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Psychea

Luna Drexler

Basic information

ID: С-I-384
Author: Luna Drexler
Name: Psychea
Date of creation: c.1910
Country: Austro-Hungarian Empire
Culture: Contemporary times
Technique: moulding polychrome
Material: plaster polychrome
Dimensions (height x width x depth, cm): 63 x 33 x 21.5

Additionally

Type: sculpture 3D
Genre: mythological painting
Plot: Allegory of the soul
Provenance: Received from the Lubomirski Museum

Information about author

Author: Luna Drexler
Artist's lifetime: 1882–1933
Country: Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, France
Biography: The artist came from the family of Ignacy Drexler, a Lviv merchant who owned a textile shop in Kapitulna Square. He was known for his artistic talent and for encouraging children's involvement in the arts. Up to the age of 17, Luna was fond of music and later became interested in painting and sculpture. In 1899, she entered the private art school of Marceli Harasimowicz in Lviv, where she studied under the portrait painter and illustrator Stanislaw Reichan (from 1899), a member of a famous Lviv family of artists and a graduate of the Vienna Academy of Arts. She improved her skills by taking lessons from Stanislaw Batowski-Kaczor and the sculptor Antoni Popiel. At the same time, the future artist attended the public drawing and modelling studio of the Lviv Art and Industrial School. She improved her skills at the Adrian Baraniecki Higher Women's Courses in Krakow for some time. In 1907, Luna Drexler studied in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Jean-Antoine Injalbert and the famous sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. She was fascinated by the work of Auguste Rodin, whose symbolic Impressionist style is reflected in a number of her works. In 1908, the artist returned to Lviv and took over the former studio of the Lviv sculptor Tadeusz Baracz, who had died in 1905. In the same year, the first personal exhibition of Luna Drexler was held in the exhibition hall of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts (Towarzystwo przyjaćół sztuk Pięknych), which included more than twenty works.
The collection of European artistic experience continued in 1909: in Paris under Antoine Bourdelle, in Rome – at the Medici Academy, and from 1910 – at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. The ideological foundations of Luna Drexler's work were formed by her acquaintance with the philosopher, writer, architect and sculptor Rudolf Steiner, who founded the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach (Switzerland). During her stay abroad, the artist was involved in the exhibition life of Eastern Galicia. Between 1911 and 1914, she collaborated with Oleksandr Levytskyi's faience factory in the village of Patsykiv near Stanislav (now Pidlissia, Ivano-Frankivsk region). In 1917, the artist returned to Lviv and settled first in house No. 30 on St. Sofiia Street (now - 114 Franko Street), then at 14 Parkova Street (1910, architect Ivan Levynskyi), where she lived until the end of her life. The creative heritage of Luna Drexler consists of more than 200 sculptures and several dozen paintings. Until the early 1910s, her creative work was dominated by the inspirations of Impressionism, Symbolism, and Secession. Later, she was inspired by the cultures of ancient Egypt and Assyria and ancient Greek and medieval French sculptures, which led to an archaic stylisation. Influenced by the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, the ideological core of the artist's figurative and plastic explorations was the revelation of human spiritual principles through artistic means. In line with the fine arts of the early twentieth century, Luna Drexler sought to integrate painterly means of artistic expression into sculpture, which is confirmed by the texture of the surfaces, polychrome colouring, and soft modelling of forms. The artist's painting legacy is made up of landscapes and portraits. It is known that the artist was also interested in graphic art, significantly etching. Drexler's establishment in the socio-cultural space of the twentieth century is confirmed by her active public activity, participation in the founding of the Union of Polish Artists, membership in the Sculpture Association, as well as membership in the Board of the Union of Polish Artists and the Lviv City Council for the Arts.
Luna Drexler died in Lviv at age 51 and was buried in the Lychakiv cemetery. For the construction of the artist's tombstone, one of the reliefs of her 1927 work "Dedication" (a flying angel, reproduced with a cross and seven roses in his hands) was used, which was cast in bronze and installed on the grave in a black marble frame. A posthumous exhibition of Luna Amalia Drexler's work was held in May–July 1937, featuring 189 works, including 126 sculptures and 63 oil and watercolour paintings.

Object description

Luna Amalia Drexler's sculpture "Psyche" ("Wanda") or "Self-Exploration" combines the desire to visualise the subconscious, Secessionist elegance, symbolic mystery and Impressionist freedom of form characteristic of early 20th-century art. Appealing to the ancient Greek mythological image of Psyche (from the ancient Greek Ψυχή – "soul", "breath"), the author creates a multifaceted sculptural figure. Taking into account the connection between Psyche and Eros that has been established in the history of culture – from Posidippus, Meleager and the ancient Roman writer Lucius Apuleius to the English Romantic poet John Keats – one variation of the interpretation of the work is the self-knowledge of the soul in love. The double title of the sculpture reflects the understanding of the soul as a unity of sensations, mind, will, and imagination and its identification with cognition and self-knowledge, which is typical for ancient and Renaissance philosophical thought. One aspect of the artistic representation is an appeal to the Platonic concept of cognition as a passionate, sensual attraction of the soul to the world of "eidos". The figure is in keeping with the idea of the soul's unity with the eternal and absolute, as well as the identity of cognition of the world and self-knowledge established in the Romantic period. The transcendental aspects of the image, rooted in the understanding of the soul as a self-moving part of the eternal, are illustrated by the ascending dynamics of the woman's body with her arms behind her head and her face turned towards the sky. The image's openness to the outside world contributes to understanding self-knowledge as unity with the world: upward through the line of the arms, forward through the step, elliptically, in the back – through the garment's folds. The image of fulfilment in self-knowledge is created by the end of the modelling of volumes from the bottom up: from the flowing, sketchy, impressionistic drapery of the dress and the flexible torso to the perfect, beautiful face. The emotional genesis of the image, inherent in early twentieth-century sculpture, is reflected in the Secessionist fluidity of contours, the differentiated play of light and shadow and the relaxed modelling of forms. The work's affiliation with early twentieth-century art is evidenced by the dominance of purely plastic means of artistic expression, semantic ambiguity and openness to different readings.

Inscriptions

On the base on the right is a fragment of a sticker from the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Lviv: "Luna Drexlerównna / P…"; sticker: "12284".

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery