JASIEŃSKI Feliks (EN)

Biographical commentary

Feliks Jasieński was an art critic, journalist and lecturer with a great talent for polemics, a patron of the arts and leader of numerous art associations, a donor and curator of the National Museum in Kraków, a fervent Japanese, a promoter of the graphic arts and a militant supporter of modern art. He was a major figure in the artistic life of Poland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But he was also, if not above all, the collector, one of the most eminent that the history of art in Poland has known (Kluczewska-Wójcik A., 2014).
Jasieński was born on 8 July 1861 in Grzegorzewice, 60 km from Warsaw, in the part of Poland then incorporated into Russia. His father Zdzisław's family, the Jasieńskis belonged to the middle stratum of Polish nobility. Far more influential were the Wołowskis, his mother Jadwiga's family, merchants and lawyers of Jewish origin who had converted to Catholicism and were actively involved in Polish economic and political life. Feliks' great-grandfather Franciszek (ennobled in 1823) and his three sons Ludwik, Kazimierz and Feliks took part in the uprising of November 1830 and the Russo-Polish war that followed. They settled in Paris after the defeat of the uprising, and were very active in the Polish "Grande émigration", as well as in French society. Franciszek was one of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski's main collaborators. A supporter of the aristocratic bloc, he nevertheless remained close to the liberal wing of the emigration thanks to the family ties between the Wołowski and Mickiewicz families. Ludwik Wołowski, Jasieński's great-uncle, was a professor of economics at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, one of the founders and the first director of the Crédit foncier de France bank (1852), and a senator for life (1876) (Levasseur É., 1877). Among his collaborators, apart from Pierre Émile Levasseur and Léon Faucher, Minister of the Interior and husband of his sister Alexandra, were the brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire.
Jasieński, along with his brother Zdzisław and two sisters Aleksandra and Jadwiga, spent his childhood at the palace of the Osuchów estate, owned by his maternal grandfather Feliks Wołowski, which remained in the family until 1898. After his schooling in Warsaw, he studied abroad, first at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia) in 1881, interrupted by a lifelong eye disease, and then, between 1883 and 1886, in Berlin and Paris. In Berlin, he practised his musical talents while taking classes with Ernst Curtius (classical archaeology) and Hermann Grimm (philology) at the University, as an auditor. In Paris, he attended lectures by Levasseur (political economy), Émile Deschanel (French literature) and Ernest Renan at the Collège de France. 

His musical compositions published between 1882 and 1886 in Dorpat, Warsaw and Paris were not well received (list of publications: Kluczewska-Wójcik A., 2014, p. 227). 
In 1887, he married his cousin Teresa Łabęcka, daughter of Mieczysław and Jadwiga née Kossowska. The young couple settled in Warsaw, their son Henryk was born in 1888. Jasieński became involved in activities of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw and made contacts with representatives of the early Polish avant-garde.  In 1896, a marital crisis turned his life upside down. Separated from his wife, who died in 1900, and from his son, he set off on a long journey "from Warsaw to London via Jerusalem" (Félix, 1901, p. 48), ending up in Paris, where he spent the last years of the nineteenth century, deepening his interest in Japanese art and contemporary engraving.

Critic, journalist, publisher

As a young man, Jasieński dreamed of a career as a pianist and composer, but his musical hopes were in vain. While his friends still admired his improvisations and interpretations of Chopin, his attempts at composition were definitively forgotten.  However, the results of the years devoted to studies are not negative: he owes them a solid foundation for his future activity as a music columnist, in which he would devote practically his entire life, collaborating in particular with the daily newspapers Głos Narodu, Naprzód, Czas, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (list of publications: Kluczewska-Wójcik A., 2014, pp. 223-227). 
His next field of endeavour was art and literary criticism. His magnum opus, Manggha. Les promenades à travers le monde l'art et les idées (Félix, 1901) was published in Paris and Warsaw in 1901. Wrongly compared to the Journal des frères Goncourt (Alberowa, Bąk, 1964-1965), this "book about France" (Lorentowicz J., 1901) should be seen in a much broader context, including the author's "masters of thought", primarily Ernest Renan and Anatole France, but also his contemporaries: Paul Bourget, the father of literary dilettantism, the critic Jules Lemaître and the essayist Rémy de Gourmont. The book presents a broad overview of the critical thought of the period, mainly French and German (Kluczewska, 1998, pp. 99-181; Miodońska-Brooks E., 1992; Salwa M., 2008). His title Manggha, in homage to Hokusai, became Jasieński's pen name. 
In 1901, after returning to Warsaw, Jasieński became a member of the editorial board of Chimera, a truly prestigious publication and the cradle of symbolism in Poland. He wrote the manifesto article for the revival of Polish music (Jasieński F., 1901b), but it was the blasphemous article published on the death of the painter Wojciech Gerson, one of the most controversial of his journalistic work, that marked the real start of his career as a polemicist (Jasieński F., 1901a). His work as a newspaper columnist for Kraków's leading dailies is also in the same vein. Behind the provocateur, however, lay a professional man who knew all the professional secrets of this new medium, the press, and did not hesitate to use it to orchestrate his artistic and editorial endeavours.
Jasieński was also the co-founder and artistic director of two other magazines, Lamus (1908-1909) in Lwów and Miesięcznik Literacki i Artystyczny (1911) in Kraków. Between 1903 and 1910, he published several graphic albums, starting with the first Album of the Society of Polish Painter-Etchers, of which he was a founder (Czarnecki K., 1991). 

Aware that modern art was also promoted through publications, he took on the task of editing the first illustrated monograph on Polish painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Polish Art. Painting, 1904-1909), which remains an indispensable source for the study of art criticism in Poland at the turn of the centuries (Kluczewska-Wójcik A., 2012). In 1907, he founded "Jasieński Museum Publishing", a music publishing house that was active until 1911 and published five volumes of works by two young musicians, Jadwiga Sarnecka and Karol Hubert Rostworowski (a future playwright) (Marcinkowska H., 2014).

A japanese journalist and a promoter of artistic life 

His concerns as a journalist and publisher were part of a much wider programme: the dissemination and promotion of Japanese art and "young" Polish art. Jasieński, the great 'agitator' of the cultural scene, is a presenter, lecturer and curator of art exhibitions. His first Japanese exhibition in Warsaw, in 1901, was a landmark because of the aesthetic novelty it proposed and the atmosphere of scandal that surrounded it. Until 1923, he organised more than forty exhibitions, mainly in Krakow, of contemporary Polish art, graphic art and Japanese art from his collection, which, as he emphasised from the outset, was intended for the nation. Most of them were of a novel nature, such as a major Japanese exhibition in 1906, accompanied by The Guide to the Japanese Collection of the Department of the National Museum in Kraków, written and published by Jasieński, or the monographic exhibitions of Hiroshige, Utamaro, Hokusai and Kuniyoshi in 1923. The presentations of two albums by the Vollard gallery, of the engraved work of Redon and Klinger, in 1902-1903, were not only the first of their kind in Poland but among the first in Europe.  
In 1902, Jasieński moved to Krakow, a city with which he would remain associated until his death on 6 April 1929. His flat at 1 rue Saint Jean, in the centre of the old town, with windows overlooking the Sukiennice, which housed the National Museum gallery, became a meeting place for artists, writers and art lovers. Since 1903, this "Jasieński Museum" has also been the home of the "L'Art" club, founded by the collector to support the Sztuka Society of Polish Artists ("L'Art", 1897), made up of his painter friends and professors at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. At the end of his career, limited by his means, the collector decided to concentrate his efforts on those he considered the most vulnerable: young sculptors, engravers and musicians. In 1921, his initiative took the form of the Feliks Jasieński Prize, administered by the Academy of Sciences and Letters in Kraków. It was awarded regularly every year until 1938 (Kluczewska-Wójcik A., 1998, pp. 365-368, 389-392).
Involved in the revival of the graphic and decorative arts, Jasieński founded the Society of Polish Painters and Engravers in 1902 and supported the Polish Applied Art Society and the Kilim Association. He also took part in the activities of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Krakow and, in 1903, founded the Society of Friends of the National Museum in Krakow, the first of its kind in Poland. He was also one of the founders of the literary cabaret Zielony Balonik (Little Green Ball), which brought together the city's intellectual elite for a wide range of artistic events. 
His collection and library are available to all interested parties, not only artists but also students at the Academy of Fine Arts and Maria Niedzielska's art school for women, for whom he gives classes accompanied by presentations of works of art, primarily Japanese. The "Jasieński Museum" thus remains the living centre of Polish Japonism.
On 11 March 1920, Jasieński bequeathed his entire collection to the National Museum in Kraków (deed of gift: Kluczewska-Wójcik A., 2014, p. 205-222; DIMNK no 140.000-155.000).  Appointed curator of the new department, he was entirely responsible for it.  With the exception of the sculptures and paintings exhibited at the Sukiennice, a number of objects remained in his flat, a situation that remained unchanged until his death. In 1930, his widow Janina completed the inventory work and the entire collection came under the responsibility of a curator appointed by the museum. The Feliks Jasieński Department did not officially open until 1934 and remained in operation until 1939. After the Second World War, the collection was divided between the Museum's various departments.

His collection

Polish art

Jasieński's true vocation as a collector dates back to his encounter with the painters grouped around the magazine Wędrowiec and its artistic editor Stanisław Witkiewicz, in the late 1880s in Warsaw. He was interested in the realist works of Witkiewicz, Józef Chełmoński and Aleksander Gierymski, but even more so in those of Władysław Podkowiński and Józef Pankiewicz, young "impressionists", then violently reviled by critics, and Leon Wyczółkowski, the third protagonist of the "landscape revolution" in Polish painting. The tragic fate of the young sculptor Antoni Kurzawa not only prompted the collector to buy several of the artist's compositions, but also strengthened his interest in this area of creation.

In Kraków, his collection was enriched by works by professors of the Academy of Fine Arts and members of the Sztuka Society: Julian Fałat, reformer and first rector of the Academy, Jan Stanisławski, founder of the Polish landscape school, Jacek Malczewski, standard-bearer of the Polish symbolists, as well as representatives of the decorative trend in painting such as Józef Mehoffer and Stanisław Wyspiański, or Konstanty Laszczka, tutor of the new generation of sculptors. The collector also maintained relations with painters from Chimera's entourage Ferdynand Ruszczyc and Konrad Krzyżanowski and Polish artists active in France Olga Boznańska and Władysław Ślewiński. Works by Xawery Dunikowski, Edward Wittig, Ludwik Puget, Henryk Hochmann, Henryk (Enrico) Glicenstein and Gustav Vigeland complete his sculpture gallery, which is unique in Poland. This part of the collection, comprising 220 paintings, 740 pastels and drawings and 78 sculptures, forms the basis of the permanent exhibition of Polish Impressionism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau at the National Museum in Krakow (list of paintings and sculptures: Kluczewska-Wójcik A., 1998, pp. 580-621; Blak H., Małkiewicz B.; Wojtałowa E., 2001; Godyń D., Laskowska M., 2016; Kozakowska S., Małkiewicz B., 1997). 

Oriental collections

The art of the Far East was and still is Jasieński-collector's first claim to fame. His "Japanese passion" was born in France, as was his collection, acquired almost entirely through Parisian dealers, first and foremost Siegfrid Bing, and Charles Vigner, but also Hayashi Tadamasa, Henri Portier, Adolphe Worch and N. Pohl. His stays in Paris, between 1897 and 1900, gave him the opportunity to train, exercise his eye and refine his references. The business relations established at that time continued after his return to Poland until at least 1909 (AMNK S1/4, S1/14, S1/19).

He also stocked his collection in other European shopping centres: in Amsterdam, at Van Veen, supplier of his collection of oriental fabrics; in Berlin, at Amsler and Ruthard, Rex & C° and R. Wagner, specialising in oriental carpets; in Vienna "Au Mikado" and in Leipzig, at Karl W. Hiersemann, who mainly supplied Jasieński's Far Eastern library and his collection of graphic arts, including Japanese (AMNK S1/4, S1/16, S1/19). In addition to monographs and specialist periodicals, his library contains several sale catalogues of major Japanese collections, from the Goncourt collection of 1897 onwards, some of which include handwritten notes by the collector, suggesting that he participated in the auctions. Between 1904 and 1907, Jasieński imported prints directly from Japan through Stanisław Dębicki, a painter and collector of Japanese art. Following the losses suffered during the Second World War, the collection now comprises around 7,600 objects, representative of the history of Japanese art, to which examples of Chinese art have also been added. It contains a selection of paintings from the 15th to the 19th century (83 kakemonos, 5 makimonos, 33 drawings and watercolours), including works by Tosa Mitsusuke, Kano Shunko, Miyagawa Chôshun, Masanobu, Toyokuni, Kishi Renzan, Watanabe Seitei and Buddhist paintings. In addition to 26 examples of Buddhist statuary from the 14th to 19th centuries, sculpture is represented by a large number of netsuke and several actors' masks (Alberowa 1968; Martini, 2014, Sztuka japońska, 1994).
Jasieński is particularly interested in prints, and his collection includes more than 5,000 (Kurakufu, 1993). Signed by 200 artists, from Hishikawa Moronobu and Okumura Masanobu to Hiroshige, they illustrate the successive stages in the evolution of ukiyo-e, even if not all periods are represented in an equally rich way. The collector's preference is for eighteenth-century masters such as Harunobu, Koryûsai, Shigemasa, Shunshô, Kiyonaga and Sharaku. One of the best represented artists is Utamaro. Among the masters of the first half of the 19th century, he appreciated Toyokuni, Kuniyoshi and Kunisada, but his favourites were Hokusai and Hiroshige. The first is represented by his historical and legendary series, as well as landscapes and 64 albums. The second, whose works make up 30% of the collection, is present with practically all his series and numerous isolated plates. There are also surimono by Hokusai, Hokkei, Gakutei and Kubo Shuman, among others.
A great lover of tsuba, Jasieński collected 680 of them, as well as a selection of kozuke, swords and two suits of armour. More than 60 inrô, ceramics, enamels, lacquers, bronze objects, textiles, notably kimono and obi belts, and katagami stencils represent Japanese decorative arts. 
Jasienski was also keen on Near Eastern art, especially Persian and Turkish fabrics and carpets, as well as Polish belts known as Słuck (17th-19th centuries), of which his collection numbered 1,200 pieces (Biedrońska-Słotowa B., 1983; Taszycka M., 1990, 1994). He bought them early in his career, but his passion intensified in the years 1910-1920. During the war, he travelled to Galicia and Podolia (now Ukraine) in search of traditional kilims to complement his collection of oriental textiles, which he bought in Lwów, as well as in Berlin and Amsterdam, where he also purchased Javanese batiks.

Graphic and decorative arts

The graphic arts are one of the collector's major interests. Awakened during his stays in Berlin and especially Paris, his taste for engraving grew at the same time as his "Japanese passion", and the two remained closely linked. His favourite correspondents were Edmond Sagot, Gustave Pellet and Ambroise Vollard. Among the many print dealers active in Paris, Jasieński chose those who were also the first to actively support the colour print movement, with which he associated himself through his acquisitions and publishing initiatives. He was particularly interested in the publications of societies or associations of painter-engravers: French, but also German, English, Dutch, Scandinavian and even Russian. He bought them directly from the publishers or from his regular supplier Hiersemann. Albums and a large number of Russian and Soviet propaganda posters were imported directly from Moscow. 

More than 3,000 engravings and numerous posters and magazines illustrate the successive phases in the development of printmaking in Europe: from Goya to the Nabis, via Klinger and Redon, who are particularly well represented in the collection (Kluczewska-Wójcik 2006a, b; Kulig-Janarek K., 2015). The collection of Polish engravings comprises around 1,200 plates. It features all the most significant artists and works from 1895 to 1929, with those by Pankiewicz and Wyczółkowski leading the way. Jasieński also bought artists' monographs and other specialist publications, hoping to turn his print cabinet into a meeting place for all those interested in this area of artistic creation.
Involved in the decorative arts revival movement, Jasieński was already championing the so-called "Zakopane" style in 1902, which had emerged from Witkiewicz's projects and writings. He naturally turned his attention to crafts from the regions of Podhale (in the Tatra mountains), the Carpathians, Wolhynia, Podolia (now Ukraine) and Kashubia (in northern Poland). Alongside specimens of folk art are carpets, furniture and batiks signed by members of the Krakow Workshops, such as Karol Tichy, Tadeusz Brzozowski and Józef Czajkowski, and by young apprentices, the Kogut sisters. Alongside the flambéed stoneware of Stanisław Jagmin, the renovator of the art of ceramics in Poland, are those of Franciszek Necel, a potter from Kashubia, whose work, commissioned by Jasieński just before his death, is the last piece to enter the collection (Kostuch B., 2001; Kostuch B., 2010).