Kilka przypomnień o zakopiańskiej Szkole Przemysłu Drzewnego i jej snycerzach (1876-1939)
Several Recollections about the Zakopane Wood Industry School and Its Carvers (1876-1939)

Summary/Abstract: The Wood Industry School opened in Zakopane in 1876 was an important centre of teaching construction, furniture production and carving. During the nineteenth century the Tatra Mts. and the Podhale region, together with their pantheistic landscape, were conceived as “sacred space”, a terrain that in contrast to big city culture attracted numerous outstanding authors, i.e. the instigator of the “Zakopane style” Stanisław Witkiewicz, Tytus Chałubiński, and Karol Szymanowski. For long, the school existed within the Austrian partition area and its first headmasters: Franciszek Neužil and Edgar Kováts taught according to methods imposed by Vienna, thus recommending the emulation of Alpine design. A genuine breakthrough came with Karol Stryjeński (1923-1927), who restored the prominence of the local art of Podhale, stimulated the pupils’ imagination, and developed their inborn talents. In 1938 another rebirth of the school was achieved by Antoni Kenar, who from 1947 was head of the State Secondary School of Art Techniques. Eminent artists who proved permanently influenced by Zakopane and the Tatra Mts. region included Jan Szczepkowski, a sculptor enamoured of folk carving; using the system of “highlander wedges” he executed in pine wood, i.e. the Nativity Shrine, winner of the Grand Prix at the Paris exhibition of 1925.

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