Michalina Janoszanka (1889–1952) is an artist better known for her role on the other side of the canvas, as the muse and mentee of famed Polish painter Jacek Malczewski (1854–1929). She posed for countless symbolist paintings, appearing alone, alongside Malczewski in double-portraits, among satyrs, and as Medusa. However, Janoszanka was more than a muse. She was also an artist in her own right. Trained in Kraków and Vienna, she became a strong oil painter. Her themes were traditional: portraits, still lifes, and religious scenes. But what most captured her mentor’s excitement, not to mention the attention of the Young Poland modernist art movement, was something else: the surreal, kaleidoscopic landscapes she painted directly onto glass.

Reverse painting, achieved by building up layers of pigment onto the backside of a pane of glass, has a long history. Having spread as far as China from its birthplace in fifteenth-century Italy, the technique was favored in Eastern Europe for devotional images and icons. These paintings could be produced quickly and cheaply, and “had the added attraction of reflecting the scant light in the dark rooms of the peasant homes”, writes scholar Phyllis Granoff. For all their strengths, however, reverse painting was not counted among European fine art. By Janoszanka’s time, the medium was firmly in the realm of folk art.

What Michalina did with reverse painting was entirely distinct from the stiff religious imagery of traditional Polish glass painting. Brilliant gem tones and metallic lines frame her subjects — lush flowers and trees, stylized birds and frogs — in shadowy landscapes. She achieves textures and tones that call to mind other mediums. Dense linework becomes lace-like butterfly wings. In Winter, swirled, watercolor blues form a marbled field reminiscent of stained glass. At the birds’ breasts, Janoszanka leaves visible brush strokes, evoking individual feathers. Butterfly juxtaposes traditional flower patterns — simplified, geometric — with life-like dry leaves. The result is whimsical and stylized, but not childish. In Spring, where Janoszanka sets glowing trees against an exploding coral sky, the effect is plainly psychedelic.

Across the Atlantic, reverse painting’s heyday had come and gone by the early 1900s. By layering not just paint but also crumpled metal foil over glass, American “tinsel painting” had stretched the limits of technique — but the medium, adopted mainly by middle-class women, was viewed as “feminine”. The craft had come to be seen as hackneyed and outdated, a Victorian throwback, and the twentieth century saw many such paintings “cracked and broken and thrown away”, writes curator Karli Wurzelbacher. But at that very moment, modernist painters began experimenting with the old technique. Artists like Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) and Rebecca Salsbury James (1891–1968) expanded on the traditional themes (flowers, still life, birds) and pushed reverse painting in novel directions: new color palettes, new approaches to line and space, new abstractions. These American experiments, beginning in the 1910s, coincided with Janoszanka’s work in Poland.

Viewed side by side, the artists’ respective experiments in glass painting could not have been more different. But in Maine, New Mexico, and Kraków, reverse painting presented new possibilities to a generation of modernist artists. There is no telling whether Janoszanka was aware of these other experimenters in avant-garde glass painting. It is also unclear if she faced the same gendered critique: the critic Paul Rosenfeld, argues Wurzelbacher, “cast Hartley’s ‘canvases and rectangles of glass’ as effeminate”, comparing them to “some sweet bit of handiwork . . . the design of a sampler, a piece of embroidery.” Though her name remains overshadowed by Malczewski, Janoszanka’s work presents a compelling case for reassessment. Her dreamlike glass paintings are a bridge between folk tradition and modernist experimentation. They raise unanswered questions not just about Janoszanka’s career, but also about modernism’s engagement with glass painting across cultural boundaries. Questions that can be answered, ultimately, only through a return to the archive.