Leon Chwistek (1884-1944), FISHERS, 1913

oil/canvas, 45 x 73.3 cm
signed p.d.: Leon Chwistek / [Fuent]arabia 1913

The early work of Leon Chwistek, a member of the "Formists" group, is little preserved. He studied from 1902 at the Jagiellonian University, receiving a doctorate in philosophy in 1906. At the same time, around 1903-1904, he studied as a free student in Jozef Mehoffer's studio at the Krakow academy. He stayed in Paris around 1905 and from late autumn 1912 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

In Paris, he took drawing lessons at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There he met Pablo Picasso and became friends with Chilean painter of Spanish origin Manuel Ortiz de Zarate. He entered the circle of the Polish art colony. He had close contacts with Louis Marcoussis and his wife Alicja Halicka, Moses Kisling, Leopold Gottlieb, Leopold Zborowski, Chaim Soutin and critics Adolf Basler and Jerzy Waldemar Jarociński (Waldemar George), among others.

In this environment he became acquainted with Cubism. From 1912 or 1913 comes a Cubist portrait drawing, included in the letter - the only trace of the artist's interest in this direction at the time. Closer to Chwistek, however, was Post-Impressionism. Few paintings have survived from the artist's work at the time. It is known that in 1913 - perhaps in the company of Ortiz de Zarate - he stayed in Fuenterrabia, a town on the Spanish coast (Basque Country). At that time he painted (according to the inventory attached to the artist's monograph by Prof. Karol Estreicher, published in Krakow in 1971, p. 382): "Spanish Landscape," "Market and Castle in Fuentearabia" (lost), "Bay of Fuentearabia"/"Sea from the terrace of the castle" (in 1971 owned by the sister of the artist's wife, Irena of Steinhaus Zglińska; repr. in the monograph, fig. 27).

From the same year as the presented composition comes a painting painted in the nearby town of San Sebastián - "Boys from San Sebastián" (1913, oil/canvas, 30 x 39 cm), kept at the National Museum in Wroclaw.

The offered painting depicts two seated men wearing berets - the older one in a blue jacket on the right and the younger one with a mustache in a brown jacket and a white scarf around his neck. A neutral background could be the wall of the house. In the list of Chwistek's works given by Estreicher, there is a painting "Fishermen" under the year 1913 (owned in 1971 by Tadeusz Stożek in Kedzierzyn, son of the artist's sister Emilianna of Chwistek Stożek, wife of Prof. Włodzimierz Stożek). The place where the painting was made - Fuenterrabia - makes it possible to connect it with the indicated title "Fishermen".

The painting is a valuable discovery. It was exhibited neither at Chwistek's monographic exhibition at TPSP in Krakow in 1971, nor at the "Formists" exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw (catalog published in 1998). Its reproduction has probably never been published.

Its artistic form derives from post-impressionism. Chwistek-possibly as a result of his acquaintance with Ortiz de Zarate-created a new realist form, strong in expression. Against the background of Polish painting of the time, the painting is a prominent, gallery-quality object.