Aleksander Gierymski’s Figuralism

Title: Aleksander Gierymski's Figuralism
Author: Michał Haake
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznań
Publication date: 2015
Pages: 576
ISBN: 978-83-232-2816-5
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The themes that can be observed in Gierymski's diploma painting titled Scena sądu z “Kupca weneckiego" Williama Szekspira and in so-called realistic works, such as images of the Virgin Mary, temples, both Judaic and Christian religious rituals as well as the followers of both these religions who are praying, show that religious motifs always recurred throughout his works and that the artist was interested in a human being's attitude toward religion in general, which was not taken into consideration previously at all. In his works Gierymski repeatedly used the opposition between "the vertical and the horizontal", which represented the heavenly and earthly orders. Therefore, Gierymski was not a positivist if one interprets this word as referring to a person who does not talk about things that are inaccessible to reason (i.e. represented by the vertical order). Gierymski created this opposition also by optically marginalizing motifs that represented the sacred order and that were placed in the background or on one side of the composition and by juxtaposing them with motifs that represented industrial civilization and were visually more conspicuous. By portraying Jews, the painter also joined in a very complex discussion on how Polish-Jewish relations developed in the territories of the Russian Partition, thus showing that he had noticed the growing differences between these nations that consolidated the divergence between the vertical and horizontal orders, which was characteristic of those times. These differences also reduced the importance of the spiritual sphere as an authority that governed human actions and made it impossible to notice a connection between the two religions.