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Olga Boznańska
Olga Boznańska achieved a lofty position in
the European art world already during her lifetime.
She was born and raised in Kraków in a Polish-French
family. She studied in Munich and later lived in Paris,
from where she visited her native country and sent
paintings for exhibitions.
She developed a highly individual formula for
painting, placing very high demands on herself,
continually developing her hand and eye, treating
art seriously and seeing it as the sole purpose of
her life. She specialized in portraits, although in
the Munich period she also created genre scenes,
and in the ensuing years, also views from the window
of her studio, interiors and exquisite still lifes.
She painted portraits of adults and children, presenting
the aristocracy, the intellectual and artistic elites, but
also people from her immediate environment. She
didn’t idealize her models. She depicted sensitive
and thinking physiognomies, but was also able to
emphasize the expression of pride, complacency or
thoughtlessness. The careful psychological analysis
was accompanied by a masterful rendering of
the facial features, posture and hand gestures, which
the artist treated as an element at times saying more
(or something else) than the facial expression.
The secret of her painting lies in the combination
of these distinctive characteristics of the model
with a specific understatement of form obtained
through the dispersion of shapes in a vibrating haze
of small patches. On the surface, this technique
resembles the experiments of the Impressionists,
but the paintings of Boznańska are distinguished
from them by a scattered, dim lighting and a limited
range of colours, very rich in nuance, as well as
a peculiar rough texture. She achieved it by painting
with oil paints on a cardboard base, which gave
the effect of a matte surface glowing with colours.
Her understanding of the purpose of art was also
different from that of the Impressionists. She did not
attempt to show a fragment of reality that is changing
under the influence of light, but wanted to explore that
which is timeless, although existing within physical
shapes. She did not strive for an objective account of
reality, and instead presented an extremely subjective
vision, shaped by her own personality, and the passion in
seeking the truth about man and the essence of painting.
Urszula Makowska, PhD
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences