The Call

We present today's painting thanks to the National Museum in Wrocław. It was created by one of my favorite painters—Witold Wojtkiewicz. His works are mysterious and very often disturbing. I hope you'll like it!

The Call belongs to the last series of works by Witold Wojtkiewicz, entitled Ceremonies, created a year before his premature death. The series consisted in seven paintings, from which the 5th and the 7th are in the collection of the National Museum in Wrocław. Wojtkiewicz studied drawing in Warsaw, spent a short while in Saint Petersburg and continued studies in the Cracow Academy, under Pankiewicz and Wyczółkowski. Even though his art derives from the modernist period, it is a unique and completely separate phenomenon. His originality was also appreciated abroad; a famous French writer, André Gide, organized an individual exhibition of Wojtkiewicz’s works in one of the galleries in Paris in 1907.

The Call perfectly embodies the artist’s style. The composition is full of fantasy and symbolism. The grotesque character is acquired through the depiction of a fairy-tale-like, childlike theme in the poetics of exaggeration, peculiarity, and absurd. At first glance, the figures look like characters from a children’s book. But there’s no happy ending. The atmosphere of the painting in full of lyrical melancholy and odd sadness, laced with dread and inarticulate fear. The pessimistic visions of the painter were above all works of his own imagination; he also drew inspiration, however, from European modernist poetry by Maurice Maeterlinck, Oscar Wilde, and Marcel Schwob.