“Towards the revival of religious art”. The revival efforts for church art in Polish Lands between 1900–1930 (with particular emphasis on wall-paintings)

Abstract

For over 200 years now, that is, at least since the French Revolution, religious, or church art has been plagued with the notion of its inadequacy to the expectations of the faithful and the resulting need for the “eternal resurrections of sacred art” (les éternelles résurrections de l’art sacré). The present paper looks at such attempts undertaken on the Polish ground roughly in the first thirty years of the 20th century, particularly in the period spanning the two decades between two major exhibitions of church art, held in Cracow in 1911 and in Katowice in 1931, and church mural paintings as the form of art that was famously flourishing on the Polish lands in the 1890s, that is at the beginning of the period under discussion. The critical appraisal of the attempts at the renewal of church art, presented on numerous examples in the paper, based on contemporary press and literature, is aimed at showing the futility of such efforts, as the sphere of the sacred seems to defy any rationalised measures taken to “revive” or “renew” it.