Objects

Looking at Wojciech Weiss’s masterly pastel "Old Jewish Cemetery", we can see how "the frame of the picture captures a fragment of space like a fixed lens, not in order to analyse it in detail or to reflect its obvious, fully exposed objectivity, but to capture its quiet, latent continuance." (Ł. Kossowski, "Pejzaże Wojciecha Weissa", exhibition catalogue, National Museum in Kielce, Kielce 1985, p. 11). This sentence of the researcher of Weiss’s work perfectly characterises the numerous landscape sketches produced in Strzyżów, especially the ones with the motif of the Jewish cemetery. The artist would repeatedly return to the picturesque town, surrounded by beautiful nature, between 1899 and 1903, finding strength and a new language for his painting in its intimate landscape. Renata Weiss, the artist’s granddaughter, reads the works created at that time through the prism of the literary works stored in the family archive: novels, poetry books and annual journals from Young Poland’s periodicals: "Życie", published in Krakow, and "Chimera" from Warsaw.

Although the works with the view of the matzevot in the Jewish cemetery are small in size, they make up a series of intense expression, evoking the melancholy, death and abandonment omnipresent in Young Poland’s literature and art: "Graveyards neglected in our villages, with dry willows on the graves; Jewish cemeteries, where crooked stone tablets protrude among enormous steppe weeds; – mourning grief on some, silent deadness and abandonment on others..." (W. Berent, "Próchno" ["Rotten Wood"], Warszawa 1901, p. 7, quoted in: "Młodopolskie fascynacje. Wojciech Weiss w Strzyżowie" [Young Poland’s Fascinations. Wojciech Weiss in Strzyżów], ed. R. Weiss, Strzyżów 2020, p. 43).

Renata Piątkowska