 Frenzy, by Władysław Podkowiński (Poland) 1893 Frenzy What is passion, if not a runaway train to which one clings for dear life, or a powerful stallion rearing up on hind legs, foaming at the mouth, dark and dangerous and wild? Władysław Podkowiński’s 1893 painting scandalized eastern Europe in its month on display at the Zacheta, and ushered in the era of Symbolist painting in Poland. Twelve thousand people flocked to the national gallery to see the massive, volatile depiction of a naked woman, arms and legs wrapped tightly around a frantic bucking steed, face upturned and head thrown back. From those thousands, not one brave enough to buy the work from the struggling painter who lived on fumes and slept on the floor. The ten-foot tall canvas was executed entirely in black, brown, and fiery orange, with the redhead’s tresses roiling into the storm of the stallion’s mane and motion. You could say she was the anti-Godiva, nowhere close to vulnerable and saintly. The legend of Godiva was about a pure and wholesome beauty devoted to justice, who rode naked on horseback through town in protest of taxes eating the poor. Here, instead, was a woman astride, given completely over to desire, in the throes of ecstasy. The title, Frenzy of Exultations, or, usually, just Frenzy, said it all. In another kind of frenzy, on the 37th day of the show, Władysław Podkowiński entered the gallery and stabbed the canvas with a knife, ending its exhibition. The artist had been very upset about not finding a buyer for the artwork. He had given all he had to that painting, body and soul. Podkowiński was severely ill with tuberculosis and worked to complete the art in utter exhaustion for months, often working from his bed. Some said the price was simply too high at 10 000 rubles, a ridiculous ask. Other accounts say there actually had been an interested patron, but he offered a third of that and his offer was turned down. From Podkowiński’s point of view, he understood the value of this work, that it was his magnum opus, a painting unique in all of art history. Plus, the chance for rest and real medical treatment was on the line. His life literally depended on that sale. Then there was the other side of the story: his fury towards his muse, Ewa Kotarbińska, whose husband had hosted the artist at his estate. People were talking: some said that the beautiful brunette’s face bore only a passing resemblance to the woman on the horse, but that clearly the artist had seen her body for himself and portrayed it accurately. Other stories held that when he had made his desires known to her, she had rejected him, refusing to leave her wealth and marriage for a starving artist. She banished him from the house to the rainy gardens overnight. Already sick, this was the nail in the coffin. Nine months following the exhibition of Frenzy and the vandalism of the painting, Władysław Podkowiński was dead. He was 28 years old. The artist’s stormy horse and rider was, one way or another, the end of him. There is no parallel artwork in the artist’s portfolio. Frenzy is considered the first Symbolist painting in Poland, the movement sweeping Europe, born from the belief that realism did not actually portray the real world. The mystical undercurrents of life, the hidden, esoteric, mythological, and unconscious were the keys to understanding humans and history. Symbolists in poetry, other literature, and visual art sought to show the deeper truth through metaphors, to both tell their stories and decipher the world around them through symbols. Podkowiński was known as a highly skilled magazine illustrator. After a trip to Paris where he discovered Monet, he was credited with bringing Impressionism to life inside of Poland. His gauzy, drowsy, sun-dappled ponds and gardens were populated with innocent children at play and happy ducks. With white picket fences! They were sweet trifles, lovely, and forgettable. It was his illness that drove Podkowiński into the subterranean recesses of his mind. He was face to face with the grim reaper, declining in the prime of his life. Death was consuming him from the inside out. He began to draw various rigorously detailed skeletons, and turned his attention from light to dark. Tuberculosis is a bacterial respiratory infection known in those days as consumption, because of the way the illness consumed you. In the late 1800s, upwards of 70% of people who lived in cities were infected. The disease has been traced back at least 9000 years and found in mummies, and is thought to be much older, even millions of years. It has been around much longer than humans. We often associate TB with tragic poets and artists like John Keats, Amedeo Modigliani and Edvard Munch. But it affected everyone, especially city dwellers who lived in close proximity and squalor. One in seven people in Europe in that era died from TB. Tuberculosis is still the world’s most deadly infectious disease, with over a million deaths per year. The vaccines are only moderately effective and antibiotic treatment is complicated, often involving four different drugs for a period of up to two years! In the context of what Władysław Podkowiński was facing, as a gifted young man with hopes and dreams rapidly going down the drain, nothing about the painting or its attempted destruction seem like madness after all. The profound disappointment in his rejection from the object of his affection would have stood in for all of his chances at love and life. And her sensible sentencing of a lusty youth to the outdoors after inappropriate advances, if that is what happened, could literally have accelerated his inevitable demise. Seeing her power, both sexual and financial, from his destitution and looming destruction, his obsessive desire and need is understandable. In his mind, Ewa held power over his life. Interpretations of the artist’s Frenzy draw from symbolist ideas as a whole. Certainly, there is the heady pleasure of an unapologetic woman and a visual representation of orgasm. But the painting also looks terrifying, showing the power and danger of desire and obsession, and the struggle between life and death. Though the woman is in rapture, the horse looks quite deranged, suggesting that in experiencing the pleasures of life, we are often oblivious to the headlong collision course with death. In ancient mythology about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the black horse represents famine and hunger. Thinking of hunger symbolically, we see ourselves completely consumed, driven mad by desire. But sex and passion are, of course, symbolic of the life force itself, for obvious reasons. After the artist succumbed to his illness, the painting was repaired. It toured to Moscow, Lodz, and St. Petersburg. In 1904, it was given to the National Museum in Krakow where it remains a prize part of the collection. In the absence of the artist’s voice, we can only speculate on the exact meaning and intention of the work. But one thing is certain: this painting about life was about death. Lorette C. Luzajic ** Poems and stories inspired by this artwork: https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/ekphrastic-writing-responses-wladyslaw-podkowinski  Children in the Garden, by Władysław Podkowiński (Poland) 1892
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