Portrait of Mika Lisowska

Olga Boznańska's late work was filled with portrait painting of friends, acquaintances, artists, aristocrats and tourists visiting her studio. An extensive portrait gallery showed various types of images, careful psychological studies bringing out individual features. At the same time her painting of the inter-war period was defined by a distinctive style, containing in the portraits a specific variant of self-portraiture expressed by the effect of dematerialisation, effacement, and disappearance of the figure.

The portrait of Mika Lisowska shows a mature female figure sitting in an armchair, her face turned towards the viewer. At the same time her face stands out with a bright glow, conducting a visual dialogue with her hands – these two parts of the body in Boznańska's approach were to define the model's personality. The whole silhouette, maintained in ochres, yellows and browns, is blended into a shallow painting maintained in uniform colours.

The painting well reflects the dualism of Boznańska's portrait painting of that time – it is an attempt to bring out a strong, clearly marked personality, with the simultaneous blurring of contours and blurring of the figure, dispersing its carnality in the decoratively presented interior.

The style consistently developed by Boznańska after the first war, combining the freedom of the painting form with the intensity of recreating the model's face and portrait features, seemed to be a specific artistic declaration of refusal to follow the patterns of avant-garde art and at the same time to uphold humanistic values – in the studio, by means of shading and focussing on the face, in timelessness, outside the hustle and bustle of the metropolis. The de-eroticisation of the figure, which was part of Boznańska's portrait painting of women, reversed the logic of the male gaze and at the same time allowed the focus to be on what was most important – the face and hands as manifestations of personality.

Marcin Lachowski