A Minor Painter Who Dug Up Poland's Pagan Past and Painted It Back to Life
Slavdom Unearthed: Marian Wawrzeniecki's Neopagan Paintings (1891–1923)
Marian Wawrzeniecki trained in Kraków's academic history painting, yet made his mark as an archaeologist, unearthing the first obsidian artifacts on Polish soil along with early shelters, ceramics, and steles. His research fed a neopagan vision: from the 1890s to the 1920s he painted Slavic rituals, bound nudes, basilisks, and burial mounds, treating the pre-Christian past as a lost paradise and Christianity as a thousand-year colonization. Critics dismissed the work as erotica; later artists, including Stanisław Szukalski, built on it.
He came to see Gothic architecture and Renaissance painting as Germanic and Italic aberrations: successive regimes of a thousand-year-long cultural colonization of pagan Slavdom by Christianity.
- cgio
I don’t know who votes these things up, but I am glad they do. Can we have a new x_HN, with all the things with potential to open your mind in unspecified ways?
- ycombinete
There is something redolent of Ralph Bakshi's work in many of these images.
- thedailymail
If you enjoy this, you might also like he work of Stanisław Szukalski, a historically problematic but talented/eccentric painter and sculptor who pursued neo-pagan slavic (slav-adjacent?) themes.