One of the most celebrated pastels by Stanisław Wyspiański, currently known by the title Chochoły, was created around March 1889. More less at the same time, a breakthrough lecture on Maurice Maeterlinck’s art took place in Kraków, becoming a turning point in the formation of Young Poland’s artistic ideology.

Just like the Maeterlinck lecture was seminal for its ideological background, so did Wyspiański’s pastel become a manifesto of Symbolism – a current aimed at expressing the inexpressible in art. The nocturne shows straw-wrapped shrubs in Kraków’s Planty Park (next to Poselska Street), arranged in an irregular circle. Thanks to their layout and the anthropomorphic shapes created by the straw cover (and by the artist’s imagination), they make an impression of a dance circle. This most likely reflects a daydream-like experience which Wyspiański described to Ludwik Puget, as the memories of the latter seem to indicate. Puget reminisced: I remember when once, as we were walking across Planty with Wyspiański a group of rosebushes we saw opposite the wall of the so-called Saint Michael. It was very early spring […] and roses were still wrapped in the winter straw cover. ‘Look over there, they are dancing, they are clearly dancing‘, Wyspiański said. Soon afterwards, he painted that group of bushes in straw wraps, engaged in an almost human lantern-lit dance amongst the park’s chestnut trees. The whole projects the aura of an incredible dream, creating an effect of experiencing something that escapes rational cognition, something out of this world.

This wasn’t the first time when Wyspiański turned to Planty for inspiration. At the beginning of his artistic practice, in 1894, he created two works dedicated to the park, which the art historian Wojciech Bałus has interpreted as a diptych: the pastel Planty nocą (Planty by Night) and an oil painting Planty o świcie (Planty at Dawn) – in the 1990s, the latter was reproduced on the reverse of a ten-thousand złoty bill. The former is a nocturne illuminated by a mysterious, surreal light reminiscent of the Eye of Providence; the latter shows the same fragment of the park at sunrise. The ‘Eye of Providence’ turns out to be a tacky modern gas lamp, which Wyspiański displayed sarcastically against the background of Wawel Hill. Bałus interprets these paintings as unveiling the ordinary reality hiding behind a poetic vision. Chochoły, painted four years later, doesn’t try to explain reality, but instead focuses on the extraordinary and the inexplicable. The composition of the drawing is also unusual. When trying to answer a seemingly simple question about the position of the observer, Bałus concluded that this spot simply doesn’t exist and also didn’t exist when Wyspiański was alive. We see the scene from the level of approximately third floor of a nonexistent house. It is therefore a painting viewed literally from a bird’s eye view, a perspective that is inaccessible to human eyes, which, according to Bałus, is supposed to intensify the extraordinary effect of the ‘dream vision.’ In comparison to other works by Wyspiański, where landscapes almost always have a clearly defined existing observation point, this is an exceptional situation, highlighting the strangeness and uniqueness of the artwork. Is it just that? The figure of a chochoł (a straw wrap) almost immediately refers the viewer to The Wedding, Wyspiański’s play from 1901. Thus, it is also possible that the circle of swaying shrubs in Planty is an anticipation of the Chochoł dance in The Wedding. This interpretation seems to be supported by other elements: the same time of day and the location of the scene – at the foot of the way to Wawel, so a place carrying special connotations with national history. The most thorough and enlightening interpretation placing Chochoły in the context of The Wedding was written by Agnieszka Morawińska.

This is also the reading which is the most heavily criticised by Bałus, who asks the eternal question about the purpose of interpreting an early art piece by a later one, as well as points to the fact that most likely even the author didn’t think that he was drawing straw wraps. The present version of the title derives from 1927, when the piece appeared in the catalogue of the artist’s works edited by Stanisław Śwież. The original title was in fact Pałuby na Plantach tańczące (Pałuby Dancing in Planty Park). The permanent change of title seems to be caused by two factors: the blatant analogy to The Wedding, and the semantic shift of both words. The word pałuba, rarely used these days, currently refers to a shapeless, ghost-like female figure, having lost its other meaning describing a straw bunch. The latter is now almost exclusively referred to as chochoł, which testifies to the scale of the cultural impact of The Wedding in Poland. Wyspiański was indeed the first one to introduce this notion to the common Polish language, in his play. However, if the same person to which we owe the term chochoł, consistently insisted that in his nocturne he painted not chochoł figures, but pałuby, it means that we should not be too attached to making a strict connection between these two works. In fact, the way in which the straw wraps are anthropomorphised, bringing to mind associations with shapeless female figures indicates that Wyspiański consciously used the word pałuby in the original title.