Lot 110. BOLESŁAW BIEGAS (1877-1954). Château du cheval mystérieux, signed ‘B. Biegas.’ (lower right), oil on panel, 60 x 80.6cm (23 5/8 x 31 3/4in). Painted in 1924. Estimate £12,000 – £18,000. Bonhams. 10/17/25. Sold £38,000
Pozwoliłem sobie skopiować w całości bardzo ciekawy esej katalogowy dołączony do tego oleju Bolesława Biegasa mającego niepodważalną proweniencję.
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Biegas. This work will be included in the forthcoming Bolesław Biegas catalogue raisonné, currently being prepared by Xavier Deryng. Provenance: Musée Bolesław Biegas (Société Historique et Littéraire Polonaise de Paris), Paris, no. Szymanski 381 (a gift from the artist in 1954). Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva, no. 1698 (acquired from the above in 1971). Brook Street Gallery, London. Private collection, UK (possibly acquired from the above). Private collection, UK (by descent from the above). Literature: J. Szymanski, Bolesław Biegas inventaire dactylographié, Société Historique et Littéraire Polonaise de Paris, Paris, no. 381. X. Deryng, ‘”La mystique de l’infini”, L’Île des Morts de Boleslas Biegas’, in Hommage à L’Île des Morts d’Arnold Böcklin, exh. cat., Musée Bossuet, Meaux, 2001 (illustrated p. 45).
Bolesław Biegas’s Château du cheval mystérieux stands as one of the most haunting visions of his celebrated Mystique de l’infini cycle, painted in Paris during the 1920s. Architectural yet phantasmagorical, the work presents the viewer with a fantastical citadel, crowned by a spectral bronze Pegasus. Its body gleams with alchemical light, rising against a field of midnight blue, while the citadel itself seems suspended in a realm that is simultaneously dreamlike and unsettling. Flanking the structure, towering cypresses ascend like sentinels, their flame-like silhouettes evoking the mournful associations of Greek myth and the visionary gravitas of Symbolist painting. In the lower right, a lone nude, her blonde hair catching an ethereal glow, provides a fragile human counterpoint to this nocturnal dreamscape.
The scene is one of profound theatricality. Biegas orchestrates his composition like a stage-set of the subconscious: the citadel gleams with touches of turquoise, crimson and pale gold, while the Pegasus’ staring eye and coiled grimace suggest both vigilance and enigma. This strange alchemy of ether, metal and imagination produces an uncanny tension between stillness and implied motion. Soft hints of acid-green light filter through the background, suggesting the first moments of dawn – or perhaps the threshold of another realm entirely. One senses that we have entered a spiritual or cognitive landscape, a land of dreams or nightmares, calm yet eerily charged.
The nude figure, diminutive yet radiant, becomes the counterpoint of this visionary architecture – a glimmer of femininity and sensuality against an otherwise desolate environment. Draped in gossamer folds of lavender and rose, she recalls both Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s classical nudes and the female protagonists of Paul Delvaux’s surrealist paintings. Her presence is enigmatic: is she a worshipper, a captive, or a dreamer before the threshold of the uncanny? Such ambiguity was deliberate, aligning Biegas with a Symbolist preoccupation with the mysteries of femininity, as well as its narrative strategies of indirection and allegory. Her scale, juxtaposed with the grandeur of the citadel and its guardian trees, evokes the Romantic notion of the sublime, recalling the monumental mythological landscapes of Gustave Moreau. Indeed, as the eye surveys this miniature human presence, one is invited into a meditation on scale, power and wonder.
Since antiquity, the cypress tree has signified mourning and eternal remembrance, rooted in the myth of Cyparissus, who was transformed into a tree to grieve forever. In Arnold Böcklin’s visionary series, Die Toteninsel – a touchstone for Biegas – funereal cypresses transform the Isle of the Dead into a necropolis, their vertical silhouettes architectural in their solemnity. In the present work, the cypresses similarly twist upward like black flames, structuring the landscape and invoking ideas of death, transcendence and passage. Like Vincent van Gogh’s cypresses, they impart emotional intensity and cosmic rhythm to the composition.
Château du cheval mystérieux is a core example of Biegas’s Mystique de l’infini cycle, executed between 1923 and 1929. Arguably his most captivating Symbolist works, these paintings present enchanted palaces, dreamlike architecture and spectral apparitions, often adorned with phosphorescent colour and gleaming with an enamel-like finish. Exhibited in Paris at Galerie Seligmann in 1925 and Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1929, such works were described by the critic Gustave Kahn as ‘a beautiful meditative poem of great isolation’ (G. Kahn, ‘Les nuits mystiques par Boleslas Biegas’, in Le Mercure de France, 1 December 1925, p. 509). The present painting stands at the heart of this cycle, with its mysterious castle, guardian Pegasus and solitary nude suffused with ethereal radiance, drawing the viewer into a reflective reverie.
The genesis of these visions lies in Biegas’s early Paris years. At the 22nd Salon des Indépendants in 1906, his paintings were admired by Guillaume Apollinaire as ‘the most profound thing in the exhibition … here is a soul’ (Apollinaire quoted in M. Decaudin, ‘Apollinaire et les peintres en 1906, d’aprés quelques notes inédites,’ in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, February 1970, p. 118). Subsequently, Biegas absorbed the Symbolist currents of the Revue blanche circle and the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as his paintings and sculpture fused music, poetry and image into sublime emanations of expression. While he aligned himself with Böcklin and Odilon Redon, his approach remained idiosyncratic, fusing Böcklin’s mythological gravitas and Redon’s dreamy haze into enchanting visual fables of phosphorescent solidity. In the present work, he reconciles Symbolist spirituality with a modern fascination for geometry and architecture, producing a composition that is timeless in its sheer originality.
Ultimately, the present work encapsulates Biegas’s vision of painting as a poem of infinite meditation. It is a work of rare atmospheric power, where Symbolist allegory, erotic nuance and visionary architecture converge. Emerging from a cycle that has remained enigmatic throughout history, the painting exemplifies Biegas’s singular contribution to the École de Paris: an art of luminous invention and symbolic resonance, bridging Romantic imagination and modernist experimentation. Coming from a distinguished family collection of Polish art, Château du cheval mystérieux is one of the most captivating embodiments of early twentieth-century Symbolism remaining in private ownership.
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