Jan Lebenstein
1930 - 1999

He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, guided by Kazimierz Tomorowicz, Eugeniusz Eibisch and Artur Nacht-Samborski. After graduating in 1954, he had his debut showing at the ZPAP (Union of Polish Artists) Warsaw exhibition. Two years later, he traveled abroad for the first time, going to Holland where he visited museums and viewed exhibitions of works by Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. During the same period, he was also involved with Miron Bialoszewski's experimental Theater on Tarczyńska Street where his first one-man show was presented.

On his first visit to Paris in 1957, Lebenstein met Konstanty Jeleński, Zygmunt Hertz and Czesław Miłosz (a future Noble Prize winner in literature) who were involved with the Paris Kultura circle. Through all the years of communist rule in Poland, their monthly Kultura was the most important Polish cultural and political periodical published outside of Poland. In 1959 – the decisive year in his artistic career – Lebenstein received the Grand Prix of the first Young Artists Biennial in Paris. After settling in France, he made a trip to Italy and in 1962, traveled to the United States where he began a new aspect of his painting career.

Introduced to Americans in 1958, Lebenstein's work appeared in numerous collective exhibitions at several museums and galleries. Acclaimed by art critics, his works were also displayed at the Museum of Modern Art and Gallerie Chalette in New York. Madeleine Chalette-Lejwa operated the Gallery. She, together with her collector husband, promoted Lebenstein's work in America. His paintings received further recognition through the efforts of Maryna Kaston and Ewa Pape of New York, and Krzysztof Kamyszew of Chicago (Director of Gallery 1112 and The Society for Arts). In addition to collective exhibitions, Kamyszew organized individual displays of Lebenstein's works in 1997 and 1999. Albert Grokoest, a rheumatologist and professor at Columbia University in New York, was a collector and personal friend of Lebenstein. Several other Americans began purchasing works for their personal collections. A group of the most important American collectors of the artist's paintings include Martin Lipschulz, Frederick Zimmerman, Henryk and Maryna Kaston, Wojciech Fibak, and Tom Podl who possesses a significant number of the painter's works. Numerous American art magazines and journals included articles on Lebenstein's art. His paintings were permanently exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco.

In the mid-sixties however, his American career started to fade. This non-conforming, prolific painter rebelled against what he viewed as the unacceptable demands and restrictions of the art market. This attitude caused unfavorable reviews in the press and a diminished interest in his works by museums and galleries. Though this resulted in fewer listings in the commercial art marketplace, Lebenstein's genius was still recognized by the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation in New York, which granted him its award in 1976.

With an invitation from Zdzisław Kępiński (a director of the National Museum in Poznań) to lecture at the Fine Arts Academy in Poznań, the artist returned to Poland in 1964. "Everything was done to discourage me from doing this. Apart from clerks, so-called friends helped to get rid of me. I was dealt with in the same way as Potworowski" (another post World War II painter who, in his last few years, became Lebenstein's friend). In an interview with Art & Business magazine, Lebenstein comments on his visit to Poland: "I was alone in a room for several weeks and decided to return to Paris." In 1971, he became a French citizen.

In 1972, Lebenstein completed a series of stained-glass windows inspired by the Apoc-alypse. This was a project commissioned by Reverend Józef Sadzik, the founder of the Pallotian Centre du Dialogue in Paris. With renewed vigor for his work, he became friends with Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, a member of Kultura editorial board and a famous Polish immigrant writer, who first described Russian camps in Siberia.

Between 1973 and 1975, Lebenstien began a series of notable gouache illustrations including books of poetry by Eugenio Montale and George Orwell's Animal Farm. Lebenstein also illustrated The Book of Job (1979), Apocalypse (1986) and Genesis (1996) all of which were translated by Czesław Miłosz. Other illustration projects included Rytmy albo wiersze polskie by the Polish Renaissance poet Mikołaj Sęp-Szarzyński (1996) and Uwagi by another baroque poet, Reverend Józef Baka (2000).

In 1983, the artist completed scenery designs and costumes for August Strindberg's play The Dance of Death for the Théatre Royal du Parc in Brussels. In 1987, he was granted the prestigious Jan Cybis Award in Poland and, in 1991, made a trip to Berlin where the Great Pergamum Altar of Zeus inspired him. Lebenstein was decorated with the Grand Cross with the Star of the Order of Poland's Revival and honored with the Award of the Minister of Culture and Art. His exhibition "Etapy" ("Stages"), was arranged by Piotr Kłoczowski, and toured the Polish towns of Lublin, Kraków, Oliwa, Poznań, and Szczecin. During his visit to Poland for this event, Lebenstein died and was interred at the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw. That tour of Lebenstein's paintings started and finished in two Polish Institutes - in Paris in 1998 and in Rome in 2000. The Italian venue of "Stages" was the first posthumous exhibition of the painter's oeuvre.

Lebenstein's earliest works were landscapes from Rembertów (in the vicinity of Warsaw), scenes from Warsaw workmen's quarter of Wola, and lanes from the Tarczyńska street area. Around 1955, he conceptualized a powerful geometric construction in the human figures he created. These figures were drawn on graph paper in the confined surroundings of an interior or a landscape in which they often seemed to consume the source of emanating light. At first, they were vaguely related to human shapes but soon became transformed into supernatural, autonomous creations formed around a vertical axis. It was as if they had been spread on the surface of the paper and then later depicted on his canvases. Lebenstein named these works, "axial figures" (sometimes also called "figures on the axis") during a conversation with Miron Białoszewski, a poet and a co-creator of the experimental Theatre on Tarczyńska.

Krzysztof Pomian noted that the painter's interpretation of symmetry as well as a forceful tension between verticals and horizontals played an important role in the organizational composition of his pictures and their symbolism (see Pomian 1985). In the early 1960s, his totemic axial figures were transformed into frozen and motionless beasts, shaped in semi-relief, and rendered in thick impasto. The beasts were not real but gave the impression of being biologically convincing. This metamorphosis also concerned the structure of the composition in which a horizontal motif would dominate. Sometimes enriched with glaze, a geometric and almost abstract character, distinctive through contrast of colors or contour, turned into an organic form and slowly emerged from the application of coarse and organically irregular painting matter. The pictures of these archetypal creatures are often characterized by an almost monochromatic structure, dominated by tones of bronze, gold, and sometimes, desaturated grays and beiges.

In the mid-sixties, "human fauna" replaced this prehistoric "bestiary". Strange, vague looking figures appeared with heads of ancient gods – Egyptian or Assyrian. In their surroundings, creatures were mythologized in their representation as sphinxes, fauns or the Minotaur. Perhaps the most important figure organizing the semantic appeal of these paintings is a woman, the heroine of Intimate Diary – from notes begun by Lebenstein in 1960. Her symbolic connotations range from The Babylon Harlot (used in illustrations for Apocalypse) to a Parisian prostitute. Vitality is here but always linked with decay. The most beautiful and seductive body is marked with traces of decay and disintegration. The artist creates a world of the bitter grotesque; using deep brown, crimson and green hues along with subdued tones of black. The world he creates in these paintings is shown in dramatic expressionistic forms and content.

Returning to painting in gouaches in the 1970s, Lebenstein depicts scenes of a courtroom, cinema or interiors of public houses (a series he titled Sweety Bar). Space in these works is organized by clear divisions of surfaces in the background. Among the silhouettes he created, Death appears in the forefront. Humanlike creatures have beaks, whiskers, muzzles and other animalistic traits. Time seems to have stopped in the silent meetings of these creatures as carnality becomes the painter's focus. His subjects exist between Eros and Thanatos: a clash of sensuality against a theme of degraded femininity shaped upon a skeletal form. This carnality can be associated with Hans Bellmer's obsessive visions of smooth contours emphasized by graphic sophistication. Shining bright spots in the pictures imitate light here and there, and a repertoire of forms subtly suggests the erotic context.

Of the almost 70 one-man shows of Lebenstein's work, the most important took place in Poland: Warsaw (1956, 1958, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1992); Wrocław (1973 and 1977); Lublin (1988), and Kraków (1977, 1990). Other major showings of his paintings were held in Paris (1959, 1961, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1974, 1975, 1985, 1990); New York City (1962, 1972, 1975); Ithaca, New York (1962); Chicago (1973, 1999); as well as Milan, Rome, Turin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Berlin and Oslo.

Apart from the Young Artists Biennial in Paris, the painter took part in numerous group exhibitions that included the Biennial of Young Painters in Brussels (1957), Documenta II in Kassel (1959), Biennial of Art in Sao Paulo (1959), International Art Exhibitions in Pittsburgh (1961, 1964, 1967), La Figure Humaine in Paris (1967), International Exhibitions of Drawings in Rijeka (former Yugoslavia; 1968, 1970, 1974). A number of Polish art exhibitions were arranged where his work was seen in far-flung cities - from Brussels to Tokyo. In Poland his paintings were displayed at the Arsenal in Warsaw (1955), at two other exhibitions of modern art in Warsaw (1957, 1958), and at the Winter Exhibition of Pictorial Art in Radom (1953, 1956, 1958).

-- Artur Tanikowski

Works in the collection: