pastel, ink / cream paper
64 × 48.5 cm (in light of passe-partout)
signed and dated p.d.: Lebenstein 70
"All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others." *
A year after graduating from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Jan Lebenstein took part in the National Exhibition of Young Visual Arts "Against War - Against Fascism" (1955). His first international success came as early as 1959 - painted with thickly laid and variously worked paint, the "axial figures" of the less than 30-year-old Lebenstein won the Grand Prix at the First International Biennale of the Young in Paris. The award enabled him to stay in Paris for a year, and the artist settled permanently in France shortly thereafter.
Since the 1960s, animal forms in Lebenstein's art have slowly replaced the artist's characteristic human figure motif, which had dominated his work since 1954. The inspiration for the series of drawings, gouaches and pastels created at the time was to be the nightlife of Paris. The featured work titled. "Bath," on the one hand, is close to his "Carnets intimes," for example, and on the other hand, with its seated dark figure of a half-animal, half-man, it fits into the phantasmagoric works of the "Bestiary" series. The motif of bathing evokes the biblical tale of Susanna and the old men or the mythological story of Actaeon, the hunter from Thebes, who was transformed into a deer for peeping at Artemis and her nymphs while bathing, and then ripped apart by his own dogs.
In 1974 Lebenstein worked on a series of lithographs titled "Animal Farm. To the memory of George Orwell," and best known for the 1990 Krakow edition of Animal Farm. One of the Orwell illustrations repeats the composition of the pastel presented here. The figures in the lithograph, for a change, present more feminine shapes, though not devoid of Lebenstein's characteristic deformity.
* G. Orwell, Animal Farm, il. J. Lebenstein, Krakow 1990, p. 89.
