Hanna Rudzka-Cybis (Cybisowa)
1897 - 1988

While a gymnasium (equivalent to U.S. high school) student in Lublin (1912-1917), Hanna Rudzka also attended a drawing course. From this beginning, she was inspired to further studies under Miłosz Kotarbiński at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1917-1920). In 1920 she began studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków where, in 1923, Ignacy Pieńkowski and Józef Pankiewicz became her tutors.

She met her future husband, Jan Cybis, and made other friends, as well, in Pankiewicz's workshop. They set up what they called, the Paris Committee (Komitet Paryski, or K.P., hence Kapists), to raise funds for painting study trip to Paris, which they realized in 1924. Upon their arrival, a Paris branch of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków was in the process of being created by Józef Pankiewicz. Rudzka-Cybisowa became a close friend of Dorota Berlinerblau-Seydenmann who also joined the group. The Cybises and their friends worked in Paris as well as in the south of France - La Ciotat and Collioure. In 1928 Rudzka-Cybisowa left for Moret-sur-Loing in the vicinity of Fontainbleau in order to pursue plein-air painting.

In 1931, most of the Kapists including the Cybises, returned to Poland where the Cybises spent each summer in a manor house owned by friends, Jan and Helena Mycielski. The house was located in Wiśniowa-on-Wisłok; a village reputed as "the Polish Barbizon". When Rudzka-Cybisowa had her first one-woman show in Paris in 1933, she traveled there and remained for a short period of time. The artist again visited Paris, in 1937 on her way to a visit to Italy. She taught summer courses for teachers (1937-1939) at a high school in Krzemieniec.

During the years of German occupation, the artist lived in Kraków where she set up a Mutual Aid Society at the House of Artists. After the war, she continued to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. She became a professor of the painting faculty and in 1960, was appointed a dean of the Painting Department. She lectured until 1967, in spite of the fact that times were difficult for colorists since social realism had become the dominant painting trend. At the time she was teaching her works had been exhibited in three out of four All-Polish Art Exhibitions, the only official art shows organized by the communist cultural governors.

Together with Eugeniusz Eibisch, Hanna Rudzka-Cybisowa belonged to a group of painters who defended colorism in the post-war Polish artistic life, both in terms of creative attitude and in teaching. As Kapists, she and her husband, Jan Cybis, were the staunchest, if not the most orthodox, in the development of their artistic skills. Rudzka-Cybisowa was shaping her vision on the basis of her on-going contact with the French culture of color as well as with the encouragement of Pankiewicz. Impressionism and the work of Pierre Bonnard, were in accordance with the Kapists artistic belief: "to 'settle' the canvas in an artistic way" while stressing color formation above subject matter. Although she did not avoid painting portraits (she sometimes achieved spectacular results in this matter), like her other friends from Paris and Kraków, it is commonly believed her talent was used to its fullest when exploring "purely artistic" themes such as still life and landscape. Rudzka-Cybisowa cherished with other colorists an opinion that the inherent 'motive' of a painting served as the reason to be given an autonomous artistic form. Thus, the expression of the painting's texture and its chromatic scheme based on contrasting hues, are the most meaningful aspects of the work. Near the end of her life, the artist engaged in value contrast, which had been rejected by the philosophy of the Kapists, by choosing to paint in a broader tonal range.

Her canvases of still life and landscapes are awash in scintillating color, enhanced with selective and precise detail. Her works are frequently compared to those of Jan Cybis, and also to the paintings of another Kapist, Stanisław Szczepański. Rudzka-Cybisowa had a similar view of nature as Szczepański and her work was well described by Krystyna Zwolińska-Malicka in the following way: "Spatial relationships in her paintings, although they resulted from the purposeful transference of three dimensions onto a surface, reflected, indeed, those which exist in nature" (see Wokół kapizmu 1995).

Her first one-woman show was in Paris in 1933, with the next taking place much later in Poznań in 1971. Rudzka-Cybisowa participated actively in Polish cultural life and took part in all the important group shows of the Kapists. These exhibitions included shows at the Galerie Zak in Paris in 1930, displays in Geneve (1931), Warsaw (1931, 1934), Belgrade (1935) and the last group show of the Kapists in Poznań (Salon 35, 1938). Before and after World War II, her works were shown in Lvov (1932) with artists of the group called The New Generation as well as on many other occasions in the country and abroad. Like many other Polish artists, Rudzka-Cybisowa sent her works to be displayed at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh (1938). Other United States showings included group exhibitions of Polish art in New York (1969), Chicago, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Connecticut and Buffalo, New York (1969-1970).

-- Artur Tanikowski

Works in the collection: