Tower in Kazimierz

Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936) devoted over thirty years of his artistic activity to graphic art, abandoning oil painting on its behalf. The board made in lithographic technique, depicting a tower in Kazimierz is an expression of Wyczółkowski's fascination with the beauty of the plein-airs in Kazimierz, which for years attracted numerous artists looking for picturesque painting motifs. The artist valued them particularly highly, as expressed by his frequent visits to Kazimierz in the years 1918-1922. The asymmetrically composed board with a fragmentary shot of the tower, surprisingly framed below the finial, reveals the influence of Japanese woodcuts. The artist's characteristic aspiration to monumentalize the depicted elements and to characterize them by means of a selected fragment, since according to the artist's words, “the whole would reduce the magnitude”, has been most fully expressed here. The seemingly random composition has been carefully thought over by the author - the massive vertical part of the tower is balanced by horizontally closed lines of bushes, the bank of the river, the ribbon of the Vistula and a wide stretch of the sky.