Roman Kramsztyk
1885 - 1942

Roman Kramsztyk came from a prominent and highly respected family of assimilated Polish Jews. His uncle, Maksymilian Fajans, had been a graphic artist, draftsman, and the owner of the best-known lithographic workshop in Warsaw. His brother-in-law, Louis Marcoussis (Ludwik Markus), who married Alicja Halicka, developed his own version of Cubism in painting and graphic arts that gained him international fame in Paris.

After graduating from secondary school, Kramsztyk studied drawing and painting in the studios of Zofia Stankiewicz, Adolf E. Herstein and Miłosz Kotarbiński. For one term, he attended Józef Mehoffer's studio at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts (1903 / 1904). He made friends at this time with the future members of "Rytm" Association: Henryk Kuna, Leopold Gottlieb, Wacław Borowski (of whom he made portraits) and Władysław Skoczylas, among others. In 1904, he left for Munich to study in the studio of Ludwig Hertereich. He stayed there until 1908, when he moved first to Berlin, and a year later to Paris. There he joined both the Society of Polish Artists in Paris and the Polish Artistic-Literary Society in Paris. In 1911, he stayed at Audierne in Brittany, and during 1914-1916, together with his friend Eugeniusz Zak, traveled to southern France, Switzerland, and finally, to Poland.

Kramsztyk and Zak's lives were united in the artistic sphere as well. Together with some other artists, they co-founded the ephemeral New Group (sometimes dubbed the Group of Five, not to be associated with the earlier group of the same name that, among others, included Leopold Gottlieb, Witold Wojtkiewicz, and Vlastimil Hofman), and, above all, "Rytm" Associ-ation. Both artists visited Berlin in 1922. After a short stay in Zakopane, Kramsztyk and his wife, Bronisława, settled in Paris in 1924, maintaining active contacts with other representatives of the Polish colony, including Olga Boznańska and Mela Muter. In the summer of 1925 Kramsztyk's wife died in an accident at sea near Collioure.

Kramsztyk often went to Poland, where he maintained his studio at 4, Boduen Street in War-saw. His last Parisian studio, where his friend Aleksander Żyw painted his portrait (a gouache in Tom Podl's collection), was taken over after World War II by his cousin, Katarzyna Librowicz-Walker, who was also a painter. She also inherited a part of the artist's estate, including some works by Kramsztyk as well as those he had received from other artists who were his friends and which had remained in his studio until after the war. A group of them are now in the Tom Podl collection.

In July 1939, Kramsztyk was in Warsaw, where he remained after the outbreak of the war. Toward the end of 1940 he moved into the Ghetto. He continued his activities, painting portraits and drawing highly dramatic views of the daily life of that closed quarter of the city. He rejected his friends' offers of help to leave the Ghetto, including those made by Anna Iwaszkiewicz and her husband, famous writer and poet Jarosław. He was murdered on the stairs of his house at Chłodna Street in August 1942.

Kramsztyk practiced painting, graphic arts and drawing, at times even sculpting. He was, first of all, a gifted portraitist. He had a talent for expressing his understanding of psychology in the language of painting. He drew silhouettes with a distinct contour. Following Cézanne, he imparted spatiality to masses through color contrasts. He set off the principal motifs with a non-representational but pictorially active backdrop. Frequently, he gave a sitter a monumental appearance with the help of props or details of dress, and he treated some portraits as allegories with a universal message that went beyond the model as an individual. In his portraits and other genres, he expressed his affirmation of life, an attitude not devoid of humor. Kramsztyk has been acclaimed as one of the most talented and most genuine of Polish portraitists, who, while "immortalizing on the canvas luminaries from the world of science, politics and culture, created [...] a splendid panorama of the Polish intelligentsia of the first half of the twentieth century" (see Kramsztyk 1997). The quality of his portraits and other works is, however, uneven.

Despite sharing his interest in the classical tradition with his colleagues from Rhythm, his landscapes, at times furnished with bucolic accessories, remain representational, unlike the paintings of Eugeniusz Zak, Wacław Borowski or Tymon Niesiołowski. His Arcadia was never anonymous and was in fact always located in Provence, Brittany or Catalonia. Like other members of Rhythm, he appreciated the honesty of the painter's craft, compositional clarity and color harmony. In the early stage of his career, he showed a predilection for a distinct, black contour. With time, chromatic contrasts gave way to subtler nuances of value: navy-blues and azures were replaced by reds and browns.

In 1932, a portfolio of Kramsztyk's lithographs entitled Les Visages was published by the Éditions "Le Triangle" in Paris. It included an introduction by his friend, the poet Jan Lechoń. The artist made references to Renaissance masters in these lithographs of portraits, studies of heads and nudes. The most interesting portraits (including the picture of Lechoń), were repeated by the artist in various configurations and techniques. Technically, he was a very skillful draftsman, and the chromatic discipline he derived from the lessons of Cézanne were subjugated to drawing, even in the most colorful paintings. The sanguine heads or nudes in pencil exceeded his impressive realizations in paint. His talent as a draftsman is evident in a series of scenes from the life of the Warsaw Ghetto, so tragic in the context of the time and circumstances of their origin.

His debut took place at the Annual Exhibition at Zachęta in 1909, and in 1911 he started exhibiting at the Paris Salons. Kramsztyk's one-man shows were organized in Warsaw (1912, 1937), Kraków (1913), Lvov (1914), Poznań (1914), Paris (1925, 1928, 1930, 1937) and Łódź (1928). Among the most important group exhibitions one should note: the exhibition of Polish artists residing in Paris shown in Barcelona (1912), the XI Venice Biennale (1914), the First Exhibition of the Polish Expressionists (further calling themselves Formists; 1917), exhibitions of the "Rytm" Association, L'Art Polonais Moderne in Paris (1929) and the World Exposition in New York (1939). In his youth he showed his works with "Sztuka" Society in Kraków, the Berlin Secession, the Salons of TZSP and TPSP, and in the Polish Art Club. Following Kramsztyk's death, his works appeared in one-man shows in Sao Paulo (1946), Łódź (1993) and Warsaw (1997 - a large retrospective at Zachęta Gallery).

-- Artur Tanikowski

Works in the collection: