Jazz

Erna Rosenstein received her artistic education in 1932 - 1934 at the Frauen Akademie in Vienna and from 1934 to 1936 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, in the studio of Wojciech Weiss. In 1937, she went on a trip to Paris. From mid-1946, she lived in Kraków, and from 1949 in Warsaw. After liberation, she joined the Grupa Młodych Plastyków (Group of Young Visual Artists) and, in 1957, the Grupa Krakowska (Kraków Group). Surrealism had the most significant influence on her work, but it is difficult to describe her achievements within its framework. Erna Rosenstein was invited to participate in the First Exhibition of Modern Art in the Palace of Art in Kraków, which played an essential role in post-war artistic life. She exhibited several works there. One of them, entitled Jazz (1947), is in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin. The painting belongs to a group of works that are not dominated by the experience of the Second World War. It refers to a specific work that strongly influenced the imagination of artists of the first half of the 20th century, namely the painting Trzech muzykantów [Three Musicians] (1921) by Pablo Picasso. The canvas is sometimes interpreted as a summary of the synthetic Cubist period in Picasso's painting. As in the case of other canvases from this career stage, the figures are initially geometrised and then broken down into smaller, simple shapes, which are later reassembled into forms. However, while the individual fragments do not match, the whole composition is coherent. All of the above procedures are intended to emphasise the ambiguity of perception. Moreover, Picasso paid more attention to colour in this work, reaching for pure, basic colours. Rosenstein, on the other hand, crossed the boundaries set by Picasso, using the semantic resources of Cubism which she developed with the elements of Surrealism.

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