the British-Hungarian relations that developed at the turn of the century facilitated the productive effect of Pre-Raphaelite art, the Arts and Crafts movement and numerous English artists on Hungarian literature, fine and applied arts as well as in architecture. The most notable influence of the Pre-Raphaelites was manifest in the ars poetica of the Gödöllő artists’ colony and the early period of Lajos Gulácsy’s oeuvre, but other Hungarian artists also drew inspiration from their English contemporaries.

The exhibition documents the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in Hungary in four thematic groups: the works made by the Gödöllő artists’ colony, the paintings of Lajos Gulácsy’s “Pre-Raphaelite period”, the English influences in Hungarian art at the turn of the century, and also Pre-Raphaelite prints and drawings that are of major significance in the history of the museum’s collection, including pieces by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Crane.

Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch founded the Tolstoyan, Symbolist – Art Nouveau artist colony in 1901, after settling in Gödöllő. The art theoretical writings of the art critic John Ruskin, who was of great importance for the Pre-Raphaelites, also fundamentally shaped the ars poetica of Körösfői, and his book on Ruskin and the English Pre-Raphaelites was published in Budapest in 1905. Laura Kriesch (Mrs Sándor Nagy), Leo Belmonte, Rezső Mihály, Árpád Juhász, István Zichy, Ödön Moiret, Jenő Remsey, Tom von Dreger, Ede Wigand Toroczkai, Ferenc Sidló and Mariska Undi were among the members.

The oeuvre of the Gödöllő artists’ colony is also presented with its antecedents harking back to the romantic historicism of the English Pre-Raphaelites, as well as to the work of William Morris, who revived handicraft traditions and initiated the Arts and Crafts movement, and also in the art and activity of Walter Crane. In the spirit of all the artistic aspirations of the period, works were made in many branches of fine and applied arts in Gödöllő: paintings, murals, graphics, sculptures, furniture, embroidery, textiles, tapestries, glass windows, costume designs, book illustrations and art books.

Lajos Gulácsy spent most of his narrow creative years, almost a decade and a half, in Italy. During this time, he lived and worked in numerous Italian cities. Moving away from space and time, he created a unique literary and pictorial atmosphere. The subject of his admiration between 1903 and 1908 was primarily early Renaissance painters; Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi and Botticelli, and Dante’s writings, artists who previously had a great influence on the English Pre-Raphaelites. In Italy, at the turn of the century, the Pre-Raphaelite artists had been worshipped, so Gulácsy could have been influenced simultaneously by the paintings of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, as well as the original Italian works that inspired the British artists.

The inspiring knowledge, as well as a kinship in style, subjects, and motifs with English art, can be presumed in the case of a great many Hungarian artists. These connections are demonstrated at the exhibition through works by József Rippl-Rónai, Károly Ferenczy, Ferenc Helbing, Ferenc Paczka, Aladár Kacziány, Lajos Kozma and Attila Sassy.

The prints of Rossetti and his pupil, Burne-Jones, were donated to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1934 as outstanding pieces of Pál Majovszky’s large-scale collection of drawings.

By the turn of the century, like in other European countries, the art of the island country had become popular in Hungary. The English connection of the Hungarian art scene is reflected in Walter Crane’s exhibition in 1900 at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. In Hungary, a real cult developed around the artist at that time, for the reason that Crane, like the group of artists organised around Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch, encouraged the discovery of folk art motifs. Numerous works by Crane from this exhibition got into the collection of museums; many of his graphic works have enriched the British material of the Museum of Fine Arts. And of particular interest, our exhibition also includes the masterpiece by the English artist, entitled Abduction of Europa (1881), which entered the collection of the Hungarian National Bank in 2020 from a private collection in Hungary.

Young Poland: An Arts and Crafts Movement (1890 – 1918) at the William Morris Gallery from October is the first major exhibition to explore the decorative arts and architecture of Young Poland (Młoda Polska), an extraordinary cultural movement that flourished in response to Poland’s invasion and occupation by foreign powers.

Originating in Kraków and the nearby village of Zakopane at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, Young Poland sought inspiration in local folk traditions, wildlife and craftsmanship while collapsing the distinction between the fine and applied arts. Developing themes explored in a critically acclaimed book by its curators (Lund Humphries, 2020), the exhibition is the first in the world to position Young Poland as an Arts & Crafts movement, revealing strong stylistic and philosophical affinities with the work of William Morris and John Ruskin.

While the diverse visual language of Young Poland was created autonomously, in search of a distinctive cultural style and identity, it simultaneously looked outwards to the rest of Europe including Britain. The exhibition explores unexpected examples of cultural exchange between both nations: for instance in 1848 the members of the newly-founded Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood included the Polish fighter for freedom, Tadeusz Kościuszko, on their list of ‘Immortals’ (inspirational heroes). While Stanisław Witkiewicz developed the Zakopane Style—which draws on the vernacular traditions of the Tatras—before he became aware of Ruskin and Morris, he later said that he had unknowingly fulfilled the theories of these British reformers.

From furniture to Christmas decorations, intricate textiles to delicate paper cuttings, this landmark survey spans five galleries and brings together over 150 works, most of which have never travelled outside of Poland. Young Poland: An Arts and Crafts Movement (1890 – 1918) examines the ideas that propelled the movement and introduces the artists, designers and craftspeople whose decorative schemes and objects came to define it.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Józef Czajkowski, Zdzisław Gedliczka, Wojciech Jastrzębowski, Karol Kłosowski, Józefa Kogut, Bonawentura Lenart, Jacek Malczewski, Jan Matejko, Józef Mehoffer, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Henryk Uziembło, Stanisław Wyspiański and Stanisław Witkiewicz.

Influences between Hungarian and Polish art, as well as that of Austria, Czech, and Croatian painting, were explored in 2017 in The First Golden Age: Painting in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Műcsarnok, an exhibition for the 120th anniversary of the Műcsarnok in Budapest. The Hungarian Review has an extensive article that also explores these influences in the light of the 2017 exhibition.

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Bela Bartok - Hungarian Sketches.

Saturday, 28 November 2020

Young Poland, Stanisław Wyspiański, Jerzy Nowosielski and Leon Tarasewicz

Young Poland: The Polish Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890–1918 is the first book in any language to explore the Young Poland (Młoda Polska) period in the context of the international Arts and Crafts movements.

The Young Poland movement emerged in the 1890s in response to the country’s non-existence for almost a century. It embraced an unprecedented flourishing of applied arts and the revival of crafts, drawing inspiration from nature, history, peasant traditions and craftsmanship to convey patriotic values.

The lavishly illustrated publication charts the rich history of the artists, designers and craftspeople whose schemes came to define Young Poland, including over 250 illustrations of ceramics, furniture, textiles, paper cuttings, wood carvings, tableware, stained glass, book arts, children’s toys and Christmas decorations, as well as domestic, church and civic interior decoration schemes.

The book is being published ahead of a major exhibition on the subject at William Morris Gallery in Autumn 2021.The book argues that Young Poland shared fundamental parallels with the British Arts and Crafts movement, and that it was specifically this Arts and Crafts ethos which fuelled the movement’s patriotic ideology and the nation’s quest to regain Polish independence.

While the diverse visual language of Young Poland was created autonomously, in search of a distinctive cultural style and identity, it simultaneously looked outwards to the rest of Europe including British influences, notably the Pre-Raphaelites and the vision of John Ruskin and William Morris. In fact, as the book reveals, there was a cultural exchange between both nations: in 1848 the members of the newly-founded Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood included the Polish fighter for freedom, Tadeusz Kościuszko, on their list of ‘Immortals’ (inspirational heroes).

As 'Views of Albion' demonstrates there were diverse responses to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Germany, Austria, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary and Southern Slavic countries showing its specific features in the works of artists such as Alfons Mucha, Gustav Klimt and Stanisław Wyspiański.

Artist, designer and writer Wyspiański was the foremost representative of the Young Poland movement and can most closely be considered a counterpart to William Morris. Nature and history were key subjects for both reformers and crucially, they shared firm belief in the equality of fine and decorative arts. Like Morris, Wyspiański was a polymath whose prolific output included wall paintings, decorative patterns, stage sets, textiles, stained glass, book arts, church and domestic interior decoration, as well as achieving acclaim for his writing. Wyspiański was also instrumental in the foundation of the Polish Applied Arts Society in 1901, the equivalent of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society which raised the status of the decorative arts in Britain. Both men were also early champions of the preservation of historic buildings.

Drawing on nature and the folk tradition, Wyspiański played a significant part in developing a distinctive national style, characterised by a ‘return to crafts’. His most famous decorative scheme is at the Franciscan Church in Kraków (1895–1904), which invites comparisons with the work of Morris & Co. Wyspiański designed the impressive Art Nouveau polychrome paintings and stained-glass windows. Most of the paintings on the walls of the choir and transept consist of geometrical and vegetal motifs, including common Polish flowers. The windows of the chancel feature the four elements and figures of the Blessed Salomea and St Francis. Dominating the entire church is the monumental stained glass window God the Father – Let There Be! situated above the main entrance to the church.

Kraków is home to a proliferation of magnificent churches, the largest stained glass studio in Poland, and resident artistic geniuses in Wyspiański and Józef Mehoffer. Stained glass as an artform reached its pinnacle during Kraków’s Art Nouveau movement. In 1902 S.G. Żeleński (brother of famous writer Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński) founded a studio specifically for stained glass, and attracted the best artists of the generation to work there, including Wyspiański, Mehoffer and Stefan Matejko - the nephew of renowned painter Jan Matejko. After working together during the restoration of the stained glass in St. Mary’s Basilica in 1899, both Mehoffer and Wyspiański turned the force of their creative energies to stained glass, creating some of their most defining works of art in public buildings around Kraków’s Old Town.

Janusz Bogucki was an important Polish critic and art historian, who noted a tendency towards the spiritual in Polish avant-garde art towards the end of the twentieth century. Work by artists such as Jerzy Tchórzewski, Stefan Gierowski and Jerzy Bereś, arose from a need to achieve transcendence and was characterised by a search for the Absolute. The work of these and other artists was, for Bogucki, confirmation of his idea that art should turn to sacrum and he, therefore, invited them to take part in his church-based projects in the early 1980s. Most significant Polish artists participated in these exhibitions. It was also in this period that the work of Jerzy Nowosielski revealed its full fascination with icon paintings through the publication of "Wokół ikony" / "Around the Icon" (1985) and later "Mój Chrystus" / "My Christ" (1993).

Until December 5th, the Museum of Icons in Supraśl has an exhibition titled “Transfiguration. Jerzy Nowosielski, Leon Tarasewicz”. The exhibition presents the “Transfiguration” on Mount Tabor from 1961 by Nowosielski (collection of the Museum of the Catholic University of Lublin) in relation to the “site-specific” concept prepared by Tarasewicz. The artists met many times in a master-student – friend relationship. The personality and work of Nowosielski influenced the formation of Tarasewicz’s artistic personality. During the opening of the exhibition, Anda Rottenberg noted that both Nowosielski and Tarasewicz, in their art, are constantly looking for evidence for the existence of God.

Nowosielski was a Kraków-born Polish painter, graphic artist, scenographer, and illustrator. He was well known for his religious compositions (wall paintings, iconostases, polychromies) in the Orthodox Churches in Kraków, Białystok and Jelenia Góra, the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Cross at Wesoła, the Franciscan Church in the Azory district of Kraków, and the Greek Catholic Church in Lourdes, France. Nowosielski designed and erected the Church of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Biały Bór.

Nowosielski was an outstanding painter, draughtsman, set designer, architect and illustrator, the author of writings on art and a bold and controversial thinker who invoked the theology of the Orthodox Church. His work is proof that, irrespective of the range of media available nowadays, he is still an innovatory figure in the world of painting, where he demonstrated that the surface of a painting continues to be a “field” for conveying a way of seeing the world and an area for communicating with the non-material, metaphysical universe.

Nowosielski’s clearly anti-Cartesian interests materialised in the form of hundreds of paintings, drawings, prints, architectural and set designs and polychromes in churches, (Roman Catholic and Orthodox alike), as well as in the numerous writings and interviews which form both a commentary on his own work and a subversive view on the matter of faith in the broad sense. The thematic sweep of his oeuvre, which goes well beyond the widely perceived concept of nudes, portraits, still lifes and landscapes, is also something that cannot be disregarded.

Alongside icons featuring traditionally conceived images of the saints present in Christian worship, he introduced a new category, ‘secular icons’. To him, both the one and the other were, above all, paintings. Time and again, he emphasised that, regardless of the questions or themes which a work of art tackles, if it is to be good, then it has to touch the sphere of the sacrum.

Leon Tarasewicz is one of the most intriguing contemporary painters in Poland. He was born in 1957 in Waliły in the Podlachia region. Tarasewicz is an inventive artist who constantly explores new aspects of the old and seemingly predictable discipline of painting. He is fascinated by the works of Nowosielski.

Tarasewicz has presented his works at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle several times (some of them also belong to the Centre’s permanent collection). One of the most interesting projects he took part in there was the show Jerzy Nowosielski - Leon Tarasewicz - Mikołaj Smoczyński (1997), an encounter of three strong artistic personalities, surprisingly linked by the Eastern Orthodox religion. This in turn inspired Tarasewicz to create a site-specific project at the Lublin’s Holy Trinity Chapel.

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Arvo Pärt - My Heart's in Highlands.