POWSTANIE KOMISJI HISTORII SZTUKI AKADEMII UMIEJĘTNOŚCI – KARTA Z DZIEJÓW INSTYTUCJONALIZACJI DYSCYPLINY.

The paper discusses the circumstances of the foundation and the early stages in the activity of the Commission on Art History of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cracow – the first institutional body dealing with art-historical research on Polish lands. Its establishment in 1873 was an important step in the process of the institutionalisation of Polish art history, a process that should be understood as one encompassing the foundation of university- -level research entities, formulation of programmes and methods of research as well as a development of the community of scholars. For the following half-century, the Commission had played a key role in this process. The first part of the paper deals with a failed attempt to form a ‘commission on the history of art in Poland’ within the Learned Society of Cracow, a body established in 1815, consisting of local scholars, artists and men of letters. In December 1870, Władysław Łuszczkiewicz, a painter and art historian, proposed to set up a commission whose aim would be to gather materials related to art history in Poland (written and visual records). The commission that was to consist mainly of architects and artists, was supposed to study the hitherto unknown historic objects, draw up a sort of survey, and publish images of artworks. Although Łuszczkiewicz’s initiative had won the favour of the Society’s board, the process of its establishment got stuck by bureaucratic procedures, and after a few months was put on hold interminably. Eventually, the Commission on Art History was formed as a part of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, then a newly-established institution, founded under a charter of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, using the basic structure of the Learned Society. The circumstances of its foundation have been discussed in the second part of the paper. In the autumn of 1871, in the course of drawing up of the successive versions of the Academy’s statute, the place of art history within the institution’s structures was established. Initially assigned, along with archaeology, to the historical and philosophical department, the discipline (without archaeology) ended up as part of the philological department. As attested by documentary evidence, this assignment resulted from the fact that the compilers of the statute strove to keep an equal number of disciplines within each of the Academy’s departments. Thus, the Commission on Art History was established within the philological department, and its inaugural meeting was held on 11 June 1873. The Commission was headed by the art critic and poet Lucjan Siemieński, and among its members were: the archaeologist Józef Łepkowski, Władysław Łuszczkiewicz, and a few former members of the Learned Society of Cracow; soon they were joined by new membership, including Marian Sokołowski, the future first professor of art history at the Jagiellonian University. Władysław Łuszczkiewicz was the moving force of the Commission in the early stages of its functioning. He, along with Sokołowski, had compiled the Commission’s first scholarly agenda, discussed in the third part of the paper. This programme, publicised in December 1873, was largely based on a similar document drafted for the 1870 ‘commission on the history of art in Poland’, and specified research on Polish art, for instance, by means of making study ‘trips’ intended to examine historic objects in situ, conducting surveys, acquiring visual material, compiling a bibliography of Polish art and publishing the Commission’s own periodical. The programme’s novel element was to include the study of works of foreign art in Polish collections and the work of foreign artists in Poland and Polish artists abroad within the Commission’s remit. The paper’s last subsection presents the Commission’s efforts to establish its own periodical: Sprawozdania Komisji do Badania Historii Sztuki w Polsce [Transactions of the Commission for the Study of Art History in Poland]. The Transactions was the first Polish scholarly art-historical periodical and it played a key role in the development of art-historical research of Polish art. The journal was founded not without difficulties: it took a few years to decide whether the new periodical should be a joint undertaking of the Commission on Art History and the Commission on Archaeology (an option favoured by the Academy’s secretary general, Józef Szujski), or if it were to be published solely by the former body. Eventually, through the efforts of Łuszczkiewicz, the latter conception won, and the first issue of the Transactions, in a luxurious in folio format, with lithographed plates, appeared in the autumn of 1877. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]