Old Masters, Young Gods

THE ŁUKASZOWCY – OLD MASTERS, YOUNG GODS

It all began in 1925 in Kazimierz Dolny with a plein-air painting session during which a group of students from the Warsaw School of Fine Arts, led by Professor Tadeusz Pruszkowski, founded the Brotherhood of St. Luke. It was they who launched Kazimierz, which soon became a mecca for Polish landscape painters. Today, this town, situated on the Vistula River escarpment, is one of the most charming places in Poland, and before the war, it was even more picturesque. This was due as much to poverty, general neglect, and chaotic wooden architecture as to the Jewish inhabitants, peasants bringing in produce for sale, beggars, swarms of children, horse-drawn carts, and the wandering cows, chickens, dogs, piglets, and goats.

A goat was the main prize in a lottery organized for town residents and summer visitors by Pruszkowski's students at the conclusion of the first plein-air painting workshop in 1924. (It should be added that this horned prize escaped before the winner was chosen, significantly disrupting the lottery's conclusion.) A year later, the young painters prepared the closing ball with much greater care, and its program was enriched by a dance party, an auction of paintings, a fireworks display, and cabaret, vocal, and acrobatic performances, during which the budding artists could reveal their previously undiscovered stage talents.

More importantly, it was during this plein-air workshop that the idea for founding a Brotherhood was born, based more on comradeship and friendship than on a shared program or stylistic unity. It was named the Brotherhood of St. Luke to emphasize the commitment to tradition, craft, skill, and technology—values ​​shared by the young enthusiasts but disdainfully rejected by their colleagues pursuing avant-garde trends.

Soon, the Brotherhood's Rule was established, drafted by Jan Zamoyski. The first paragraph stated that "The Brotherhood is an association of people working professionally in the field of Polish visual art." The next paragraph concerned the board – the "Chapter" – composed of the Commander, Secretary, and Treasurer. The Treasurer managed the Brotherhood's funds, to which each member pledged to contribute 10% of the proceeds from the sale of works at joint exhibitions. The final, 15th paragraph read: "This is the rule of the Brotherhood / without any talk or pretense. / And whoever disregards it / may kiss our asses."

Initiation into the Brotherhood was accompanied by a parodic "liberation" ceremony held in the studios of the Warsaw Academy. During this ceremony, the "victim" was subjected to tests of fire, water, and sword in the Torture Chamber, examined by the Master (Pruszkowski himself), and sprinkled with yellow, red, and blue paint before receiving a diploma written in Latin. After this ceremony, the company retired to the Consolation Room, where, amidst jokes and dancing, they "consoled" each other with wine, vodka, and snacks until dawn.

And here is a phalanx of Professor Tadeusz Pruszkowski's most talented students, who were inducted into the ranks of the Brotherhood's masters: Jan Zamoyski, Bolesław Cybis, Jan Gotard, Antoni Michalak, Eliasz Kanarek, Edward Kokoszko, Jan Wydra, Aleksander Jędrzejewski, Janusz Podoski, Mieczysław Schulz, and Czesław Wdowiszewski. Later, they were joined by Jeremi Kubicki, Bernard Frydrysiak, and Stefan Płużański.

Who remembers these names today? Why are they given so little attention in the history of Polish painting? Is it simply because most of their works were destroyed or lost in the turmoil of war? Unfortunately, history dealt them a cruel blow, and after the war, they were subjected to the method recommended by Tytus Czyżewski: "silence as the best way to exterminate an opponent." Contributing to this was their colleagues, the Kapists, who before the war envied the Łukaszowcy's successes and commissions. When, after the war, the left-leaning Kapists dominated Polish art schools, they ruthlessly exploited this situation to erase the memory of their more talented competitors. They accused them of "nationalism, subservience to the clergy and the Sanation," and "anti-Semitism" (an accusation all the more absurd given that the Brotherhood's founders included painters of Jewish descent). In turn, art historians and critics, blindly absorbed in avant-garde innovations, deprecated the Łukaszowcy as "epigones," "stylizers," and "regressives."

What did this "backwardness" entail? The Brotherhood's members consciously (and provocatively) drew on the traditions of medieval guild painting. Their foundation was a mastery of craftsmanship: properly priming a board or canvas, the ability to grind pigments with a binder, and the application of impasto and glaze. "There is no such thing as a good picture that is poorly painted," taught their master, Pruszkowski. The public was able to see this for themselves at the Brotherhood's first exhibition in 1928, which was so successful in Warsaw that it was subsequently shown in Łódź and Bydgoszcz. It was then that critics compared them to "old masters," while Antoni Słonimski, reviewing the exhibition, exclaimed: "Łukasz's painters paint like young gods." The following years brought further joint exhibitions in Warsaw, Poznań, and Kraków, as well as at the Musée Rath in Geneva, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the 1934 Venice Biennale (today it's hard to believe that representational art once had a place at the Venice Biennale), the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and Amsterdam. Their works were eagerly purchased everywhere, the talent and skill of the Łukaszowcy were noticed, and the original, Polish character of their works was appreciated, something lacking in the Kapists, who were obsessed with French Post-Impressionism (which is why the Kapists' exhibition in Geneva was received with cool indifference by the local audience).

Official commissions quickly poured in from the state authorities. And again, to the credit of those times, it must be said that during the interwar period, the Polish state placed great importance on the visual arts, seeing them as both a symbol of communal unity at home and a showcase for Polish culture abroad. Unlike many of today's art officials, the decision-makers of the time were aware of the benefits of cultural policy. They commissioned monumental paintings, frescoes, and mosaics for public buildings.

No one was better suited to fulfill such commissions than the Łukaszowcy, who simply knew how to paint a human, a cat, a horse, or a dog well. They mastered ancient techniques (Zamoyski and Cybis, and later Wdowiszewski and Jędrzejewski, traveled Italy, viewing and thoroughly analyzing frescoes in churches and murals in Pompeii) and strived to ensure that their paintings appealed to everyone – from children and ordinary viewers to discerning fellow artists and art critics. The "Łukasze" covered the walls and ceilings of the Military Geographical Institute in Warsaw and the Polish School in the Free City of Gdańsk with frescoes, and painted portraits of politicians, university rectors, and high-ranking military personnel.

After the construction of the first Polish ocean liners (the M/S Piłsudski and M/S Batory), it was the Łukaszowcy who were entrusted with decorating their interiors with paintings. The artwork on board the ships was intended not only to provide passengers with artistic pleasure during long voyages but also to serve a propaganda function. Today, the word "propaganda" has a rather unfavorable connotation, but at the time, the goal was simply to celebrate the achievements of the Second Polish Republic, which had just appeared on the world map, to emphasize its dynamism and energy, and to create a new iconography for the young Polish state.

It is impossible to describe all the members of the Brotherhood here – let us briefly mention a few of the most prominent ones.

Jan Zamoyski (1901–1986) was a versatile artist, a proponent of classicism in painting, who tackled many themes and challenges, as well as a creator of nativity plays and a writer who composed sketches and witty couplets performed during plein-air workshops in Kazimierz. He strove to integrate painting with architecture, eagerly undertaking monumental frescoes and altarpieces. He participated in the September Campaign and was imprisoned in an Oflag, where he staged theatrical performances and designed set designs. He included much information and anecdotes about the Brotherhood in his memoir, "Łukaszowcy."

Jan Gotard (1898–1943, executed by the Germans) created genre scenes and evocative portraits bordering on caricature. In the crypt of the church in Kazimierz Dolny, during a memorable plein air painting session in 1925, he painted the mummified bodies of monks and children buried there. He suffered from epilepsy; during one of his attacks, to the horror of his colleagues, he fell from the walls of Kazimierz Castle. Hospitalized in Puławy, he escaped bandaged to Kazimierz to continue the paintings of "dead men" he had begun in the crypt of the Kazimierz parish church. From his later period, he is best known for his depictions of characteristic figures (Drunkard, Solitaire) and old men, in which he recreated the tissue of wrinkled flesh with extraordinary diligence and downright cruel naturalism. At the Venice Biennale, a small oil painting by Gotard fetched a staggering 25,000 złoty, the highest fee for a Polish painter during the interwar period.
Antoni Michalak (1899–1975) as a young boy found himself in an orphanage in Odessa (where he was cared for by the Russian princesses Dolgorukov and Shcherbatova). In Kazimierz Dolny, he painted "The Tale of a Happy Man," depicting an emaciated beggar with a radiant face (the model was Oleksy Kozdroń, a well-known blind man from Kazimierz), surrounded by well-fed and richly dressed people, but clearly dissatisfied with their lives. For this painting, Michalak was awarded a one-year scholarship in Paris by the French government. Another of his works, "St. Anthony Speaking to Fish," received a silver medal at the international exhibition in Padua. After the war, he taught painting and drawing at the Catholic University of Lublin, and worked on church conservation and altar paintings. Eliasz Kanarek (1902–1969) was a painter of Jewish descent who served as a volunteer in the Polish Army during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920. He painted cheerful portraits of women and children, still lifes and landscapes, and satirical drawings for the pre-war "Szpilki" (High Heels). He also designed the set for the film "Wild Fields," directed by Józef Lejtes. In 1939, he sailed on the ocean liner "Batory" to New York to bring paintings by the Łukaszowcy to the World's Fair, and remained in America for the rest of his life, as did his traveling companion,

Bolesław Cybis (1895–1957). The latter was often confused with the colorist Jan Cybis, much to the mutual annoyance of the two painters, who hated each other and were not even related. Bolesław remained a restless spirit throughout his life. As a young man, after the Bolshevik Revolution, he fled his native Latvia for Constantinople, where he earned a living decorating clay pipes. After graduating from the Warsaw Academy, he created portraits and figurative scenes in the style of the early Italian Renaissance. His most famous painting from this period is Primavera – a disturbing parody of Botticelli's Spring, depicted as a rather unpretty girl combing her hair in a gloomy, sparse room. Cybis traveled to Tunis and Tripoli, which was reflected in the Arabic motifs appearing in his paintings and the African elements of the decor of the bar he designed on the M/S Batory. In the USA, with his typical penchant for the exotic, he painted Native Americans, fascinated by their clothing and crafts. He also successfully designed and manufactured porcelain, but later went bankrupt, investing all his assets in film production, and ended his life by suicide. Last but not least, we must mention the founder of the brotherhood, Professor Tadeusz Pruszkowski (1888–1942), a painter who played a significant role in pre-war artistic life. "Prusz" possessed a great ease with painting, employing vibrant colors and virtuoso drawing. He created portraits with grace and ease, especially of women; the most famous of these is the portrait of his wife, titled Melancholia. As a professor at the School of Fine Arts (from 1932, the Academy), he had a profound influence on popularizing among young artists a distinctive painting method based on the observation of nature and simultaneously drawing on the best traditions of European painting: the Italian Renaissance, Caravaggism, and Netherlandish Realism. In this way, he created a national school with a Latin metric and Polish outline – a thoroughly original phenomenon, whose contemporary counterparts include Italian metaphysical painting (pittura metafisica) and the German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit).

Pruszkowski was also a remarkable personality, an avid motorist and pilot. He owned his own de Havilland Moth plane, which he used to make daring landings in the meadows around Kazimierz (after which he would transport fuel by horse-drawn carriage in milk cans for the return trip to Warsaw). In Kazimierz Dolny, he owned a villa equipped with a large studio. It was here that an unprecedented painting was realized in 1938. Eleven members of the Brotherhood arrived at the "Prusz Castle" to begin work on a series of seven monumental paintings from Polish history, commissioned by the government for the World's Fair in New York.

After lengthy discussion, the themes for the paintings were selected: Bolesław the Brave welcoming Otto III, the Baptism of Lithuania, the Privilege of Jedlino, the Union of Lublin, the Warsaw Confederation, the Relief of Vienna, and the Constitution of May 3rd. Before painting began, it was agreed that the paintings would be stylistically homogeneous, non-naturalistic, multi-figured, decorative, vibrant in color, and rich in detail. The painted figures and objects were to be slightly stylized—as in Italian frescoes—with clear contours and no shadows. The pictorial expression of the series was to be distinctly different from Matejko's vision (also out of respect for the latter's originality).
The painting of the costumes and props was preceded by meticulous research in museums and archives – the artists were determined to render historical facts as faithfully as possible. It was decided that each artist would focus on what they were best at: one would create exclusively landscapes, another architecture, a third costumes, a fourth figure compositions, a fifth faces and hands, and so on. Thanks to this method and the subordination of individual painterly temperaments to the established style, a unique work was created, the fruit of the collective effort of 11 masters of the brush, painting almost simultaneously.

The paintings exhibited in Warsaw were enthusiastically received and subsequently transported aboard the MS Batory to New York. There, they were hung in the Hall of Honor of the Polish Pavilion, where they generated enormous interest among both the international audience and the Polish community in the United States. However, the world's attention soon turned elsewhere – Germany invaded Poland, the Second Polish Republic ceased to exist, and the Polish Pavilion in New York was left to its own devices. The Polish exhibition's commissioner, Stefan de Ropp, retained all seven historical paintings (and four tapestries) as compensation for unpaid royalties from the Polish government. He eventually donated them to the Jesuit Le Moyne College in Syracuse, where the works spent over 80 years.

For decades, the dispute over the recovery of the canvases seemed insoluble. Fortunately, this historic remorse of Polish culture came to an end in 2022, when, thanks to the efforts of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Polish History Museum, the entire series was officially returned to the country. Today, these impressive canvases are one of the main attractions of the permanent exhibition at the new home of the Polish History Museum in Warsaw.

It is worth remembering the Łukaszowcy and saving from oblivion their guiding idea, rooted in the great European tradition of craftsmanship, talent, and imagination. A seemingly obvious idea: that creativity is not only an expression of the artist's personality, but also "professional work in the field of visual art" and a response to the spiritual needs of individuals and the entire community. And "painting should defend itself."