Obraz w obrazie i rama. Schulz wobec tradycji

This article aims to reevaluate Schulz’s early drawings from 1919 to 1921, rarely included in scholarship on Schulz’s artwork, by focusing on the motifs of “picture within a picture,” imitation of historical paintings, and the frame of the image. Previous scholarship on Schulz’s artwork mainly discussed the specific theme of men’s worship of women in the 1920s cliché-verre series The Book of Idolatry and regarded Schulz’s seemingly realistic renderings as “anachronistic” compared to twentieth-century modernist art. Here, I will first focus on Schulz’s adaptation of the style of historical paintings into his so-called “masochistic motifs” of men supplicating themselves to women. By creating a gap between the style and the content expectations of the viewer familiar with the conventions of European paintings, Schulz’s early drawings question the custom or conventional understanding of paintings created for acceptance and success in the European Art Academy system. Second, I invoke Derrida’s interpretation of the concept of “parergon” in The Truth in Painting (1978) to reconsider the motifs of frame and “picture within a picture,” omnipresent in Schulz’s early drawings. Through these means, I explore Schulz’s perception and attitude regarding medium specifics of paintings as Clement Greenberg argued regarding modernist paintings. Thus, I discuss his early drawings as self-referential and radically modernist works.