Still life

Born in Herzegovina, Władysław Lam began his artistic education at the Real Gymnasium in Sarajevo, where the Czech painter, photographer, folklorist, and publicist Ferdinand Velc gave drawing lessons. After his family moved to Tuzla, Lam was sent to a school where this subject was taught by the Bosnian painter-ethnographer Savo Popović Ivanov. Between 1912 and 1917, with a break in the war, the young Pole studied at the Academy in Kraków - first under Teodor Axentowicz, and later under Józef Mehoffer. From 1920, he began teaching in Łódź, Modlin, Wągrowiec and Poznań. It was in the capital city of Wielkopolska, where he worked at the State Teachers' Seminar and the Adam Mickiewicz Private Gymnasium, that he began his artistic career, joining the local group of artists Świt as its youngest member in 1922-1925. When he and his friends exhibited their works at the spring exhibition of 1923 at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, he received the highest critical acclaim. His still lives, in which the influences of Paul Cézanne and Cubism were perceived, were particularly praised, as was his solid construction, rare in contemporary Polish art. Lam's paintings in fact combined avant-garde ideas of an analytical character with traditional formal concepts and themes, and the gradual growth of the classical element eventually led to the artist saying goodbye to the Poznań group. Before this happened, he created several striking, decorative arrangements of objects on a table - a bottle, fruit and a fashionable amaryllis or plumeria in a pot - with intense enamel colours, deformed perspective, simplified shapes of imagined objects and a balanced and concentrated composition.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak