Great Seasons. The Theatre of Andrzej Kreutz Majewski

The exhibition "Great Seasons. The Theatre of Andrzej Kreutz Majewski" recalls the outstanding achievements of Polish and European theatre of the second half of the 20th century, created by a brilliant painter and visionary, as well as a charismatic educator at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and Warsaw, always sharing his passion for art with younger generations of set designers. Majewski's stage productions made Polish opera recognizable among other world events in the 1970s. The artist maintained a constant dialogue with opera stars who invited him to collaborate. As the chief set designer of the Teatr Wielki – Opera Narodowa, he built close relationships between the national stage and the cosmopolitan community of composers, directors, and opera singers. Majewski, as a painter and set designer, introduced an original form to Polish opera, combining inspiration from contemporary avant-garde with images of Neoromantics, Symbolists, and the monumentalism of the Baroque era.

Andrzej Kreutz Majewski is characterized by the need to record events, thoughts, and descriptions of visions and dreams, which we find in his diaries, and above all, an almost instinctive or family-instilled sensitivity to music and the need to paint pictures creating "fragile monuments of childhood." In them, he defined a personal vocabulary of symbols and metaphors, marked by death, loss, fears, and a sense of loneliness.

The narrative of the exhibition "Great Seasons. The Theatre of Andrzej Kreutz Majewski" pays tribute to an artist whose art continues to stir the imagination of successive generations of viewers following the path discovered in his works. Initiating the exhibition with designs for the curtain for Igor Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring" (Polish premiere in 1962), we highlight the time when Majewski began working at the Teatr Wielki – Opera Narodowa in Warsaw, and his collaboration with Henryk Tomaszewski marked the beginning of his creative passion for musical theatre. The distinguished title is also significant in the context of the Parisian premiere realized by Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1913 as a spectacle combining tradition with painterly avant-garde. Both Diaghilev and Majewski often created outside their home countries. Both gained recognition, but Majewski's works were described as "theatre of cruel miracle." The sensational costumes and set designs documenting Richard Strauss's "Elektra," realized by the artist in many European cities (Cologne, 1969, Warsaw 1971, Hamburg 1973, and Paris 1974), and currently presented at the heart of the Katowice exhibition, find their complement in the Parisian Bibliothèque-Musée de l'Opéra Palais Garnier.

The exhibition presents 27 play titles shown through 160 works, selected from a collection of nearly 450 plastic art pieces, such as set designs, theatrical costumes, paintings, and sketches donated by Andrzej Kreutz Majewski to the Centrum Scenografii Polskiej as the foundational basis for collections commemorating the achievements of a total artist, visionary, and demiurge.

We invite viewers into the labyrinth of Andrzej Kreutz Majewski's works, opening up to reveal an exhibition of works by students from the Department of Scenography of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, who have engaged in a dialogue with the past, and whose artistic visions allow us to look with hope towards the future of 21st-century art.