As Years Go By, As Nights Go By: 100 Years of Cabaret In Cracow
Szolajski House: The National Museum of Cracow, 25th January - 30th April 2004.
Young Poland and the Jama Michalika Circle
Jama Michalika (Ya - ma - Meek - a - leeka), was the heart of Cracow's bohemia during the run up to the Great War. It means 'Michalik's cavern', named after the founder, Jan Michalik, a young tearaway who had mucked up his university studies and then fallen in love with the world of pastry and eclairs - all much to the surprise of his parents.
With no real windows as such, the cafe's name is apt, as this is very much an Alladin's Den. Having finished for the day, artists would saunter by from the nearby Academy to meet their girlfriends - inside, it was hazard, Turkish cigarettes and liberal quantities of alcohol, preferably until dawn.
Following in their footsteps today, one enters down a small corridor, before turning right into a large room that is divided by green velvet curtains - all distinctly fin-de-siecle. Beyond one finds the heart of the cafe, and a vast place it is too.
At first the sheer exoticism of the place is dizzying. The rich green tone continues, with banquettes lining the walls that curl here and there into romantic little alcoves. Dark polished wood furnishings curve with a voluptuous elegance - the tone is art nouveau but it is not really like anything that you would find in France, or indeed elsewhere. There is something of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland about the place - in one corner of the room a splendid mahogany mirror stretches up to the ceiling, its base a shell-like whirl. And if one was to step up and place a hand on its surface, the glass would surely dissolve and an enchanted world unfurl beyond.
Indeed, one soon realizes that not everything is quite as it seems. Some of the chairs are vastly outsized, and all about one notices bizarre flourishes. Stained glass windows peep out of the walls - unicorns, spiders and smiling bakers (who appear to be confronting strange paleolithic monsters). Behind these the unseen chefs are busy concocting walnut cakes and coffees.
All the greats used to come to Michalika. And perhaps more than at any other time in Poland's history, here was an era when Poland could rival French, Italian or English talents. Wyspianski, Mehoffer, Witkacy - all horribly unpronounceable to the English tongue, but names that can hold their own with any of the familiar characters of the French Belle Epoque. However, until this day, all of the aforementioned three (and many more besides) remain largely undiscovered in the West.
Until the end of April this year, the National Museum in Cracow is hosting an exhibition that draws back the curtain on the 'Mloda Polska' Group ('Young Poland'). By turns dazzling, and often entertainingly louche - it's a marvellous introduction to a little known world.
The exhibition, entitled 'As Years Go By, As Nights Go By' is being held in a chain of vaulted rooms in the recently renovated Szolajski House, just off the city's ancient Market Square. It is intimate in scale, focusing on the world of the cafes themselves, where, as the old saying goes, art was life and life became art. These cafes grew organically, absorbing the works of their talented customers - sketches, caricatures, paintings - and until this day Michalika possesses one of the most remarkable collections of Polish fin-de-siecle art.
The curators have rooted out some real gems from the depths of the museum's storerooms for this show. One of the first exhibits that greets you is a vast canvas that once covered a wall in the popular Peacock Cafe (f.1896). The whole thing is a glorious assembly of sketches, caricatures, and pithy verses, and it must surely be one of the most precious doodle-pads to have come down through the ages intact. In one corner a winged devil swoops out, ( courtesy of Wyspianski and looking suspiciously like a self-portrait), whilst up to the right one finds a well-finished landscape in oils by Antoni Procajlowicz. A loose portrait of a cross-legged fellow reading the popular art periodical Zycie, ('Life'), provides a snap-shot of the day, whilst to the right one finds a sketch of a baboon-like yeti running off with a naked woman in a manner that would make King Kong proud. Emerging in and out of the fray are rhyming couplets and amusing verses exalting art or satirizing contemporary life. The clatter of glasses, and the echo of laughter, is, one feels, never far away.
In true bohemian fashion the owner of the Peacock Cafe, or 'the nonchalant peacock' as it was dubbed, went bankrupt in 1901, and this paved the way for Jama Michalika as the cafe of choice for Cracow's artists. Much of the exhibition focuses on this world, and the cabarets and art exhibitions that went with it.
One of the events that became a regular feature of bohemian life in Cracow was Michalik's Green Balloon cabaret. This was a kind of grown-up, although not always dignified, Punch and Judy show. Cracow has always had its fair share of pedants and Ancien Regime caricatures, and at the Green Balloon witty writers would have a go at the pomposity and fustiness of local grandees, be they professors, dignataries or men of state. A certain cache of the group meant that occasionally grandees would drop by, only to find themselves being sent up, a factor that contributed to the amusement of the evening.
One of the central figures of this world was Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski (1874-1941), or 'Boy', as he was known. A medical doctor by profession, he also translated over a hundred French literary classics into Polish, which he started amidst the boredom of the First World War years. A campaigner for women's rights, he wrote many of the satirical pieces for the Green Balloon Cabaret. (Like thousands of other members of the Polish intelligentsia he was murdered by the Nazis during the second war. He was three quarters of the way through a translation of Proust at the time).
Many of the invitations to Boy's cabarets are exhibited in the show, and they are little masterpieces in themselves, providing a wonderful compliment to the paintings, sketches and caricatures that are also on display. Although distinctly more lurid than children's book illustrations, they are comparable in quality to the 'Golden Age' of book illustration that was emerging in England at the same time. Certainly the spirit is more Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes than gallant Peter Pan, and one feels that Beardsley and Wilde would have been well at home in this milieu, yet they have a certain magic about them that is very typical of the age.
Although most of the Mloda Polska artists were strongly patriotic, the Green Balloon set were certainly able to have a laugh at themselves, as well as put the wind up genteel society. On one of the cabaret invitations, a mad, demonic looking fellow is blazing through a starry Cracovian sky on the back of a comet (he is dressed, naturally, in white tie and tails). He has knocked for six the spire of St.Mary's, one of the city's most revered landmarks, whilst a small rope attached to his cane carries a basket that's brimming with wine bottles (or is it absinthe?) and a rather upset looking baby.
This was pretty irreverent by the day's standards, when Cracow was a sort of huge open air museum (a shrine even) to Poland's former greatness. At that time, Poland was divided amongst Russia, Prussia and Austria. The latter, including Cracow, was the only autonomous province, and Cracow's monuments were valued as sacred in expressing the glory of the old independent Poland. 'Where is there another city,' wrote one contemporary, ' on whose monuments so much care is being lavished, where so much effort and money is being expended on their renovation, maintenance and preservation; where they are so frequently spoken about, and with such concern.' Austrian Poland was in fact the only place where new monuments were allowed to be erected, and, indeed, where the Polish language was even allowed in the universities.
Thus Polish artists were in a very particular position. The landscapes and rural scenes of the Mloda Polska group are often imbued with a reverence for a very Polish type of idyll. Many had spent time in France, Italy or Austria and one can find echoes of French and Austrian trends in their works. However, Impressionism and the strands of Post-Impressionism were not taken up for their own sake. One might find an echo of Renoir here or Klimt there, but the work of the Mloda Polska artists is rooted in a very specific national predicament. Wyspianski's works, for example, are shot through with clear patriotic messages, both in his church interiors, as well as his plays.
This is a delightful exhibition, modest in its scale, yet rich in quality. Besides the lucid, elegant presentation it is the intimacy and focus that provides the real key to its success. By focusing on the artistic milieu of Cracow's cafes, and the dazzling variety of art that emerged with them, the spirit of that epoch ramifies in a more satisfying way than a simple arrangement of paintings by a group of related artists. Little touches here and there such as old furnishings from the cafes themselves help to conjure the ambiance of fin-de-siecle Cracow. Thus the painters themselves seem like less distant figures - we can see them in the world that they knew best, which provides an amusing balance to the loftier themes that were often pursued outside of the cafes.
These artists certainly deserve to be wider known. And with the passing of the Iron Curtain, one feels that it can't be much longer before they start to gain the recognition that is their due in the West. This small exhibition also provides a tantalizing foretaste to the imminent re-opening of the Wyspianski Museum upstairs. For if one had to single out one figure from amongst a host of talents it is Wyspianski. Painter, poet, philosopher and master in stained glass, he also managed to write some of the best (and best-loved) plays in the Polish language. The sheer range of his talents makes figures such as Seurat or Gauguin seem positively lightweight. With the centenary of his death just a few years away, the big galleries of Europe and America should seriously be considering a tribute.
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