An Artistic Family

The more than month-long Lenica Festival in Poznań will include exhibitions of works by Alfred Lenica, Jan Lenica and Danuta Lenica-Konwicka, and will feature films, lectures and discussions.

Poznań's National Museum has mounted an exhibition featuring Jan Lenica (pictured), an outstanding graphic artist, essayist, poster artist and animator.

The preparations behind the exhibition have taken many years. It all started in 1988 when, in a letter to Zdzisław Szubert, the curator of the museum exhibition, Jan Lenica, suggested an exhibition titled Lenica-The Father and the Son. After Danuta's death in 1999 the project was expanded to include her works.

Jan Lenica was born in Poznań in 1928. After World War II, the Lenica family returned to their home city and moved into a building near the former Wielkopolska Museum, where a wing of the National Museum's Gallery of Painting and Sculpture can now be found. The present exhibition is displayed here.

Jan Lenica left Poland in 1963 and settled in Paris. From 1986 he lived in Berlin. He explained his decision to leave Poland: "I have never considered myself an emigrant. I am a Polish artist who works abroad. Like many English writers living on the Cte d'Azur, or Americans working in Paris, the French in Greece, and so on. I'm not a national painter, but I would like my works to belong to Polish culture."

In 1994 he prepared a broad selection of works for the exhibition. However, the situation was complicated by the continuous delays in the completion of the new building. In the summer of 2001 Jan Lenica came from Berlin to discuss the arrangements. He died Oct. 5 of that year, before he was able to see the exhibition open.

The exhibition includes all the creative fields that he pursued-posters, satirical drawings, book illustrations, film graphic works, designs of small graphic forms (postage stamps, for example), stage sets and costumes, and animation. The exhibition comprises over 400 works and is accompanied by a book, prepared by the artist's friends Ewa Czerwiakowska and Tomasz Kujawski. It is the first complete Polish monograph on the artist, describing his works, his private life and his travels.

Jan's father, Alfred (1899-1977) currently has three different exhibitions commemorating his work: at the Zamek Culture Center (Retrospective-Part 1, works until the 1950s), the Arsenal City Gallery (Retrospective-Part 2, works by "mature Lenica") and the ABC Gallery (Retrospective-Part 3, watercolor and gouache from the 1940s and works on paper from the 1960s). The 25th anniversary of the artist's death occurs later this year.

The exhibits present the stages in the artistic development of one of the most outstanding Polish artists, from realism, cubism and expressionism, to surrealism (influenced by De Chirico). The artist's prewar works include mainly portraits, still lifes, landscapes and thematic compositions.

After the war, Alfred Lenica became one of the leading representatives of the Polish avant-garde, co-founder and member of the famous Poznań-based 4F+R group (Farba, Forma, Faktura, Fantastyka + Realizm-Paint, Form, Texture, Fantasy + Realism). It was established in October 1947 and its manifesto postulated a rapprochement of visual arts and architecture-"the most social of all arts since it organizes collective space." In this way he entered the circle of modern Polish painters.

Lenica pursued an inventive use of decalcomania, collage and photomontage. Critics praised the allusive and exceptionally bright paintings which were usually imbued with surrealist metaphor.

The festival also includes a display of works by Danuta Lenica-Konwicka (1930-1999), Alfred's daughter and sister of Jan. The Profil Gallery in the Zamek center features about 120 drawings and graphic works from this creator of many excellent book illustrations, including those for books by her husband Tadeusz Konwicki. These cheerful and witty images were created mainly with children in mind. Her pictures of cats, believed by the artist's brother to be her most beautiful work, are perhaps her most well known. Lenica-Konwicka used simple forms and made decorative stylizations so that her images resembled those of children, hence her "spectral" range of pure, bright, pastel colors.

All the exhibitions are accompanied by extensive literature. The Lenica Festival will certainly be among the most interesting artistic projects this year and will allow audiences to get to know an important area of Polish 20th-century art.

Anna Kosowska-Czubaj

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