Description
Watercolor, paper; 54 x 47 cm (w/light p-p)
Signed l.d.: Jerzy Stajuda 86; l.d.: 1511
Asking price 1500
Estimate 3000 - 4000
◙ droit de suite
Auction 212, 14.05.2022
Jerzy STAJUDA
1936 Falenica - 1992 Warsaw
Studied at the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology from 1952 to 1959. He made his debut as a painter with a solo exhibition in 1957. At the same time he also began writing reviews and columns about art for the press, which became his main occupation for many years. His longest collaboration was with "Współczesność" (1959-1967), and he also published in "Przeglad Artystyczny", "Polska", "Miesięcznik Literacki", "Ty i Ja", "Więzi" and others. He achieved the position of a leading critic of the 1950s and 1960s, his opinions and choices weighing on the image of Polish art of those years to this day (among other things, he had a significant part in promoting the talent of Wladyslaw Hasior). Until 1968, i.e., until he broke with the regular practice of criticism (influenced by changes in the editorial board of Contemporary Art and the situation in the country after March 1968), Stajuda painted, so to speak, in hiding. He believed that a critic should not exhibit. Nevertheless, from the late 1950s, paintings, watercolors and drawings were created, in which the artist gradually came to his own expression in art. He created abstract compositions, in the type of lyrical informel, with a refined painterly form and subdued colors, accented by white clearances to the ground or paper ground appearing in the compositions - in which analysts of his painting see a symbol of emptiness. The apogee of his mature work came in the late 1970s and the following decade. At that time he created dozens of paintings (mostly scattered in public and private collections at home and abroad) and thousands of compositions on papers of various formats (these, in turn, are mostly the property of his family, deposited in the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw). Writing and practicing painting did not exhaust Stajuda's list of interests. Toward the end of his life, he taught drawing at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1990-1992). He was also an amateur musician with wide connections in the music community, moreover, for many years his home was a social meeting place for artists of various fields of art and science.
