Alfred Lenica (1899, Pabianice – 1977, Warsaw), Composition

Provenance
private collection, Poland
DESA Unicum, 2015
private collection, Germany

Biography
Polish painter, father of Jan Lenica and Danuta Konwicka. Father-in-law of Tadeusz Konwicki. He began his studies in 1922 at the Faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Poznań. At the same time, he studied music at the Music Conservatory. He deepened his interest in painting by studying at the Private Institute of Fine Arts led by Adam Hannytkiewicz. In the 1930s, Alfred Lenica painted figurative works, primarily still lifes and landscapes, drawing inspiration from Cubism. At the outbreak of the war, the Lenica family was displaced from Poznań and moved to Kraków. The war years marked a turning point in the painter’s career. The Kraków art scene centered around Tadeusz Kantor—and especially his friendship with Jerzy Kujawski—led to a deepening of the painter’s interest in the avant-garde. In 1945, Alfred Lenica returned to Poznań, where he became involved in the art scene. In 1947, he became a co-founder of the avant-garde group 4F+R. After years of experimentation and exploration, Lenica increasingly gravitated toward abstraction and tachism. In 1948, he participated in the First Exhibition of Modern Art in Kraków, organized by Tadeusz Kantor. Alongside his explorations and fascination with abstraction, Alfred Lenica actively participated in the Socialist Realist movement, creating many realistic paintings in the early 1950s. In the first half of the 1950s, during the Socialist Realist period, Lenica suspended his creative experiments, turning instead toward the politically mandated artistic doctrine. Given his political convictions, this marked a return for him to the socially and politically engaged paintings he had already created in the 1930s. During this period, he painted works such as “Young Bierut Among the Workers” (1949), “Pstrowski and Comrades,” “Admission to the Party,” and “Red Poster” (1950). For his own purposes, he also attempted to combine formal experiments with ideologically engaged themes, as in the 1953 work “We’re Losing Our Daily Wages,” in which he employed collage and monotype. By 1955, Alfred Lenica’s painting style had finally crystallized, a style that would remain with him until his death. This style was a fusion of tachisme, surrealism, informel, and dripping. He created large-format oil paintings using a technique he had previously developed (revealing glimpses of color beneath successive layers of paint), which he subsequently refined and expanded upon. Lenica readily used varnishes and industrial paints. He presented a style of abstract painting with surrealist and expressionist undertones. Lenica traveled extensively; at the invitation of the United Nations, he stayed in Geneva at the turn of 1959–60, where he created the mural “The Three Elements” (Water, Fire, and Love) at the organization’s headquarters. He maintained regular contact with the Polish avant-garde art scene, exhibited with the Krakow Group, participated in most of the open-air painting events in Osieki near Koszalin, and took part in the symposium “Art in a Changing World” in 1966 in Puławy.