Kidnapping

Leonard Pękalski specialised in monumental painting. After graduating from the private School of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he accompanied his former lecturer Edward Trojanowski, who from 1919 became a conservator of 15th-century Ruthenian frescoes at the castle in Lublin. In 1920-1923, Pękalski ran with Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski the Graphic Arts Establishment Sztuka in Toruń, and when the latter was given a studio of decorative painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, he became his assistant. Accepting a huge commission for the conservation of the Renaissance frescoes at the Wawel Castle and complementing the decoration of the royal residence with new compositions contributed to the classicisation and monumentalisation of the artist's individual style. Pękalski restored the polychromes of the chapel of St Mary of Egypt, the bedroom and antechamber of Zygmunt I, the Chamber of Deputies and the Army Review and Tournament rooms. In the rooms of the Battle of Orsha, Under the Planets and Under the Zodiac he made friezes according to his own design. The employment of Kazimierz Sichulski, a representative of the Art Nouveau-Vernacular movement, at the Kraków academy, regarded by Kowarski and Pękalski as retrograde, resulted in their conflict with the academy authorities and their moving to Warsaw together with several older students. From 1928, Pękalski worked as an assistant and from 1932 as a professor at the capital's nationalized School of Fine Arts, and after its denomination as an academy in 1934 as an associate professor of decorative painting. A penchant for multi-figural scenes, combining modern themes and arrangements with modernistic colour modelling, was also a characteristic feature of Pękalski's atelier paintings, presented at his solo exhibition in Czesław Garliński's salon. In the exhibition catalogue Konrad Winkler wrote: Paintings of this type such as Wojna [War], Atak [Attack], Porwanie [Kidnapping], etc., sometimes resembling Hans Marée[s] in their treatment of the nude, also have decorative assumptions in the sense of monumental decoration (Wystawa prac Leonarda Pękalskiego [The Exhibition of Leonard Pękalski's Works], Warsaw 1930, p. nlb.).

Szymon Piotr Kubiak