Red Armchairs

Moscow-born Marian Tomaszewski (1904-1968) began his education in a Russian gymnasium but moved to Poland with his parents after the October Revolution. He passed his baccalaureate examinations at the Juliusz Słowacki State Teachers' Seminary in Lublin (1926). It enabled the future painter to find employment in the educational sector, in which he was active almost his entire professional life. After receiving his diploma from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, he began teaching the art of drawing in the capital city's secondary schools. During the Nazi occupation, the artist returned to Lublin, where he became an instructor at the art courses of Janina Miłosiowa (1896-1983) and subsequently at the German School of Painting and Drawing. Alongside his teaching career, Tomaszewski was involved in underground cultural life. After the liberation of the city, he created the foundations of an institution with the Provisional Board of the Trade Union of Visual Artists, of which he became president. His experiences in Lublin led him to be entrusted with organising artistic life in Szczecin, where he arrived in September 1945. At the Provincial Department of Culture and the Arts, he was a specialist in the arts; at the local branch of the ZZAP - he was a vice president; he also founded the Society for the Promotion of Culture in Western Pomerania and the Free College of Visual Arts (from 1947 the School of Visual Arts, and from 1948 the National Visual Arts Cultural Centre), of which he became director. Wartime memories and pioneering work became an influential theme in his works, including commercial print designs, fabrics, illustrations, and ephemeral urban decorations. The work Red Armchairs (1948) represents an early concept in Fernand Léger's (1881-1955) style, already emerging during the Lublin period. The colour of the furniture featured in the work's title may be an allusion to systemic changes in the country - the growing strength of communism and the establishment of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) in late 1948. Memories of the time tell us that Tomaszewski's spacious flat was the centre of the Szczecin visual artists' social life, where the officially introduced method of socialist realism was debated. Despite the artist’s return to Warsaw in 1951, both social and professional contacts linked the artist to West Pomerania for the rest of his life. Szymon Piotr Kubiak