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This article deals with the essayist and critical work by Wiktor Gomulicki who is best known for his literary fiction and poetry, as well as literary criticism, essays on history, and a rich collection of varsaviana. It is, however, less known that he was a keen observer of the changes which the Polish painting was undergoing at that time. He took part in the four most important debates of the day: “on the identity of national art”, “advocates of idealism versus advocates of realism”, “the episode of Warsaw impressionism”, “dispute about the values of symbolic and proto-expressionist art.” In each of them, Gomulicki unwaveringly expressed his favour for the superior role of “the idea” in painting, which translated into his adverse view of realist-naturalist tendencies and impressionism, while at the same time he supported academic idealist painting and, later, symbolism – whose traces he found in Władysław Podkowiński’s work. Gomulicki’s views on art are expressed in a number of literary forms (such as reports from exhibitions, reviews, polemics, whistle-blowing features) and characterised by the opalescence of function (from postulation to operation to cognition and assessment), cycle grouping, and the so-called literary style of reception, consisting in “reading” a painting as if it were a novel, with the “story” taking precedence over the “form.