Henryk Berlewi, Geometric Figures, 1920s.

charcoal, crayon, paper, 26 x 18.5 cm (in light of passe-partout) on the reverse stamp: ATELIER BERLEWI/Etude CHAPELLE PERRIN FROMANTIN VERSAILLES

provenance: Mes Chapelle, Perrin, Fromentin, Versailles, February 17, 1974; Crait + Müller, Paris; private collection, Lodz.

Henryk Berlewi (1894 Warsaw - 1967 Paris) - graduated from the Warsaw School of Fine Arts. He continued his education successively at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In 1913 he returned to Poland and took up a three-year course of study at the Warsaw Drawing School under Jan Kauzik. Initially, his art was dominated by motifs derived from Jewish culture. An important and limiting date in Berlewie's art was 1922, when he went to Berlin, where contact with the theories of Constructivism and Suprematism had a profound influence on his artistic views. He was closely associated with El Lissitzki, but also had the opportunity to meet Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter and Theo van Doesburg. During his stay in Germany, he formulated the principle of mechanofacture (1923), which was promulgated in Poland in 1924. The basic principle of this theory was the rejection of spatial illusion in painting in favor of emphasizing the two-dimensionality of the canvas.
Henryk Berlewi is the main representative of avant-garde geometric abstraction in Poland. During this period, the artist limited the color range in his rhythmic and geometric compositions to black, white and red. He was a member of the Cubist, Constructivist and Suprematist Group "Blok" (1924-1926). In 1928 he participated in the Warsaw Salon of Modernists. In the same year he went to Paris where he lived for the rest of his life. At this time, his art shows a move away from avant-garde aesthetics in favor of portrait art. He also painted nudes. He returned to the principles of mechanofacialism in the second half of the 1950s, re-entering the abstract art trend.