Poetry – that has been loved, anthologised, set to music, and even danced.
Plays – that were a commercial success in her lifetime and are re-emerging as daring, taboo-breaking, and highly relevant now.
And there is yet another side to Maria’s genius - -
The visual arts.
As her friend the poet Beata Obertyńska wrote, looking back at the 1920s, ‘Her talent for painting - and the fact that she discarded it completely, prodigally, for the sake of poetry - is hardly ever mentioned.’
‘I saw many of her compositions,’ Beata remembered, ‘Amazing, […] in between a blissful dream and a tormenting nightmare. The meaning? Often known only to her. But always testimony to a cool, unfailingly acute observation of life, and with all the panache of a subtle, contemporary, feminine sensibility.’
Maria was a member of the famous Kossak family of painters, and she became a highly skilled and visionary painter even though training in the art schools was rarely available to women when she was young. But in the 1920s she was encouraged to focus on her writing. She was an instant success, and outside Poland her visual art has remained almost unkown.
Until now.
On November 27th 2020, there will be an online book launch for what has already been welcomed as one of the ‘Best Art Books of the Year’:
Young Poland
The Polish Arts and Crafts Movement:1890 – 1918
edited by Julia Griffin (William Morris Gallery) and Andrzej Szczerski (National Museum, Kraków).
As the publishers write, ‘This groundbreaking study is the first book in any language to explore the Young Poland (Młoda Polska) period in the context of the international Arts and Crafts movements at the end of the nineteenth century.’
‘Young Poland’ celebrates the extraordinarily beautiful art of Stanislaw Wyspianski, and it includes a chapter devoted to the visual art of a painter of the next generation, ‘Young Poland’s daughter’ - Maria herself: ‘A painter of bold and intimate watercolours, often incorporating fantastic and macabre elements inspired by Polish folk traditions; the book explores this important aspect of her oeuvre for the first time.’
‘For the first time’ – but definitely not the last.
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‘Young Poland’ will be published by Lund Humphries on December 1st 2020, in advance of a major London exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in the autumn of 2021.