Creation of the World (My Guernica)

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. While studying from 1930 to 1934 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under the guidance of Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski (1890-1948) and Wojciech Jastrzębowski (1930-1963), Tomaszewski supported himself by working as an after-school community tutor. Following his diploma in art, he taught the art of drawing in the capital city's gymnasiums and, in 1939, took the state exam to become a secondary school teacher. 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, for example, as in the decorative panneau Creation of the World (1948). Inspired by Picasso's Guernica (1937), the painting resembles an open tomb from which species are reborn. The adaptation of the anti-fascist icon is given an evidently wishful character here, emphasising the aspect of overcoming evil and rebirth from destruction. With numerous allusions to the concept of the "Regained Territories" as the new Arcadia, Tomaszewski became an iconic figure for the Szczecin milieu. Despite his 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