Alfred Lenica, MORNING OF HOPE, ca. 1949

29.5 x 20.5 cm - gouache, watercolor, paper 29.5 x 20.5 cm (in light passe- partout)

Signed p.d.: Lenica

Image described and reproduced:

- Bożena Kowalska, Lenica - Artist of Many Ways, [in:] Alfred Lenica. Painting, Arsenal City Gallery, Poznan 2002, p. 72.

Extremely important, because truly pioneering, was the stage of the artist's search in 1948-1950, when - on his own - he discovered Tashism. Simultaneously with Jackson Pollock. After all, Pollock's first groundbreaking works in the new technique, combining abstraction with expressionism, date back to 1947. Thus, it is almost the same time and analogous direction of exploration, which independently brought these two, so far apart artists to the same result. (...) "The source of my painting," Pollock wrote, "is the Unconscious. I approach painting in the same way I approach drawing, i.e., directly, without preparatory studies... When I paint I don't notice what is happening, only later do I notice what I have done." Alfred Lenica almost said the same thing in an interview, "In a sense, one paints automatically (...) the important thing is this subconscious current. (...)

There is no doubt that in both artists compared here, the provenance of Surrealism and Expressionism was the same. It is not possible today, and perhaps not very sensible, to imagine how Lenica's Tasist concept would have developed if the artist had been free to continue it, without losing four years of Socialist Realist retreat from his explorations. (Bożena Kowalska, Lenica - Artist of Many Ways...)

♣ to the auctioned price, in addition to other costs, will be added a fee resulting from the right of the artist and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Law of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite)

Alfred Lenica (Pabianice 1899 - Warsaw 1977) studied drawing and painting privately in the studios of Artur Hannytkiewicz and Piotr Kubowicz in Poznań (1925-1928). In the 1930s he painted figurative paintings, referring in style to Cubism. A little later he succumbed to the influence of Surrealism, which, leaving aside the years of Socialist Realism, would become his most serious area of painterly exploration. Since the mid-1940s, he maintained regular contacts with the circle of the "Cracow Group" and was friends with Jerzy Kujawski. After moving to Poznan, in 1947 he became a co-founder of the avant-garde group "4F+R" (paint, form, fantasy, texture + realism). He is the author of the first Polish Tasist painting (Paints in Motion, 1949, tempera). During the period of Socialist Realism, he joined the mainstream of official art, working simultaneously as an organizer of artistic life, president of the Poznañ District of ZPAP (1948-1950) and at the same time head of the Visual Arts Studio there. At the end of the 1950s, he moved to War-szawa and also here, until 1969, held managerial positions in ZPAP. In the second half of the 1950s, he again - after the experiments of the 1940s - practiced informel, painting eagerly using the dripping technique. Around 1958, he developed an individual, distinctive style of swirling, colorful, sometimes calligraphic forms that dynamically filled the fields of paintings. He created them using a technique akin to surrealist decalcomania. This style became the artist's trademark for the rest of his life. In his paintings he did not shy away from shapes referring to natural forms (his painting was called "biological"), and in the 1970s he sometimes included figural motifs in his compositions. The artist's retrospective exhibition was held at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw in 1974.