Józef Tadeusz (Tadé) Makowski
1882 - 1932

From 1902 to 1906, Tadeusz Makowski studied classical and Polish philology at the Philosophical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. During 1903-1908, he also studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts in the studios of Józef Unierzyski, Jan Stanisławski (painting) and Józef Mehoffer (drawing). He was awarded several prizes while studying graduated with a silver medal and the Rector's letter of recommendation. He was a puppet-maker for the cabaret in Kraków known as "The Green Balloon." From 1907 to 1912, he traveled to Italy and the Ukraine. At the end of 1908, availing himself of a scholarship awarded in Lvov, he went to Paris via Munich to continue his artistic education for one year. The studio he moved into at that time became his home for the rest of his life.

He befriended Henri Le Fauconnier, whose atelier in 1910 was the meeting place for a group called "the Montparnasse Cubists." Its members included Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Aleksander Achipenko, the Dutch painters Piet Mondrian and Conrad Kickert and the writers and critics Guillaume Apollinaire, Jules Romain, René Arcos, Paul Castiaux, Georges Duhamel, and Alexandre Mercereau. In 1913, he made the first of several successive trips to Brittany, during which he visited the Russian painter Serge Charchoune. He maintained the closest connections with several Poles living in France: Zygmunt Lubicz-Zaleski, a poet and critic highly regarded in the Polish community in Paris (Makowski designed the graphic art for a collection of his poems), the poet Józef Ruffer, Kazimierz Młodzianowski, Edward Wittig, Wacław Wąsowicz, Tytus Czyżewski, Mojżesz Kisling and Eugeniusz Zak. He actively participated in the life of the Polish colony, chairing the Society of Polish Artists in Paris. He was a close friend of Maria Mickiewiczówna, the granddaughter of Adam Mickiewicz. The house of her father, Władysław, became a gathering place for Makowski and his Polish colleagues: Franciszek Black, Bolesław Bałzukiewicz, Marcin Samlicki and Vlastimil Hofman.

Since he was an Austrian subject, Makowski had to leave Paris at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He went to Doëlan in Brittany, where he stayed at Władysław Ślewiński's house. He then moved to Le Pouldu but the following year returned to Paris, where he became engaged in doll making as part of the charitable activities that were organized to help Polish artists during wartime. For five consecutive years, beginning in 1918, he spent his summers at Espaly in Auvergne. In 1921 he traveled with the sculptor Edward Wittig to the Netherlands in connection with an exhibition of Polish art in Amsterdam. During 1926-1927 he stayed at Breuilpont in Normandy, where a cycle of important landscapes was created. In 1930, he made trips to St.-Paul near Vence. In the late 1920s, he befriended the critic Louis Léon-Martin and the art-dealer Jean Aron.

Makowski's works from his Krakovian period reveal influences of the art of his two eminent, academic teachers. Following Jan Stanisławski, the young painter practiced plen-air painting with great sensitivity to color. The forms were shaped by a flexible and curling contour line, as in Józef Mehoffer's works. In Makowski's youthful drawings and sketches, one can detect two predilections for folk art and for the theatre, which he would develop in his mature oeuvre.

His first Parisian paintings show a strong fascination with the works of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, an artist frequently admired by the Polish newcomers on the Seine. As early as 1911, Makowski met Le Fauconnier and other Cubists. Under their influence, his still lifes and Breton and Parisian landscapes acquired a clearly geometric construction, while still preserving three-dimensional depth and a schematic chiaroscuro. It has been said that Makowski was not a Cubist in that he did not create a new pictorial structure independent of nature; instead, he merely reduced an observed object to a simplified, block-like shape. Makowski claimed, in fact, "Cubism was needed to strengthen form after Impressionism."

In his canvases after mid-1913, one can see an obvious return to the object observed from life and painted, after old masters, with a craftsman's respect for its material shine. Władysława Jaworska noted: his feeling for the folk spirit led him to discover three traits of extreme importance for his mature oeuvre - simplicity, charm and lyricism. In addition to landscapes, around 1920 his works became focused in representations of children whose world the artist entered with great respect and psychological understanding. Makowski invented a formula to assimilate the human figure into a wooden puppet. His development evidenced by a large dose of conscious naiveté, with clearly poetic implications, strengthened with passing years by an intense stylization was also characteristic of other artists of the School of Paris. The scenery of a landscape or interior that surrounds his main figures is also based on arbitrariness and simplification, very much folk in spirit.

In the series dubbed Landscapes from a Small Town (see Jaworska I 1999), painted around 1927 at the Norman town of Breuilpont, the artist continued to refer to a direct observation of nature, captured painterly in a gamut of misty-romantic pearly-pinky-brown tones. With the last painting of this cycle he began to move away from images of reality towards an imaginary vision that was highly emotional and expressive, intensified by color contrasts of browns, whites, oranges and yellow tones. This development is linked to the final shaping of the artist's mature style, visualized in arranged carnival, theatrical or musical scenes with figures of children. These young heroes of Makowski's paintings were more and more frequently "disguised" with masks on their faces. His representations of children are full of humor and kindness. In the scenes with adults, painted by Makowski in his last years, where the grotesque has lost its mild character, the artist creates images with musical bands, views of country interiors and inns, and, finally, a peculiar gallery of professional types: from a shopkeeper to a "sabot-sculptor." The expression of the paintings from the 1930s is enhanced by a peculiarly treated light that pours out onto objects (sometimes even screening them off) with thick streaks of contrasting flames. Makowski's artistic program realized in his last works was based on an exact transposition of form, color and light.

The artist, painting mainly in oils, also dealt with watercolors, drawing and graphic art, not infrequently elaborating in those techniques some motifs from his large-scale pictures. He occupied himself with illustrations to Alain Fournier's famous initiatory novel Le Grand Meaulnes, though the best known and successful have been his woodcuts illustrating Tytus Czyżewski's Pastorałki (Paris 1925).

Makowski's oeuvre is sometimes included in the circle of the School of Paris and its expressionistic faction. As well, his expression is linked with a post-cubist return to the object which places the painter's works in the context of the German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) or, wider, of Magical Realism. The majority of critics, however, have agreed with the artist's friend, Marcel Gromaire, that his original creativity is rooted in Polish folk art.

Among the artist's sketches preserved in manuscript the most important ones are his Remarks on Art and his Memoirs - the diary kept between 1912 and 1931 - which was published in Poland in 1961.

In Poland, the artist's works were exhibited in Kraków (1907, 1908, 1912), Warsaw (1907, 1908, 1917, 1924) and Lvov (1924). Abroad, Makowski took part in exhibitions of Polish art in Barcelona (1912), Paris (1914, 1929, 1930), Vienna and Budapest (both in 1928). In Paris, having made his debut at the Salons in 1912, the artist also exhibited in numerous galleries. The most notable were a series of exhibitions with a group of five other artists that took place at both the gallery "La Licorne" and Berthe Weill. From 1923 to 1927, Makowski showed his works at these two galleries every year, together with his friends Marcel Gromair (the founder of this enterprise), Pierre Dubreuil, Edouard Goerg, Per Krohg and Jules Pascin. His career outside Paris was launched in 1913, when Conrad Kickert invited him to participate in an exhibition of avant-garde artists called Moderne Kunstkring at the Municipal Museum in Amsterdam.

Makowski's one-man shows took place in Paris at the Galerie Berthe Weill (1927, 1928). The Societé des Amis de Tadé Makowski (The Society of Friends of Tadé Makowski), founded after his death, organized retrospective exhibitions of his paintings at the Salon des Indépendents (1933), Jean Castel Gallery (1935) and the Venice Biennale (1936). In 1936 the artist's paintings were shown at Instytut Propagandy Sztuki (The Institute of Art Propaganda) in Warsaw and at the Vienna Secession.

-- Artur Tanikowski

Works in the collection: