Mrozowski, Andrzej2025-12-082025-12-081985Studia Theologica Varsaviensia, 1985, R. 23, nr 1, s. 149-169.https://theo-logos.pl/handle/123456789/39611The "Self-portrait” of Waldemar Cwenarski (1926-1953), painted a few months only before the artist's untimely death, remains his most mature achievement as well as a tragic evidence of the drama of his time. Formally, the painting combines almost complete monochromatism and austerity of its fabric with expressive spontaneity marked with traces of streaming paint. The representation of the artist’s face evokes a monumental and dramatically still image of the death’s-head. However, both his head as well as those of two other persons, who emerge against the dark background of the painting, are covered with cone-shaped caps – a traditional element of the harlequin coat, and hence a sign denoting this sort of occupation. Being a recurrent motif In Cwenarski’s work, the cones-haped cap symbolism, nevertheless, is gradually developed to acquire a profoundly new semantic value. As opposed to the general notion of sadness and death suggested by his art, It seems to symbolize the lost joy of one’s life (eg. „Composition with Children”, 1950); while in the „Self-portrait” it reaches still further, as it were, to demonstrate a tragic ambivalence of an artist’s career in Cwenarski’s time. As the majority of the Polish people, W. Cwenarski painfully experienced the horror of the World War 1939-45 and the wandering life afterwards, until he settled down with his mother in Wroclaw in 1947. He entered the High School of Art there in 1949 – the critical year marking the beginning of the social realism rule in Polish art. According to new principles, an artist was compelled to produce an invariably simplified and optimistic vision of life, and strictly obey the realistic method of representation. A deviation from the rules would be considered an ideological failure on the part of an artist, with him being doomed to disappearance from the public arena as an officially dead. In the case of W. Cwenarski, the social realism principle determined the duplication of his work as a young painter. On the one hand, he tried to adjust his art to the official demands put forward by his professors. A profound need to find means of expression for his true self, on the other hand, made him secretly develop an independent trend of art conceived in what might be termed as the manner of spontaneous expressionism. In a series of outcries of temporarily released emotion, as it were, Cwenarski created such masterpieces as „Conflagration” and „Pieta” (1051). It was in his „Self-portrait”, however, that he succeeded in expressing to the full how well was he aware of the tragic destiny awaiting those in his time who dared to refuse the status of an officially accepted painter for the sake of remaining faithful to their true artistic vision. Only two years after Cwenarski’s death, in 1065, did it become possible for his best works of art to come out of hiding and grant the artist a great posthumous fame.polCC-BY-ND - Uznanie autorstwa - Bez utworów zależnychaldemar Cwenarskiartyścimalarzemalarstwosocrealizmsztuka niezależnaartistspainterspaintingsocialist realismindependent artArticle