Description
Watercolor, paper; 14 x 9.5 cm
On the reverse of the stamp: NIKIFOR - PAINTER | KRYNICA
Provenance: from the collection of Mateusz Grabowski
Asking price 5000
Estimate 7000 - 8000
◙ droit de suite
NIKIFOR KRYNICKI
1895 - 1968
Naive painter Nikifor , Lemko from Krynica Village. The artist's real name was probably Epifaniusz Drowniak, but the painter himself signed his paintings with the words "NIKIFOR THE PAINTER-NIKIFOR THE ARTIST" and under this name he went down forever in the history of Polish and world art. Nikifor suffered from a hereditary speech defect, which limited his contact with the outside world from childhood. Painting became a better form of communication for him.Before Nikifor's paintings hung in famous art galleries and found their way into museum and private collections, for decades almost no one in Krynica paid attention to the street painter wandering around the resort every day with a wooden suitcase housing his workshop. He would set up his "portable studio" in places where tourists and visitors walked most often, putting up paintings for sale as "Souvenirs from Krynica." However, not many people decided to buy them at the time. There were also those who considered him a mere beggar, and looked at the colorful pictures as worthless scribbles.
Nikifor's "little homeland" was Lemkivshchyna, whose landscapes he expressed in his paintings in a very personal way. This was pointed out by Associate Professor Jerzy Zanozinski, writing about Nikifor's paintings in the catalog for an exhibition at Warsaw's "Zachęta" in 1967: (...) exposed are landscapes of Krynica or rather Podkrynica with motifs of checkered forests, checkerboard fields, tracks and railroad stations, painted partly before the war and partly during the occupation. Landscapes of this type, executed by Nikifor with various variations and later, and in fact up to the present day, established his fame as the artist who first noticed and in an extremely evocative way recorded the distinct beauty of the Poprad valley landscape.
Nikifor's works are arranged in characteristic thematic cycles. The paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, depicting Beskid landscapes with stations, are considered the most valuable in artistic terms. Individual works depict railroad stations along the Krynica-Tarnów line, and further east, towards Lviv. Other exquisite series of paintings include offices and dollar factories, Krynica villas and boarding houses, Orthodox churches and synagogues, kitchen interiors, saints, portraits of visitors and friends, military scenes. Among the very interesting works are also self-portraits, in which Nikifor depicts himself as an artist at work, often under a colorful umbrella, an elegant man in a black suit or even as a saint or bishop. In the self-portraits, Nikifor is always someone extraordinary, more important than other people because of his special role as an artist-painter in society.
Nikifor's fascination was architecture. Sometimes he additionally marked the purpose of objects with explicit symbols, for example, he placed a man smoking a cigarette on the roof of a tobacco factory. The series of paintings described as fantasy architectures, painted in the interwar period, are among the most interesting in the artist's work. Nikifor used school watercolors and crayons, as he had no money to buy good paints, brushes and pencils. He painted on such paper as fell into his hands, sometimes literally on scrap paper. Good material for a painting for Nikifor were old school notebooks, posters, court prints, colored paper for cut-outs, tracing paper, wrapping paper, cardboard and even cigarette boxes. He began his work by making a sketch in pencil, then applied paint, signed the painting in his own way, and crowned the work by affixing a special seal on the reverse side (he had a dozen of them). It is estimated that the artist painted tens of thousands of paintings, most of which were destroyed.
