This article deals with the motif of mirror in Józef Pankiewicz’s art. The Author’s attention is focused on five ‘pictures with a mirror’, created between 1902-1911, providing a simply marvellous testimony of the decisive transformation in the painterly vision of the world which ensued in the artist’s creative work. In her analysis the Author adopts two main lines of thought. The first of these follows the painterly necessities, from the tradition of Portrait of the Arnolfinis, by the way of the theme of Narcissus, to Bonnard mirror images. The second interpretative course follows problems taken up by the artist ranging dorm the double – or split – image of reality created out of the reflection in the mirror as far as the simultaneous to this ‘transmitting of the glance’, concentrated on the exceptionally famous triangle of mutual relations between the artist, model and viewer, which arise out of friction between them over the reflection.
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