Slavdom Unearthed: Marian Wawrzeniecki’s Neopagan Paintings (1891–1923)

A nude lies upon an open tome, bloodied branch in hand. With a skull for a face, but otherwise enfleshed, the body bisects Art Nouveau illustrations: a red-haired woman circled by some kind of serpent and a colder image, whose face is obscured by a forest of hair. Is this the same woman, present, past, and further past? A memento mori of a kind? And how should we interpret the title, Old Truth Lies in Books (Stara prawda w księgach leży)? Painted in 1910 by Marian Wawrzeniecki, the image seems to gesture toward something menacing and mythical, forgotten by history but alluded to in antiquities and the pages of artbooks.

For all of his later Symbolist leanings, Wawrzeniecki was trained in Kraków, in the academic style of Polish history painting. The style was large-format and maximalist, mixing subjects from Polish history with allegorical tableaux. From Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances to Jan Matejko’s masterpieces, high art and folk forms blended to create local senses of cultural identity distinct from the empires and colonial powers of occidental Europe. Yet Wawrzeniecki surpassed this cultural era of Romantic nationalism by reaching further into the past than his peers and masters could have imagined.

Although he was, by any measure, a minor painter, Wawrzeniecki was a majorly influential archaeologist, discovering not only the first obsidian artifacts on Polish lands but also early earthen shelters, ceramics, and steles. His pioneering work left its mark on his visual art, including one of the earliest paintings depicting an archaeological excavation. Rozkopany kurhan (“The Excavated Burial Mound”), painted between 1891 and 1892, is notable for how it takes up the conventions of history painting to depict not an idealized scene from the past, but rather the gulf separating those discovering prehistory from the fragmentary, quizzical remains of this long-ago time.

The archaeologist’s task necessarily involves applying the imagination to interpret their findings, but Wawrzeniecki’s ran wild. He began to see his region’s pagan prehistory as its true essence, finding a radical rupture between this paradise and the Christianized fallen world that had supplanted it. His artistic output was colored by his archaeological research to such an extent that by the 1910s and 1920s, he mostly produced colored illustrations of pagan Slavic rituals.

In several, female nudes are tied to a tree, or strung up between two pillars. A basilisk often lurks nearby, sometimes smiling creepily. These women became an idée fixe, populating more and more of his later illustrations, the style of which abandons his academic training in oil painting for the bright colors of textbook illustrations. It would be easy to conflate these plump and faceless female nudes with pulp erotica — and similar accusations were already leveled at the artist in his lifetime. But Wawrzeniecki’s allegorical tableaux, painted at the turn of the twentieth century, offer up the possibility of a less reductive reading.

Read as symbolic vehicles, these neopagan nudes become multilayered allegories: for an elusive pagan-Slavic essence, for creative devotion, for artworks packaged and assessed by critics. Their hostility to his cultural theories, and Wawrzeniecki’s pugnacious disposition, led him to publish numerous ethnographic studies, defenses of history painting, takedowns of the younger generation of Symbolist painters, and open letters to his critics from the 1910s onward. He came to see Gothic architecture and Renaissance painting as Germanic and Italic aberrations: successive regimes of a thousand-year-long cultural colonization of pagan Slavdom by Christianity.

How to reconcile Wawrzeniecki’s elegant early paintings with the plethora of designs and storybook illustrations he produced for the last three decades of his career? Torn between archaeology and oil painting, his intellect evolved in an obsessive direction, collecting and producing a neopagan visual archive to rival the iconic power of the Christian West. It’s no surprise that conventional markers of quality and professional success became unimportant to him. Even if he never achieved escape velocity, his visual language paved the way for later artists who took up the task. His artistic descendants include Polish-American Stanisław Szukalski (1893–1987), whose neopagan experimental style is the subject of a spectacular 2018 documentary, and his speculative cultural theories found new life in Maria Janion’s pivotal 2006 book Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna (Uncanny Slavdom), which argues that Polish culture’s perennial obsession with ghosts, monsters, and phantoms proves that this pagan past never really stopped haunting the art and poetry created since. Perhaps it never will.