Painting

Gérard Singer's enormous painting is one of the most unusual in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin. Its author, who came from a Jewish family with Polish-Romanian roots living in Paris, made his debut at the age of eight (1937). After Paris was occupied by the Nazis, the Singer family left for the south of France conquered by the Italians, where Gérard began his studies at a secondary school in Nice. Having lost his grandmother, who was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, the young man became close to leftist anti-fascist circles and joined the French Resistance. After the liberation of Paris, in 1944 he enrolled in the private Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and a year later in the sculpture and fresco studio of Pierre-Henri Ducos de la Haille at the local School of Fine Arts. At the same time he became a member of the French Communist Party and the great hope of the editor of its publications, Louis Aragon. Like the Surrealist poet in the 1930s, Singer now adopted the method of Socialist Realism, adapting to it the formal solutions of the great art déco panneaux brought from his master's atelier. This is particularly evident in the painting 14 lutego 1950 roku w Nicei [14 February 1950 in Nice], which Singer intended as a contemporary equivalent of the salon genre of history painting. The subject was the events of the eponymous day, when in a southern French port during anti-government strikes workers sunk weapons intended to serve the capitalist cause in Cold War disputes. The monumental painting became the subject of controversy in the country, and in 1952 it took part in an exhibition of French art at Warsaw's gallery Zachęta. Purchased by the Polish Ministry of Culture, it found its way to the Museum of Western Pomerania, where it took centre stage in the gallery of contemporary art. The complicated fate of the painting in the context of the era was recalled in the exhibition Daleko od Moskwy. Gérard Singer i sztuka zaangażowana [Far from Moscow. Gérard Singer and Engaged Art.], shown at the National Museum in Szczecin in 2016, and in accompanying publications.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak