Girl's head (Girl in scarf)

Eugeniusz Zak studied painting in 1902 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Jean-Léon Gerome. He then developed his skills at the Académie Colarossi under Albert Besnard. In 1903, he took lessons at the private school of Anton Ažbe in Munich. He belonged to the Society of Polish Artists. He was friends with the École de Paris artists, including Roman Kramsztyk, Wacław Borowski and Leopold Gottlieb. The stylistic evolution of the artist's work can be traced by analysing his portraits, which were one of the ever-present themes in his art. He painted men much less frequently than women, which we see most often on his canvases. In the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin, there is a portrait of Dziewczyna w chustce [The Girl in a Scarf] from around 1910. The title character has been portrayed in the bust. The artist succeeded in portraying her delicate features, expressing a pensive face devoted to dreams and, simultaneously, mysterious thanks to the lowered gaze and the position of the lips. The sense of an incomplete representation of the woman's appearance and personality is caused by the headscarf covering her entire face. The image is shown against a uniform, light-grey background. In his portraits, the artist challenged himself with the possibilities of form. The Szczecin painting and other images of women from that period are synthetic, slightly geometric since they resemble drawings and sculptures of Elias Nadelman, who was also associated with the artists of École de Paris, although the main point of reference for him was the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Between 1915 and 1920, he painted a dozen or so idealised images that visibly echo the great master's fascination. Against this background, Zak created his type of portrait of a young woman overwhelmed by melancholy. Their common features were a linear, static shot with refined contours, similar colouring and technique (crayons, sanguine, gouache, sometimes pastel).

Beata Małgorzata Wolska