Gustaw Gwozdecki
1880 - 1935

The artist came from a theatrical and literary family. Initially, he studied in Munich (ca. 1898) at the private schools of Stanisław Grocholski and Anton Ažbé. He practiced landscape painting while in Dachau, near Munich, attracting the attention of German critics and educators. In 1900, he returned to Kraków where he began studies in the studio of Jan Stanisławski at the Academy of Fine Arts, and also had his debut at Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych (Association of Friends of Fine Arts). A year later, he moved to Warsaw to study at the private school of Konrad Krzyżanowski, whose art exerted a considerable influence on him, especially in the discipline of portraiture.

In 1902, he stayed near Chartres in France for a short time and then, in 1903, settled for good in the Montparnasse district of Paris where he began to study sculpture under Hubert Ponscarme at the École des Beaux-Arts. Among his closest friends were some of the representatives of the Polish colony in France: Olga Boznańska, Władysław Ślewiński, Bolesław Biegas, Eugeniusz Zak and Elie Nadelman. He also had connections with members of the artistic elite of Montparnasse: Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico, Pierre Roy and probably Henri Matisse. His art and pedagogical undertakings found support among such outstanding persons as the critics Louis Vauxcelles, Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon, as well as the sculptor Emile-Antoine Bourdelle. The last two were especially active in supporting Gwozdecki in his project to run a "painting workshop," an art school for Poles living in France. Opened in mid-1914, it operated for only a few short months prior to the outbreak of World War I.

In 1915, Gwozdecki began to make trips to the U.S., residing mainly in New York City. He contributed to various branches of Polish cultural life there, becoming, among other things, the first president of the Committee to Forster Friendly Relations between the Arts of Poland and America founded in 1927. He was the chairman of the board of the Annual Salons in New York. In the early 1920s, he befriended Catherine Dreier, an artist, collector, and above all co-founder together with Marcel Duchamp of the Société Anonyme, an organization that popularized abstract art in America. Some of Gwozdecki's works were included in the Dreier collection.

In addition to painting and drawing (including illustrations for the periodicals Rydwan and Krokwie), he produced sculpture and graphic arts, mainly etchings, monotypes and a technique he invented called "gwozdotypes," which was related to monotypes. He also published articles on art in the Lvovian periodical Nasz Kraj and the French L'Amis du Peuple and Comoedia. In 1908, he published a treatise entitled On Evolution in Art.

According to the artist's monographer, Anna Lipa: "Gwozdecki began his career with dusky, visionary portraits, spectral representations of masks and heads, and expressionistic landscape compositions. In these works, one can detect the influence of the aestheticism of Przybyszewski, the portraits of the artist's teacher Konrad Krzyżanowski, and the landscapes of Jan Stanisławski" (see Lipa 2000). In France, his youthful fascination with works of the Post-Impressionists, especially those of the Pont-Aven School (known to him through Władysław Ślewiński) led him increasingly to identify his own work with the idea of pure painting. This concept was, in his opinion, exemplified in the painting of Henri Matisse, Kees van Dongen and other fauvists. Broadly applied brush marks of intense color were contained within black contour lines, yielding synthetic forms. His development from 1906 to 1914 in Paris was crowned with the discovery of his own pictorial style. The German Expressionists also exerted a significant influence on the final form of Gwozdecki's paintings, which were most highly valued by the French critics. Among the Poles, closest in style were Mela Muter and Leopold Gottlieb, the creators of an analogous form of expressive portraiture.

According to Lipa: Gwozdecki "until the end of his life remained faithful to expressionist painting, understood as a constant search for strong emotional expression through intense color, though from the beginning of the 1920s he succumbed to various stylistic influences, the new classicism and the sophisticated drawing techniques found on Greek vases, among others" (see Lipa 1995, p. 39). The refined elegance of his late portraits was emblematic of the method he acquired under the influence of Amedeo Modigliani and, to some extent, Eugeniusz Zak. Gwozdecki's mastery of drawing revealed itself especially in the series of prints and drawings of heads and nudes, which were constructed with an economy of line and often filled the whole frame. Elie Nadelman, a friend of the artist, simultaneously made an analogous quest in the field of drawing. Both of them were probably influenced by the theories of Mieczysław Golberg, the author of La Morale des Lignes. Gwozdecki belonged to a group of artists who, on one hand, imported to Paris an artistic sensibility already formed in their homeland (as in the case of the so-called Polish School) and, on the other hand, after a several year stay, grafted themselves onto the Parisian artistic bohemians. This symbiosis provided a platform for Polish avant-garde movements, which had become institutionalized by the end of World War I as exemplified by the works of Mojżesz Kisling, Eugeniusz Zak and Elie Nadelman.

The first one-man show of Gwozdecki's works probably took place in Warsaw (1901), followed by others in Poznań (1907), Lvov (1907) and Kraków (1908). He organized his most important one-man shows in Paris in 1912 and 1913 at his own studio in Montparnasse. His last one-man show took place at his studio in Paris in 1935, a few days before his death. In New York the artist exhibited in 1918, 1921-1922 and after 1925. A posthumous exhibition of his work was included at the Paris Autumn Salon.

Gwozdecki exhibited at the Paris Salons beginning in 1902. He also participated in the exhibitions of the Kunstverein in Munich (1900), TPSP (the Association of Friends of Fine Arts) in Lvov and Kraków (where his debut took place in 1900), TZSP (Society for Encouragement of Fine Arts) in Warsaw, the Juryfreien in Vienna and Berlin (1910-1911), "Sztuka" Association in Kraków and the Polish Expressionists, later known as the Formists (1917, twice in 1918, and 1919).

-- Artur Tanikowski

Works in the collection: