Onbeach

Maria Jarema earned her artistic diploma in sculpture between 1929 and 1935 under Xawery Dunikowski at the Academy of Art in Kraków. She abandoned sculpture almost entirely in favour of painting after the Second World War. Before 1939 she belonged to the strongly left-wing Kraków Group, with Leopold Lewicki, Stanisław Osostowicz and Jonasz Stern. It is also worth mentioning that her friendship with Tadeusz Kantor played an essential role in her artistic development, which resulted, among other things, in the creation of stage designs for the Cricot Theatre. After the war, in 1945, she joined the Group of Young Visual Artists. She was one of those people who made every effort to reactivate the Kraków Group, which only became possible in 1957. Jarema was at the centre of the artistic community, which co-organised three Exhibitions of Modern Art (Kraków 1948-49, Warsaw 1957 and 1959). At the First Exhibition of Modern Art in 1948, which played a significant role in post-war artistic life, she presented five temperas and several watercolours. A tempera in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin was painted in the same poetics. The painting is entitled Na plaży [On the Beach] (also known as Pejzaż morski [The Seascape]) and is composed of a series of irregular patches of bright colours - yellow, blue, a little black and red. The work is a collection of colour forms that refer our imagination to the seascape proposed in the title. The artist has managed to achieve the dynamics of shapes, causing us to feel that we are dealing with elements that need to be arranged independently to represent certain precisely undefined scenes. They can be used to compose a whole spectrum of things, people and landscapes that can be seen on the beach (people, ships, birds, etc.). The even distribution of the whole composition on the picture plane, which can be seen in the Szczecin work, was also crucial for works form that period. The dynamics of movement - so important for this work - was one of the most vital problems that determined the later path of Jarema's development.

Beata Małgorzata Wolska