Malczewski painting becomes Poland’s most expensive artwork after €5.2m sale

A painting by Jacek Malczewski, a renowned Polish artist active around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, has been auctioned for 22.2 million zloty (€5.2 million) – a new record for an artwork sold in Poland.

The painting also previously broke the record in 2022, when it was auctioned for 17 million zloty. But that sale did not go through after doubts – later dispelled – over the legality of its ownership.

Reality (Rzeczywistość in Polish) is an oil painting on canvas, created in 1908, depicting a nativity scene. It was last shown publicly at Malczewski’s jubilee exhibition at the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine) in June 1926.

“This image has fired the imagination of art historians, museum professionals, critics – just based on a black-and-white photograph taken in the early 20th century,” Agata Szkup, head of Warsaw auction house DESA Unicum which sold the work, told TVN24.

As well as Jesus, Mary and angels, the painting features three representatives of Polish uprisings against foreign rule in the 19th century, a self-portrait of the artist, and the character Stańczyk, a jester who, in Polish literature and art, is often presented as the only one to see the dangers facing the country.

The painting is not only “one of the most important and outstanding works in the history of Polish art…[but] also an example of an efficiently conducted process of asserting ownership rights”, said Szkup said in a video about the artwork published by DESA Unicum on the occasion of the auction.

That is because, during the previous auction of the artwork in 2022, Polish prosecutors, at the request of the culture ministry, issued an order for the work to be taken to the National Museum in Warsaw, as the ministry had doubts about the legality of the painting being taken from Poland to Germany in the 1950s.

According to the auction house, the Malczewski work had been in the hands of a family from Silesia – a historic region around the border between Poland and Germany – from the very beginning. They had taken the painting to Germany as part of a family reunification programme after the war.

The original owner’s grandson received the painting for his 18th birthday and, in February 2022, aged 60, decided to sell it. However, that sale was put on hold due to an investigation by prosecutors into the painting, which took two-and-a-half years to complete, Szkup told TVN24.

She explained that, earlier this year, the auction house was informed that the painting had been cleared and the transaction could be finalised. But the National Museum – which had previously exercised the preemptive right to buy the piece after the 2022 auction – backed out of the purchase due to a lack of funds.

That is why DESA Unicum decided to hold a new auction with a starting price set at the 17 million zloty the painting reached in 2022. This time, it sold for 18.5 million and, together with the auction fees, the bidder will pay a total of 22.2 million zloty for it.

The new owner of the painting has so far remained anonymous, but Szkup revealed that the work will remain in Poland.

While the sale of Malczewski’s Reality is the largest ever made in Poland itself, the most expensive work by a Polish artist remains the portrait of Marjorie Ferry by Tamara Łempicka that was sold for £16.3 million (81.6 million zloty) at Christie’s in London in 2020.

Main photo credit: Wikimedia Commons (under the public domain)