Frenzy of Exultations

Podkowinski was a young Warsaw painter who had brought Impressionism back from Paris and then turned, in the last two years of his short life, to symbolism. He painted this in eighteen ninety four, when he was already ill with tuberculosis, and it seems to have grown out of an unhappy love. Look at the contrast between the pale, smoothly painted body of the woman and the rough black mass of the horse, and at the way the composition spirals upward from the hooves to the flying hair. The horse was an old symbol of passion and of death; here it is both.

At the Warsaw exhibition of eighteen ninety four the picture drew crowds and abuse, and after five weeks the artist walked in with a knife and slashed the canvas, cutting the woman's face and body. He died the following year at twenty nine. The painting was bought, repaired, and given to the National Museum in Kraków, where it has hung in the Sukiennice for more than a century. The cuts were restored, but if you look closely at the woman's figure you may still sense the wounds. It remains one of the most reproduced images in Polish art.

Did You Know? The artist attacked his own painting with a knife at its first exhibition, and the slashes had to be repaired before it entered the museum.