Lublin, Old Town

Trachter was a painter of Lublin. After his return from Paris in the late 1920s, he portrayed the city on the Bystrzyca River, applying different artistic conventions. In his interpretation, Lublin gained a modern expression, shaped by inspirations and patterns from the international environment of the École de Paris. Fascinated with the works of Cezanne and Soutine, Trachter freely referred both to the simplified, geometrised, and expressive painting formulas.

The depiction of the Old Town belongs to the expressionist tradition, combining the piled-up topography of buildings with the violent gesture of thickly applied paint. The Old Town is shown from the side of the now-defunct Jewish quarter, with the characteristic points of rising historical buildings, the Tyszkiewicz Chapel, the Dominican Basilica, the Trinity Gate and the tight arrangement of residential buildings in the foreground extending beyond the frame of the painting. Their twisted, deformed, makeshift structure has been brought out with strong brush strokes and intense colours of yellows, reds and blues.

The cityscape is not populated. The artist's main objective was to contrast the monumental buildings piling up above with the view of the poor, decaying Jewish quarter. Trachter compensates for the lack of people with the unstable, expressively excavated tissue of buildings, curtains of drying clothes, fences dividing the dense space. They express everyday life, changeable, impermanent and fragile. The painter resigns from a documentary account, creating instead a subjective and emotional metaphor of human fate, expressed by the view of the twisted and impermanent houses situated at the foot of the hierarchical buildings of the Old Town.

Marcin Lachowski