Leopold Gottlieb
1880 - 1934

Leopold Gottlieb was the youngest son of a petroleum industrialist. Leopold's elder brothers, Filip, Marceli, Marcin and, above all, Maurycy (a pupil of Matejko) were also talented painters. Furthermore, Leopold's brother-in-law, Mieczysław Jakimowicz, was a painter who co-organized the Group of Five.

Gottlieb's artistic talent became evident early, as he testified in an interview: "I've been painting since I was five. When I was seven, I executed my first historical composition" (see Brandstaetter 1934). From 1896 to 1902, he studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts under Florian Unierzyski, Jacek Malczewski and Teodor Axentowicz. At that time, he was on friendly terms with Xawery Dunikowski, who sculpted his portrait. While a student, he produced pastels and watercolors on commission at Kołomyja (1898) in order to earn funds for his further studies in Vienna, which plans were never realized. After his studies in Kraków, he was awarded a scholarship and in 1903, left for Munich where he attended the private school of Anton AŽbé. He frequented the Old Pinacotheca on the Isar River, where he copied, on commission, seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Those funds enabled him in 1904 to visit Paris for the first time, where his debut took place at the Autumn Salon. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Poland.

While in Kraków between 1904 and 1907, he was connected with the milieu of young Jewish artists and intellectuals gathered around Samuel Hirszenberg: Jerzy Merkel, Abraham Neuman, Henryk Kuna and Emil Breiter, among others. In 1905, he founded the Group of Five, in which, Vlastimil Hofman, Mieczysław Jakimowicz, Jan Rembowski and Witold Wojtkiewicz also participated. This group was a statement of protest against the policies of the Society of Polish Artists "Sztuka", which considerably limited the participation of young artists in its exhibitions. Gottlieb left Kraków for periods of time, staying in Lvov or Vienna, where he joined the Hagenbund. In 1906, he traveled to Jerusalem, where he headed the faculty of painting at the School of Arts and Crafts "Bezalel."

In 1908, he found himself in Paris again. He spent a great deal of time at the café Closerie des Lilas in the company of artists and critics: Jules Pascin, the poet Manolo Hugue, as well as Adolf Basler, Mojżesz Kisling, Louis Marcoussis (Ludwik Markus), Simon Mondzain, Elie Nadelman and Eugeniusz Zak who arrived from Poland at various times. Additionally, he was particularly close to Mela Muter. Gottlieb was active in the Society of Polish Artists in Paris. During 1913-1914, he relocated to and worked in Toledo, Spain. Upon his return to Paris in 1914, he fought a pistol and saber duel with Kisling in the Parc des Princes over an unclear issue of honor. That event was prominently discussed in the Parisian press. Gottlieb's second in the duel was his friend, the well-known Mexican painter, Diego de Rivera. Neither of the combatants suffered much harm.

Along with Mojżesz Kisling, Xawery Dunikowski, Louis Marcoussis, Władysław Skoczylas and others, Gottlieb participated in the activities and training of the Paris branch of a secret military organization known as the "Strzelec" ("Rifleman"). After the outbreak of World War I, he joined the Polish Legions as a volunteer. Serving in the First Brigade, he made hundreds of drawings, etchings, and lithographs representing his brothers-in-arms in official portraits or on duty, as well as battlefield and genre scenes from behind the front lines. He also made photographs and films immortalizing the more important moments of the First Brigade's campaigns. Some of his lithographs were reproduced in portfolios and also as postcards printed during and after the war. In 1918, he was sent on leave for his health to Zakopane, where he co-directed the Free School of Fine Arts.

In the early 1920s, Gottlieb lived in Vienna and Baden. In 1926, he again settled in Paris, and in the same year traveled to Collioure in southern France. He also made visits to Poland, where in 1929 he became a member of the Association of Polish Artists "Rytm". He also exhibited with the group "Nowa Generacja". In 1931, he decorated a sanatorium chapel near Magdeburg (Germany) with frescoes.

The early oeuvre of Leopold Gottlieb was formed in the cultural climate of Kraków and Vienna at the turn of the century. In addition to scenes symbolistic in character and with a decadent mood, he also explored Jewish religious subjects in his first painted and graphic works. These little-known works are possibly the result of the influence of the art of his older, already famous brother, Maurycy. Leopold Gottlieb's early work was dominated by portraiture, where the model was subjected, in Juszczak's words, to an: "expressionistic vivisection, stamped with the air of pathos and overwhelming pessimism" (see Juszczak 1965, p. 89). Among its characteristic features, were values strengthening the expression: sophisticated arrangements of hands with elongated, intertwined fingers and compositions where the model filled and almost burst out of the frame. The psychological depth of these highly deformed figures give expression through the model's pessimistic musing as well as by the images' form - flat contoured shapes, and color - predominantly of broken violets and beiges. They recall the works of two Viennese painters: Egon Schiele and Oscar Kokoschka, as well as, to a certain extent, even Edvard Munch.

As a portraitist operating with a modern language of forms, Leopold Gottlieb was famous both in Poland and in Paris. He painted portraits of numerous artists, critics, writers, politicians and scholars. Their list seems endless: Diego de Rivera, Pablo Picasso, Jules Pascin, Henryk Glicenstein, Jan Rubczak, Mieczysław Jakimowicz, Arthur Rubinstein, André Salmon, Adolf Basler, Chil Aronson (Franciszek Biedart), Michał Mutermilch, Paul Valery, Stefan Żeromski, Jan Kasprowicz, Kornel Makuszyński, Shalom Asch, Henri Bergson, Theodor Daubler, the prime minister of France Paul Painlevé, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Józef Piłsudski, Kazimierz Sosnkowski, and so on. Portraits of Gottlieb were rendered by Mela Muter, Samuel Hirszenberg, Roman Kramsztyk, Edward Rydz-Śmigły, Mieczysław Jakimowicz and Xawery Dunikowski.

From 1908 to 1910, the painter enlarged his iconography with multi-figural scenes, often having their source in Biblical themes. The figure of Christ that appeared in them is said to personify the Jewish national revival. The color in these works became more saturated in comparison to his early portraits, while the forms grew increasingly stylized and monumentalized. Moreover, the compositional rhythms increased. Secular scenes also acquired a religious character. A fisherman's evening meal, for instance, was reminiscent of the Last Supper. In the early 1920s, dark, saturated tones predominated, shapes were distinctly enclosed within contours and the forms themselves were subjected to geometrization. The artist emphasized rhythmic movement and muscular tension in figures at work, whose angular, wedge-shaped forms in silhouette filled the entire frame to capacity.

Leopold Gottlieb's paintings of his mature period were dominated by metaphor. In the late 1920's and early 1930s, he often inscribed the main image in a triangle. Later, the compositions became more airy, while the main shapes remain undisturbed by the excess of details in the background. The angular forms evolved into more ovalesque, milder shapes, which were poetically harmonized with new colors, dominated by delicate gradations of pearly white with light tints of green, pink and blue. These chromatics can be compared with the palette of another leading representative of the School of Paris, Jules Pascin, a friend of the Polish artist. The apotheosis of the daily life of women dominated his last pictures. The particular rhythms of their work and rest were expressed in intimate scenes that gained a universal dimension. This was no less than that of the scenes of praying Jews, to which the painter returned after many years.

Although an eminent Polish writer, most probably the Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont, tried to persuade Gottlieb to be baptized, he never agreed. His wife Aurelia, a declared Zionist, supported Judaism in the artist's house. The painter wanted to and in fact did, belong to two intertwined cultural circles, the Polish and the Jewish. He fought in the Polish Legions, participated in Polish art associations, exhibited in group shows of both Polish and Jewish art, and studied at a Polish academy, while lecturing in the first Jewish art school. His highly individual style was influenced in various periods by the poetics of Młoda Polska (Young Poland), by the trends that shaped the modern face of the European Jewry, and the traditions established in part by Maurycy Gottlieb. He was also greatly influenced by the achievements of the international circles that led cultural fashion in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Leopold Gottlieb's one-man shows took place in Lvov (1912), Paris (1927, 1929, 1930, 1934), Geneva (1928) and Pittsburgh (1933). Posthumous retrospective exhibitions were organized at the Autumn and Tuileries Salons in Paris (1934), in Warsaw and Kraków (1935), and in London (1936).

The artist showed his works primarily at TPSP in Kraków (1901) and Lvov (1903) and at the Paris Autumn and Independents Salons (beginning in 1904). He participated in exhibitions of Jewish art organized in Kraków and Lvov, and also exhibited with the Group of Five (1905-1908), the Formists (1917-1919), "Rytm" (1929-1930) and "Nowa Generacja" (1932). He displayed his works at important exhibitions both in Poland (The General Nationwide Exhibition, Poznań 1929) and abroad, e.g., in Barcelona (1912), Brussels (1928-1929) and Paris at the Galerie Editions Bonaparte (1929). He also exhibited in Vienna, including showings with the Vienna Secession.

-- Artur Tanikowski

Works in the collection: