Authenticity of the painting consulted with Mr. Andrzej Szczepaniak.
Provenance:
The painting was created in 1959 and was purchased by the present owners directly from the artist's studio, together with the second Landscape, which retains a CBWA Branch in Lodz sticker with the date 1959.
In 1950 Jerzy Nowosielski, together with his wife Zofia, moved from Krakow to Lodz and remained in the city for the next 12 years. Here he took a position as artistic director of the State Directorate of Puppet Theaters and was given a studio on the 8th floor of a house at 27 Zachodnia St. From the windows of the studio there was a view of Lodz, which fascinated Nowosielski. At that time, the cityscape was one of the artist's favorite subjects.
Nowosielski's landscapes, however, are not faithful representations of cities. Nowosielski gives them metaphysical qualities. He develops his own characteristic way of shaping space. Decisive, as Krystyna Czerni writes, is the composition of the painting, the organization of the plane according to the network of archetypal forms: triangles, trapezoids, squares. It's as if the whole reality: the earthly and the heavenly, the real and the imagined - had one internal skeleton; a common ordering structure. In landscapes Nowosielski likes shots from above, seen from a bird's eye (or God's eye?): steep, deserted streets, urban neighborhoods cut by streetcar rails, endless frontages of tenements - marked by the rhythm of mysterious blue windows, ajar doors [...]. quoted by Krystyna Czerni, Jerzy Nowosielski, in Great Painters. Their Life, Inspirations and Work, No. 105, p. 14
♣ to the price auctioned, in addition to other costs, a fee will be added, resulting from the right of the artist and his heirs to receive remuneration in accordance with the Law of February 4, 1994 - on Copyright and Related Rights (droit de suite)
Jerzy Nowosielski (Krakow 1923 - Krakow 2011) began his studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Krakow in 1940. In 1942 he stayed for less than a year in the St. John the Baptist Lavra near Lviv. There he studied the art of painting and the history of icons. After returning to Cracow in 1943, he re-established contacts with the circle of the future Cracow Group. After the war, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow under Prof. Eugeniusz Eibisch (1945-1947). At the First Exhibition of Modern Art in Cracow in 1948/49, he showed paintings maintained in the trend of geometric abstraction. During the years of Socialist Realism, he did not exhibit, dealing at the time with stage design and painting of churches and orthodox churches. In 1955 in Lodz he presented his first solo exhibition, in 1956 he participated in the XXVIII Venice Biennale. From 1957 to 1962 he was a teacher at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Lodz, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, where he taught at the Faculty of Painting until his retirement in 1993. In the second half of the 1950s he achieved a distinctive style of nudes, landscapes and figural scenes in interiors, which he owed to his fascination with icons and his experience with sacred painting. In 1976, he took up monumental works anew, producing mural paintings, Stations of the Cross and designs for stained glass windows at the Church of Divine Providence in Wesola near Warsaw (1976-1979). The artist was widely recognized as an authority on art rooted in spiritual values.
Jerzy Nowosielski died on February 21, 2011 in Krakow, Poland.
