The painting collection of the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America serves a unique role. The Institute’s rooms, filled with Polish artworks, transport visitors from Brooklyn’s Greenpoint to the landscapes of the Central European lowlands and the Carpathian Mountains. It is worth following the landscape trail of this collection, viewing the paintings as elements of an emotional vehicle through time and space.

Wyczółkowski, Leon "Facade of the Cloth Hall and Towers of St. Mary's Church in Krakow"I begin this journey through the Polish landscape with Leon Wyczółkowski’s watercolors depicting Polish cities. An alley leading to the market square of Warsaw’s Old Town, the rooftops of the Old Town, and the view of Kraków’s Cloth Hall and the towers of St. Mary’s Church are vivid, unmistakable images that evoke Polish space. Their immediacy in conjuring two key Polish cities emphasizes their emotional power—on one hand, tied to Poland’s long history dating back to the Piast dynasty; on the other, to the resilient cities rising from ruins, serving as symbolic points of reference for contemporary Polish identity.

Wyczółkowski, a key figure of the Young Poland movement who sought a distinct Polish idiom in painting, was well aware of the symbolic power of such vedute. He was a student of another great painter I would like to mention—Wojciech Gerson. Gerson’s oil painting Rysy in the Tatra Mountains is a testament to his exceptional artistic vision. An esteemed professor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Gerson was passionate about hiking. Many of his paths led to the Tatra Mountains, which he often portrayed in his works. His realistic and majestic image of Rysy shifts our attention from urban settings to the contemplation of wild nature.
Fałat, Julian "Autumn in the Mountains"Julian Fałat also explores untamed nature. His watercolor depicting a mountain stream in Bystra, however, is painted in an entirely different style—sensual, impressionistically illuminated, and deeply personal. The piece reveals his affection for the town where he settled after retiring from his position as rector of the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. After years of artistic travel—working on archaeological sites in Odessa, studying in Zurich and Munich, touring Italy, and visiting Berlin—he chose Bystra, a small, charming town in the Silesian Beskids, as his home. A similar emotional intimacy is felt in his watercolor Autumn in the Mountains.

The eastern borderlands also find expression in the work of another prominent painter, Juliusz Kossak. His watercolor The Crossing of the Dniester by an Armored Captain transports us to the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s former glory—though one in decline. Set during the 17th-century Turkish wars, in the region of Pokuttya and Podolia—historic borderlands of the Commonwealth—this historicizing watercolor evokes the Sienkiewiczian mythos and underscores symbolic territories crucial to Polish identity during the country’s stateless periods.

A similar atmosphere of the kresy (borderlands) radiates from the oil landscapes of Józef Chełmoński (Four-in-Hand) and Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski (Hunter on a Sleigh). The Polish landscape also forms the backdrop for battle scenes in oil paintings by Wojciech Kossak—Józef Piłsudski on Kasztanka and Skirmish.

The spirit of this collection is deeply influenced by the sensitivity of Aleksander Mełenia-Korczyński, a Polish-American community activist closely associated with the Institute. It was from his donation that the most significant works entered the collection: among them, the renowned Four-in-Hand by Józef Chełmoński, Wyczółkowski’s watercolors, several works by the Kossaks, and a watercolor sketch by Jan Matejko. Born near Kyiv to a Polish-Ukrainian family, Mełenia-Korczyński’s borderland and multiethnic heritage—and his conscious embrace of Polish identity—are deeply relevant to the character of the collection.
The Polish landscape, as captured in the Institute’s paintings, radiates a melancholic aura—a sense of distance, vastness, and yet closeness, emotional resonance, and nostalgic longing. It seems that only someone deeply attuned to the myth of the borderlands—a vision of a diverse, multiethnic, and culturally rich Republic of Poland that could exist only in dreams after World War II—could have assembled such a collection. A dream preserved in the images of Polish painting.

 We invite you to a virtual tour of the Institute.

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National

Heritage of the Republic of Poland