Slavdom Unearthed: Marian Wawrzeniecki's Neopagan Paintings (1891–1923)

Marian Wawrzeniecki’s paintings grew from an unusual combination of academic history painting and archaeological research. Trained in Kraków, he initially used the grand, allegorical conventions of Polish historical art, but his excavations of prehistoric sites - including obsidian tools, shelters, ceramics, and carved stones - turned his attention toward the distant pagan past. His 1891-92 painting The Excavated Burial Mound applies history painting not to an imagined ancient episode but to the modern discovery of fragmentary remains, emphasizing how uncertainly the past can be reconstructed.

Wawrzeniecki came to regard pre-Christian Slavic culture as Poland’s authentic essence and Christianity as a rupture that had displaced it. From the 1910s, he built a visual archive of imagined pagan rites, often featuring nude women bound to trees or pillars and watched by dragons or basilisks. These unsettling figures can look like erotic spectacle, but they also function as allegories of lost Slavic identity, artistic devotion, and the treatment of art by critics. His rejection of Gothic and Renaissance traditions as foreign impositions accompanied polemics against critics and younger Symbolists. Though a relatively minor painter, he pursued his neopagan project with such intensity that conventional artistic success mattered less than its cultural ambition. His imagery influenced later artists such as Stanisław Szukalski, while his vision of a pagan past still haunting Polish culture reappeared in Maria Janion’s influential account of its ghosts, monsters, and phantoms.