Dimensions: 43.2 x 110.4 cm
Signing: five stickers on the frame - from left: sticker (typescript): Municipal Collections Krak. / Dzp. 43/44 / Dep. P. Zygmunt Ziembicki; sticker (print, ink): [RE] G. NO / CASE NO / CARNEGIE INSTITUTE, PITTSBURGH, PA., U.S.A.. / TABLEAU La cigale / PEINTRE Jacek Malczewski / PROPRIÉTAIRE Zygmunt Ziembicki / ADRESSE Pologne, Cracovie, Acad. des Beaux Arts / Priere de coller avec soin deux étiquettes: l'une au châssis, l'autre au cadre; sticker of the National Museum in Poznan (print, typescript): AUTHOR/ARTISTE Jacek Malczewski / TITLE/TITLE Grasshopper / triptych, 1903-1907 / EXHIBITION/EXPOSITION Monographic of Jacek Malczewski / ski XI 1968-II. 1969 / CAT NR./ CAT NR 123; sticker (print, ink): 271 / REG. NO. CASE NO [oli:] 89-1 / CARNEGIE INSTITUTE, PITTSBURGH, PA., U.S.A. / TABLEAU La cigale / PEINTRE Jacek Malczewski / PROPRIÉTAIRE Zygmunt Ziembicki / ADRESSE Pologne, Cracovie, Acad. des Beaux Arts / [...] au cadre detached collector's sticker with red border (ink): 5 (...) / J (...) and on the so-called "back" two stickers: sticker (print, blue pen): TOW. PRZYJACIÓŁ SZTUK PIĘKNYCH W KRAKOWIE / Author Jacek Malczewski / Title of work Triptych "Grasshopper" 1907 / Type of work oil-on-board / Price / Signature of author (owned by Ziembicki); sticker (print, typescript): Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie / R. 1939. No. 178 [stamp] 1688 / Author [stamp] JACK MALCZEWSKI'S EXHIBITION / Address / Work Grasshopper / Execution ol., dict. / price ...
Provenance
Poland, private collection Agra-Art, auction 17.10.2021, item 20 Krakow, collection of Zygmunt Ziembicki
Exhibited
Radom, Jacek Malczewski Museum in Radom, Jacek Malczewski. Contexts, 20.09.2024 - 5.01.2025.
Poznan, National Museum in Poznan, Jacek Malczewski, 1968.
Kraków-Zabrze, Museum in Zabrze, Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Kraków, Jacek Malczewski 1855-1929, 1961.
Kraków, Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie, Polish Painting of the 19th and 20th centuries. Works of non-living artists, 1949.
Kraków, Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Kraków, Jacek Malczewski 1855-1929, 1939.
Cracow, National Museum in Cracow, Posthumous exhibition of works by Jacek Malczewski, November 1929.
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, Twenty-Fifth Annual International Exhibition of Paintings, 1926.
Reproduced
Szymalak-Bugajska P. [ed.], Jacek Malczewski. Contexts, Jacek Malczewski Museum in Radom, Radom 2024, pp. 272-273.
Szymalak-Bugajska P., Malczewski. Approaches, Arkady Publishing House, Warsaw 2023, pp. 180-181.
Krzysztofowicz-Kozakowska S., Jacek Malczewski. Life and works, Cracow [2008] p.138-139.
Jacek Malczewski. Catalog of a monographic exhibition, National Museum in Poznań, Poznań 1968, cat. no. 123, il. 129-131.
Literature
Jordanowski S., Vademecum of Polish painting in the USA, Wrocław 1996, p. 71.
Jakimowicz A., Jacek Malczewski, Warsaw 1974, cat. no. 98.
Jakimowicz A., Jacek Malczewski and his epoch, Warsaw 1970, p. 156.
Jacek Malczewski 1855-1929 [exhibition catalog], Zabrze Museum, TPSP in Cracow, Cracow 1961 cat. no. 24.
Polish Painting XIX-XX w. Works of deceased artists [exhibition catalog], TPSP in Krakow, Krakow 1949, cat. no. 46.
Jacek Malczewski (1855-1929) [exhibition catalog], TPSP in Krakow, Krakow 1939, cat. no. 187, p. 18 (as property of Zygmunt Ziembicki).
Posthumous exhibition of works by Jacek Malczewski at the National Museum, "Voice of the Nation," November 9, 1929, no. 301, p. 5.
The triptych "Grasshopper" belongs to the group of unusual, symbolically rich works by Jacek Malczewski, in which the real world is intertwined with fairy tales, constituting a story about human existence and the artist's fate. In the central part, the author depicted a portrait of his warm friend and longtime model, the Cracow painter Stanislaw Bryniarski (1829-1914), flanked by two effigies of fauns in the side quarters. Bryniarski, a painter of the generation of Matejko and Grottger, depicted mainly urban architecture and interiors, and in his later century was also involved in copying and conservation of paintings. He is remembered, however, primarily as the distinctive figure in Malczewski's canvases. Here his wrinkled face, blue eyes and gray mane take on a metaphorical dimension, becoming the embodiment of the myth of Titonos.
Malczewski draws on a story from Greek mythology about the beloved of the rosy-fingered goddess Eos, who was given immortality but not eternal youth by Zeus. Doomed to age indefinitely, Titonos eventually transformed into a cricket - a creature that in the artist's iconography becomes a sign of the immortality of the spirit. In this key, the portrait of Bryniarski - an aged painter associated with an ancient era - acquires a profound meaning: it is an image of human transience and, at the same time, artistic duration. The old man is accompanied by a young woman with a wreath of tares on her head - this is Eos, holding in her hand the title grasshopper - the future figure of her beloved. These insects, in Malczewski's work synonymous with the cricket or cicada, almost always evoke the motif of death. The pink stinging plants adorning the head of the goddess, though beautiful, are poisonous plants - and thus carry the ambiguity of Eros and Thanatos, love and the inexorable end of life. The background of the composition, filled with an idyllic landscape in which a faun embraces a country girl, reinforces the erotic and sensual tone of the representation. Malczewski, as he often does in his work, here combines the sacred and the profane, myth and the everyday, creating an allegory of a man torn between body and spirit, time and eternity.
The figures of the two satyrs visible in the side sections of the triptych were created in 1907 - four years after Bryniarski's portrait was painted - but together they complete the artist's myth of transience. The paintings show the faces of elderly, horned men, the one on the left of whom additionally has a scapular placed around his neck. Belonging to the world of nature and fairy tales, the creatures are a reference to both animal instincts and human spirituality. The presented "Grasshopper" is therefore not only a portrait of a friend, but also a meditation on the artist's fate, old age and transience. In both the old man with blue eyes and the satyrs, one can see Malczewski himself, looking back into the past and into himself. This painting - poetic, ambiguous and symbolic - is one of the artist's more elaborate works, in which his reflection on the nature of existence reaches a particular maturity.
