Still life

Adam Marczyński studied painting at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts between 1929 and 1936. His professors were Władysław Jarocki and Ignacy Pieńkowski, namely, the artists of the old generation, shaped in the era of Post-Impressionism and Art Nouveau, who enjoyed the privileges of official artists of the Second Republic of Poland. Already in 1930, Marczyński took an artistic trip to Spain and France (to the latter again in 1936), from where he returned enchanted by the paintings of Paul Cézanne. Contact with colleagues holding radical leftist views (Sasha Blonder, Leopold Lewicki, Stanisław Osostowicz, Jonasz Stern), and the mentorship of Leon Chwistek, a precursor of post-cubist tendencies in Poland, inspired by examples of naive, folk and non-European art, shaped his socially involved attitude and abstracted artistic language of the budding artist. Painters, draftsmen and graphic artists of the young generation formed the Krakow Group (1931). It also included the sculptors Maria Jarema and Henryk Wiciński, formally closest to Marczyński, who exhibited with them from 1933. As in the still life from the Szczecin collection, they operated with severely modelled solids or planes, vibrating contours and a muted colour palette. We represented the province - uncouth, hungry, eager, not blasé with bourgeois manners, not bound by connections to Kraków's Olympus. We were wild strangers who came to the Polish Athens to become somebody, one of the comrades recalled (Jonasz Stern, Grupa Krakowska[Kraków Group, in: Cyganeria i polityka. Wspomnienia krakowskie 1919–1939 [Bohemia and Politics. Kraków Memories 1919–1939], ed. by Janina Bogucka-Ordyńcowa, Warsaw 1964, p. 227). At the same time, Marczyński's focus on the studio genres of still life, interior and portrait brought him closer to the other Krakow milieu of the 1930s, namely the colourists of the Paris Committee.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak