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

Marian Wawrzeniecki (1866–1923), a minor Polish painter and pioneering archaeologist, is the subject of a new survey examining his Neopagan paintings made between 1891 and 1923. Trained in Kraków in academic history painting, Wawrzeniecki discovered the first obsidian artifacts on Polish lands and produced one of the earliest paintings of an archaeological excavation, "Rozkopany kurhan" (1891–92). His later work abandoned oil painting for bright, textbook-style illustrations of pagan Slavic rituals, featuring faceless female nudes bound to trees or pillars, often with a lurking basilisk. The article argues these images, such as "Old Truths Lie in Books" (1910), reflect his belief in a radical rupture between Poland's pagan prehistory and the Christianized world that replaced it, and should not be dismissed as pulp erotica. The show matters as a reassessment of how archaeological research shaped Symbolist art and nationalist cultural identity in partitioned Poland. What to watch next: whether the exhibition's catalog and further scholarship establish Wawrzeniecki's influence beyond his modest standing as a painter.