But we also know that a good haggle is needed. Like in trading – quick reflexes are essential. You can be for it or against it, everyone (for each person) will find at least a small, satisfying role for their own fantasy in such a convention. One has to seek a moment of relief amidst the battleground landscape of the surrounding campaigns. We have to survive this, make wise choices, and retain strength for our own plans after the elections. More depends on this than on the elections themselves. All on the house, courtesy of Art Atlas and our collective imagination.
Let’s sell Poland!
“Selling Poland”, considering the partitions, is an excellent topic for a doctoral thesis, perhaps on 19th century iconography. A theme briefly formulated, working like a stimulus.
The 19th century (thus, from our perspective, already after the sale) united Europe through steam and trade. It was no different in our Łódź. In art, this period can be defined as a long time of increasingly self-enamored academicism. Nineteenth century academicism, as a mental stance, is not far from today’s admiration for the precision of aggregate and statistical representations in tables.
Who knows if the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries won’t someday be called the era of neo-academism? The beginning of the 19th century, due to Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition and then Byron’s Greek guerilla warfare, valued oriental motifs, distant, straight from the wild east. “Selling Poland” can easily be set in such a convention. And if someone needs an “allusive” reference to the foreign and different, they will also benefit, as paintings from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries show almost everything “just like in the movies”.
If the Minister of Culture recognized such a need, it would be easy to commission the newly opened Museum of Polish History, for example, to organize a contest for highly artistic (not only visual) interpretations of this motive. A potential exhibition could be a feast for the eyes and a success in attendance.
We really, but really, like to calmly observe the details of what terrifies us.
Jean-Leon Gerome was an early academic, strongly classifying painter, so with the sold Greek woman, one can, along with the buyer, check the teeth for certainty; then, in the paintings of Ernest Normand (1885) and Otto Pilny (1919), the teeth ache just from looking, but well, when you don’t have what you like, you buy whatever you get.
We still have more than two weeks of the campaign ahead, so it’s very possible that we will return to the lasciviousness in trade. If the situation begins to resemble what is commonly called a “fire in a wh…rehouse”, we might reach for the strange painting by Gerome (now in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg) “Pool in the Harem”. Just to maintain an atmospheric balance.
