Czapski towards Cézanne. Significance of authority.

The paper focuses on the contents of Józef Czapski’s programme article 'O Cézannie i świadomości malarskiej' [On Cézanne and painterly conscience] published by the Institute of Art Propaganda in Warsaw in 1937. The detailed analysis of the text firstly, indicates Czapski’s specific understanding of the oeuvre of the French painter in a wide context of European art history. Secondly, it reveals rhetoric background of the article seen within the frames of the Kapists’ massive campaign aiming at reassessment of Polish painting tradition in the 1930s. Therefore, the reading is not only a report on the contents of the text about Cézanne, with a special attention paid to dynamics of meanings that construct it, but also deals with the question of a characteristic strategy of affecting the reader. Within the paper the author also makes an attempt at finding Cézanne’s motifs in the self-portraits painted by Czapski. The inter-pictorial dialogue refers to a complex phenomena of pressure, which is experienced by artistic identity and personality in view of a suggestive and self-imposing model