Japanese Art: Stanislawski and His Students

One hundred years after Jan Stanisławski’s death, the Manggha Center of Japanese Art and Technology has organized an exhibition of his works.

The exhibition will be running from May 11 to September 16, with the pre-exhibition reception at 5 p.m. May 10.

It has the long-winded title of A Space of Landscape – A Landscape of Space. The Japanese Art Inspirations in the Work of Jan Stanisławski and His Students..

Stanisławski, who lived from 1860 to 1907, was one of the greatest Polish modernist landscape painters. He got acquainted with Asian art during his ten-year stay in Paris from 1885-1895. There he not only observed works of Japanese masters, but also their impact on European artists.

When he returned to Kraków he started collecting Japanese art. At the time the city was home to many modernists of the Young Poland movement, influenced by another Asian-art admirer, Feliks Jasieński.

Stanislawski borrowed from Japanese artists’ techniques and often surprising perspectives, such as their use of a blade of glass or of top of a tree to focus a painting. The most important thing, though, about Japanese art for him was the attitude behind it – a mystic, subjective way of experiencing nature and the landscape.

Using a combination of these inspirations, the work of Stanisławski and his students became a phenomenon in Polish and European art.

The exhibition, part of the Polish Japanism series, will includie not only Stanisławski’s paintings, but also those of his students Filipkiewicz, Kamocki, Karpiński, Makowski, Neumann, Trusz, Witkacy and others — and some of his friends, such as Fałat and Wyczółkowski.

Along with wood engravings by Hokusai and Hiroshige, the exhibition will include 200 works, most of which have never been displayed in Kraków before.

The Manggha Center is on ul. Konopnickiej 26, right across the Wisła River from Wawel Castle. You can get there by tram (lines 1, 2, 6 ? stop Jubilat/Most Dębicki and lines 18, 19, 22 – stop Rondo Grunwaldzkie) or by bus (lines 109, 114, 124, 164, 173, 179, 194, 439, 444 – stop Jubilat/Most Dębicki and lines 100, 103, 112, 114, 124, 128, 162, 164, 173, 179, 184, 194, 439, 444 – stop Rondo Grunwaldzkie)