Rajmund Kanelba (1897, Warsaw – 1960, London), Girl with Flowers

oil on canvas, 76.5 × 64 cm
signed lower left: “kanelba”
inscribed on the reverse: GIRL WITH FLOWERS/BY/KANELBA/(799 PARK AV. N.Y.C)

“[...] Kanelba belongs to the ‘young’ artists of this special category [painters reaching creative maturity in Paris]—he arrived from Poland with the clear intention of defending his creative independence and never wavered from this principle for a moment. He upholds two fundamental elements of his art: his way of perceiving Reality and his style. This is no easy task, especially in Paris, where the love of static harmony—characteristic of the Latin spirit and expressed in the precise line of drawing—does not harmonize with the dynamism, in a certain sense, romantic, perpetually quivering contour that lies at the foundation of Kanelba’s entire body of work. Breaking through the mass of air—formless and dense—he distinguishes three colorful dimensions of Reality. To his credit, he defends this vision of Reality—with a fluid “epidermis” but a solid skeleton—by putting forward compelling arguments that he owes to the beautiful colors of his palette. No, this bears no resemblance to the Impressionists’ concept—Kanelba is not interested in the outward appearance of the forms he depicts, nor in their visual qualities. He composes his paintings in a completely different way: he focuses on color and light, on the inner “meaning of the form created by a mass of air, which emphasizes its plasticity.”
Z. St. Klingsland, “La peinture de Kanelba,” *Pologne Litteraire* 1932, no. 65–66, p. 4