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. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.
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.
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