78 - Józef von Brandt (1841, Szczebrzeszyn, Poland – 1915, Radom, Poland), Horse Catching in the Puszta (Catching a Horse with a Lasso).

Józef von Brandt (1841, Szczebrzeszyn, Poland – 1915, Radom, Poland), Horse Catching in the Puszta (Catching a Horse with a Lasso). Oil on canvas, with relining. (ca. 1880). Approx. 56 x 41 cm. It is a scene familiar from old Western movies, in which cowboys attempt to lasso and subdue a wild horse—a dramatically charged scene full of dynamism and movement, full of dust and noise, except that this is not a film still from a Western, but a narrative from Eastern Europe. Tatars—recognizable by their characteristic headgear, the kalpak—have rounded up a herd of wild horses and captured a rearing horse with a lasso. Three Tatars hold the lasso and brace themselves against the ground with all their might, while a fourth Tatar attempts to leap onto the panicked horse to subdue it. Tatars on horseback, galloping down the hill on the right-hand side, are trying to separate the horse from the herd. Condensed into a close-up, the painting conveys a sense of dynamism in a way that almost overwhelms the viewer —the various, opposing movements of humans and animals create a field of tension brimming with energy and intense concentration on a small hill, within which the viewer must first find their bearings. Everything vibrates, is full of urgency, and one feels as though one can literally hear the screams and the clatter of the horses’ hooves. The composition, built on diagonals and foreshortening, along with the unusual bird’s-eye view from below, reinforces this effect. And then there is the painting itself, which conveys the impression of this untamed energy and dynamism—quickly applied, executed in a sketch-like manner to the point of an almost pre-Impressionist dissolution of form—resulting in a shimmering tangle of shapes and colors whose vital expressiveness is hard to surpass. The creator of this dramatic scene is the Polish painter Józef Brandt, one of the most significant representatives of the Munich School in the second half of the 19th century. In the early 1880s, Brandt had devoted himself to the unique interaction between humans and animals in several paintings—mostly in works depicting Cossacks or Tatars attempting to tame the untamed power of wild horses. Our newly discovered, previously unknown work is the preparatory oil sketch for one of Brandt’s best-known paintings, which he created in 1881 and which is now housed in the National Gallery of Lviv (Lemberg) in western Ukraine (ill.). According to his diary, Brandt had been working on the painting since 1880, so it can be assumed that our oil sketch was created that year. In it, Brandt depicts the struggle between man and horse, which traditionally embodies freedom, vitality, and the untamed power of nature. It is the existential struggle of humankind, which seeks to subdue these elemental forces through courage, skill, and tenacity. Brandt was renowned for staging such scenes so effectively that today they appear like cinematic snapshots. He had come to Munich in 1863, studied at the Academy under Carl Theodor von Piloty, and taken private lessons from the equine painter Franz Adam and the Orientalist Theodor Horschelt. Brandt remained based in Munich until his death and devoted himself primarily to nostalgic themes from the 17th and 18th centuries, in which the freedom of the Cossacks and Tatars in the steppes of eastern Poland was glorified. Brandt had undertaken numerous journeys to these eastern steppe landscapes of the Kresy—now located in western Ukraine—which were regarded in Poland’s collective memory as places of freedom. At a time when Poland was partitioned among Russia, Austria, and Prussia and did not exist as a state, these dramatic equestrian battles embodied the ideal of independence and military prowess. The European revolutions of 1830 and 1848 had also swept through Poland; although they were subsequently crushed, they laid the foundation for a strong Polish national consciousness. For the public, such paintings therefore had a strong patriotic component, in which the energetic depictions by Brandt and his colleagues—drawing on the glorious past and untamed nature—served as a canvas for national identity and freedom. It was the artists’ contribution to the development of an identity-forming, nationalPolish painting, in which the return to the Polish noble republic that existed before the Partition of 1795—whose territory had extended to the borders of the Ottoman Empire—points toward the establishment of a Polish nation-state. In 1880, when our painting was created, Brandt was the undisputed leader of the Polish colony in Munich, which had formed there in the second half of the century from intellectuals