Academy of Fine Arts
Kraków Artists: Painters and Sculptors
The oldest Polish art school, which began operating in 1818. In 1873 the School of Drawing and Painting became the independent School of Fine Arts, and Jan Matejko became its director, leading it for twenty years and initiating the construction of the Academy building on today's Jan Matejko Square. In 1900, thanks to the efforts of director Julian Fałat, the school received the status of a higher education institution and returned to the name Academy of Fine Arts; Fałat appointed outstanding artists of Young Poland as professors, and in 1905 he became the first rector.
History
The Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts is the oldest art school in Poland. Its beginnings go back to 1818, when the new statute of the Jagiellonian University attached an academy of fine arts to it. Its teachers included the professors of drawing and painting Józef Brodowski and Józef Peszka and the professor of sculpture Józef Riedlinger. After the fall of the November Uprising, in 1833, the school was separated from the university, and for the next forty years it operated as the School of Drawing and Painting, part of the Technical Institute. It was there that the young Jan Matejko studied in 1851-1858.
The turning point came in 1873. The school regained its independence, and Matejko became its head, holding the reins for two decades. It was he who initiated the construction of the building in Kleparz, on what is now Jan Matejko Square. The design was prepared by Maciej Moraczewski, then Kraków's director of building works. The city donated the land in 1876, construction began in 1879, and the building was officially opened in 1880. Matejko's master studio, colloquially known as the "majsterszula", trained, among others, Leon Wyczółkowski, Jacek Malczewski, Julian Fałat, Józef Mehoffer and Stanisław Wyspiański.
In 1900 Emperor Franz Joseph turned the school into the Academy of Fine Arts, as its director Julian Fałat had sought. Fałat invited artists of the Young Poland movement to join the professors, among them Malczewski, Wyczółkowski, Wyspiański and Mehoffer, and in 1905 he became the school's first rector. Women have been able to study at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts since 1919. The academy has borne Matejko's name since 1979.
The building's façade is Neo-Renaissance, of brick, with white window surrounds. Above the main entrance, below an ornamental window, is a bust of Matejko carved by Jan Tombiński in 1894, and the two corner projections are crowned by domes with sculptures of griffins, which returned to their places after the roof was renovated in 2010-2012. Inside, a plaque in honour of Stanisław Wyspiański was set into the wall in 1923, twenty years after he took up a chair at the academy. His head on the plaque was sculpted by Konstanty Laszczka.
Did you know?
In 1939-1943, when the Academy's work was suspended during the occupation, the building housed a vocational art school set up by the occupying authorities, the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule Krakau.