2. Couple with a bouquet
English version | Wersja polska
Andrzej Wróblewski’s oevre is marked by themes: topos-like themes, fundamental themes and themes that are myths. Series such as Executions, Chauffeurs, Chaired or Tombs are of immense value to Polish culture. They constitute a monumental postmortem image of an artist engulfed by post-catastrophic and dystopian visions - an apologist for the blue dead whom he was soon to join.
In the density of threads one in particular is abundantly represented, both in oil paintings and in realistic and metaphorical gouaches: the temporal and terrestrial relationship between man and woman, fiancée and fiancé, wife and husband. Portraits of couples appear here in several gouaches and oil paintings - such as Lovers’ Walk or Wedding Photograph of 1949 which opens the narrative of the exhibition.
Wedding Photograph, Married Couple with a Bouquet is one of Andrzej Wróblewski's more important symbolic and poignant works. It is a portrait of a newlywed couple in which the joyous moment of the wedding is transformed into a tragic experience composed of silence and understatement. The figure of the groom, encapsulated in a cool shade of blue, is already dead. Death took the young man before he could fulfill his dreams of a happy life together. Instead of the explicit scenes of violence depicted by Wróblewski in the series of Executions, the artist reaches for an allusive telling metaphor - the dead man becomes a symbol of loss and at the same time a testimony to the wartime brutality that destroyed lives so ruthlessly. The picture is painfully direct in its message. Wedding Photograph is not only a record of the tragedy of an individual - it tells a story of a generation deprived by the war of its future, of a happy ending, the opportunity to build a life together and to experience love.
The motif of a dead person in blue became an icon of Wróblewski's work and appears as a sign of death in many paintings. This is the spirit of masterpieces such as Mother with a Dead Child and Child with a Dead Mother. They are united by deep trauma which found its expression in the simplicity of the painterly symbol. This ability to capture human pain and the tragedy of loss in a simple yet harrowing way granted Wróblewski a permanent place in the canon of Polish art history. His painting, personal as well as universal, made him the most important artist of his generation. The artist who dared to face the darkest sides of human nature and the obscurity of human experience.
