Zygmunt Józef Menkes
1896 - 1986

Beginning in 1912, Menkes attended the School of Industry in Lvov where Kazimierz Sichulski taught courses in drawing and decorative painting. Sichulski was the person who inspired Menkes to capture the character and the lives of the Hutzuls, mountain people of the high Carpathians in Poland, Ruthenia and Slovakia, in his early paintings. During World War I, Menkes was engaged in the painting and renovation of works in churches located in the vicinity of Lvov. After the war, he took an active part in the town's artistic life, particularly by helping to arrange exhibitions of the Society of Jewish Art Admirers. Through his activities, Menkes made close friends with Henryk Langerman and Fryderyk Kleinman, who were painters and caricaturists. He went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1919-1922), where he was tutored by Wojciech Weiss. While studying in Kraków, the artist often visited Lvov. In 1922, Menkes left for Berlin to study at the private atelier of a Ukrainian sculptor, Alexander Archipenko. There he made friends with three future members of The Group of Four – Alfred Aberdam, Joachim Weingart, and Leon Weissberg – as well as Artur Nacht-Samborski and Ludwik Lille. All were active in Lvov's art community. When he arrived in Paris for the first time in 1923, accompanied by Aberdam, he became a neighbor of Eugene Zak and Marc Chagall. Unable to earn a living in France, however, he returned to Lvov after a year. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Paris where he befriended Chaim Soutine, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Utrillo. In 1925, the artist spent six months in Sanary-sur-Mer in the south of France, where he painted several canvases. In late 1925 and during 1926, the paintings of Menkes and other members of the ephemerally named Group of Four were exhibited in Jan Śliwiński's gallery "Au Sacre du Printemps". A Greek millionaire, Nico Mazaraki, became the patron of the Polish artist, contributing a monthly stipend to Menkes in exchange for his artistic production. The painter married a Sorbonne student and future fashion designer, Stanisława (Stasia) Weiss. She often posed for Parisian artists including her husband and his Polish friends, Leopold Gottlieb and Rajmund Kanelba. After returning from a trip to Spain where he and Artur Nacht-Samborski were involved in plein-air painting, Menkes was offered an exhibition in New York City in the late 1930s. He found America to his liking and decided to make a home in the States. Nevertheless, prior to the outbreak of World War II the artist returned to Paris three more times where he visited his friends and enjoyed the city's vibrant cultural life. Menkes’ art became well known and greatly appreciated by Americans. In New York, Menkes became involved with the Associated American Artists Gallery and was the recipient of a number of prestigious awards. His paintings were purchased by important museums and, in 1967, he was granted an award by the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation of New York. Among his friends in the Polish artistic and intellectual elite in America were Jan Lechon and Arthur Rubinstein. Others he came to know in America's cultural world included such acknowledged painters as Marsden Hartley and Raphael Soyer. The artist remained professionally active his entire life until his death at the age of ninety. Menkes' artistic development began with his participation in the Jewish artistic community in Lvov. Those early works consisted of portraits of Jewish men, women and children as well as scenes and landscapes of Lvov. He also copied works of Jewish painters of previous generations. His art was already characterized by expressionistic bold brushwork and strong composition, which were later intensified, likely due to the painter's contacts with a group of Formists from Kraków. His works of that early period, presented a bright and contrastive palette that was influenced by the school of Jan Stanisławski as well as by Post-Impressionists. His stay in Berlin in the early 1920s was important in terms of the development of his artistic consciousness. There, Menkes was able to experience personal achievements in Expressionism, Cubism and Constructivism. His strong expression of color and interpretation of the traditional portraits and still lifes merged with influences of cubism and pictures of Alexander Archipienko. Menkes acknowledged that he had been briefly fascinated by Lovis Corinth's paintings and, when he was in Paris, was somewhat taken with some of Renoir's works. His stay in Paris, however, as a result of contacts with Zak, Chagall and Soutine, proved most important to the development of his artistic language. Upon his brief return to Lvov, Menkes began a series of paintings of Hutzul subjects that he continued to work on along with his other projects. These works were characterized by a subdued expression and limited coloring. After his encounter with landscapes of southern France and with Parisian museums, however, the artist enriched his palette, strengthened contrasts, saturated tints and used unstructured elements of form to intensify expression. These developments, combined with his great artistic skills and his interest in a variety of subjects, led to a diverse oeuvre complete with fine landscapes of southern France and the brilliantly sun-burned Spanish Ibiza, very sensual still lives and nudes, portraits in coloristically sophisticated interiors and self-portraits in various costumes and poses, and scenes that portrayed the mystically saturated Jewish religious life. In the United States, Menkes was acknowledged mainly as a colorist. The American phase of his late years as a painter was characterized by a simple geometry of composition and stylized silhouettes that lost portrait individuality. His images thus moved closer to becoming a more anonymous artistic symbol - a strengthened "fracturing" of elements - most probably due to the artist's contacts with American abstract expressionism. In terms of categorization within the École de Paris, Menkes's work was defined by "la violence dramatique," the patron of which was Chaim Soutine as noted by Waldemar George. Menkes was an Expressionist no less than his friend Soutine and just as intensely immersed in his work. His two paintings Martyrdom of Warsaw and The Last Station, among others attest to this fact. They are dedicated to Gehenna – the suffering of his Jewish nation and his Polish homeland. Menkes' debut occurred in an exhibition organized by the Society of Jewish Art Admirers in Lvov in 1919. His works were later shown in 1921 and 1922 in several group exhibitions. His first one-man show took place in Lvov in 1922, and his works were also exhibited in collective shows there in 1923. He had a second one-man exhibit in 1930 and also had his works included in group exhibitions in 1932, 1933 and 1935. He was involved with Polish artistic groups such as "Nowa Generacja" and "Zwornik", exhibiting with their members. Menkes had his work displayed in Warsaw in 1931, 1935 and 1938, and in Kraków in 1934. His paintings were also shown in an important exhibition Expressionism in Polish Art organized by the National Museum of Wrocław. The painter's works, together with other Polish art works, were exhibited abroad as well - in Vienna, Budapest (1929), and in Paris. It was in Paris where Menkes' paintings were presented at Salon d'Automne in 1924. His work was later displayed at Salon of Independents, Tuilleries Salon, as well as at the Ecole de Paris exhibition during the Venice Biennial in 1928. His paintings were exhibited on many occasions in the United States: in New York in 1939, 1944 and 1975, a number of times at the National Academy of Design, Detroit (1945), Woodstock, New York (1947), Philadelphia (1945), Washington (1947) and Beverly Hills (1947 and 1949). Apart from those exhibitions organized in Lvov, subsequent one-man shows of the artist's works took place in Paris (1928, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933), Warsaw (1931), Berlin (1930), Philadelphia (1931), New York (1936, 1938, 1941, 1942, 1947, 1949, 1954), and in Washington (1941). -- Artur Tanikowski

Works in the collection: