Młoda Polska: Władysław Ślewiński
Combing (Czesząca się), 1897
Oil on canvas
64 x 91 cm
©National Museum in Krakow

This painting by Ślewiński reduces a daily combing routine to flat forms, dominated by a large mass of red hair. The National Museum in Krakow lists the model as unknown, though art historians identify her as Eugenia Szewcow, a Russian painter who married him in Paris. This solitary scene links directly to his earlier painting Sleeping Woman with a Cat, 1896.

From financial ruin to the Paris studios

Ślewiński did not take a standard path toward modernism; painting was a late choice driven by crisis. In the early 1870s, he briefly attended the Warsaw drawing school of Wojciech Gerson (1831–1901), a leading Polish realist who forced students to focus on anatomical precision and copying plaster casts. Ślewiński abandoned art to run his inherited estate in Pilaszkowice, but he mismanaged the finances into total bankruptcy. In 1888, pursued by Russian tax collectors threatening to seize his property, he abandoned everything and fled to Paris.

To rebuild his life, he enrolled in the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi. These private, independent art academies operated as radical alternatives to the conservative, state-run École des Beaux-Arts, attracting an international avant-garde by offering students creative freedom. This independent environment made Ślewiński forget Gerson’s methods, as artists in these cafés favoured a direct, raw approach to art.

Discovering a new language in Brittany

His breakthrough came through a close friendship with Paul Gauguin. The two met in 1889 at Chez Madame Charlotte, a small Paris crêperie where the owner, Charlotte Caron, allowed broke avant-garde artists like August Strindberg and Alphonse Mucha to pay for food with artwork. Ślewiński, despite his own financial troubles, regularly bought meals, tobacco, and paint for Gauguin.

Following Gauguin’s radical advice to stop copying nature and treat art as an abstraction, Ślewiński spent his summers between 1889 and 1896 in the Breton fishing villages of Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. He abandoned three-dimensional perspective entirely to embrace Synthetism. Working from memory inside the studio rather than painting directly outdoors, he began locking simplified figures into thick, dark outlines filled with flat, unblended color.

Conflict and legacy in Poland

When Ślewiński returned home in 1905, his Franco-Breton style offered an alternative to academic historicism for the Młoda Polska movement. In 1906, he became a professor at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts, but his radical methods quickly caused a scandal. His refusal to teach traditional anatomy led to open conflict with conservative faculty members, forcing him to resign within a year.

He retreated to the mountain town of Zakopane, where his studio became a gathering point for young artists eager to break away from tradition. Through his guidance, the next generation learned to reject decorative realism. Czesząca się captures the core of this transition; his treatment of the massive hair field avoids academic detail, connecting directly to the bold, linear experimentation found in Teodor Axentowicz’s pastel study Redhead, 1899.