Portrait of Alfred Stepek 1901

Jacek Malczewski made this painting of Alfred Stepek, we think around 1901, with oil on canvas. The brushwork is pretty direct, but he’s working in layers. He’s starting with big tonal blocks and then adding finer details. What strikes me is the surface quality, the way Malczewski builds up the paint. There’s a real tension between the specificity of portraiture and the kind of messy, hands-on quality of the medium. Look at the man’s face: the little flecks of red around his nose and cheeks. They’re not just blush. They also seem to be about the act of applying paint, the physical gesture of dabbing the canvas. Even the background seems like a kind of dreamscape. For me, the painting brings to mind someone like James Ensor, who was also working with these strange, psychological spaces in his portraits at the time. It’s like both artists are questioning what a portrait can really tell us.