Stanisław Wyspiański
Stanisław Wyspiański was a Polish Post-Impressionism and Symbolism artist who lived from 1869 to 1907. A true Renaissance man, he was a painter, poet, interior designer, and playwright. Wyspiański was proud of his Polish heritage and was part of the Young Poland movement.
Wyspiański was born in 1869 in Kraków, which at the time was part of Austrian Poland. His mother died when he was 7 years old. His father was an alcoholic, so Wyspiański was brought up by his aunt. His aunt and uncle were middle class intellectuals and friends with the Polish artist, Jan Matejko, who gave Wyspiański his first informal art lessons. As he got older and attended the Jagiellonian University where Matejko was serving as Dean for the school of fine arts, Matejko invited Wyspiański to help paint the architectural elements of the Mariacki Church, a fourteenth century church in Kraków.
Between 1890 and 1894, Wyspiański traveled across Europe. In France, he befriended the French artist, Paul Gauguin, who toured the art museums of Paris with him. Wyspiański was fond of the art of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. When Wyspiański returned home to Poland in 1894, he worked for various theater companies while writing his own plays. His play, ‘Warszawianka’, was revered by critics and helped bring Wyspiański mainstream. At the time, the Polish people were under foreign rule. As such, there was a burgeoning national identity, passed to fellow Polish people through means of art, writing, and design.
In 1900, Wyspiański married his aunt’s servant, Teodora Pytko, with whom he already had 4 children. He often documented his domestic life in informal pastel sketches. This same year, he wrote his most famous play, ‘Wesele’ (‘The Wedding’). This drama commented on the social class system in Poland at the time. Though Wyspiański is mostly known for his plays, throughout his life, he continually worked on the visual arts, creating portraits of his family and friends as well as landscapes. He worked mostly in pastels, but also used oil paints.
Wyspiański’s health started to deteriorate. Stanisław Wyspiański died in 1907 at just 38 years old from syphilis, which was incurable at the time. Just months before his death, his right and dominant hand stopped working. He could not hold a brush or a pen, so he taped the pen to his fingers, desperate to continue to output the immense art inside of him.
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