Zawado (1891-1982) Still Life In Front Of A Landscape

Jan Waclaw Zawadowski dit Zawado (1891-1982) Still life in front of a landscape, watercolour, 40 x 50 cm, signed lower right. slight mark and foxing at the top left. Born April 14, 1891, in Volhynia (Russian Poland), it was at the age of 13 that Zawado discovered contemporary French painting with a friend of his father. This produced a great impression on him which gave birth to his vocation as a painter. In 1909 he went to Krakow and began his painting studies at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Jozef Pankiewicz, the representative of Impressionism in Poland. He then left for Paris in 1912. The capital was then a major meeting place for European artists. He became friends with Chagall, Delaunay, Léger, Modigliani and even Bonnard, who were to mark the history of 20th century art and influenced his work. Artistic activity between Madrid, Paris and Aix-en-Provence During the First World War, the Polish painter with an Austrian passport was forced to leave France for Spain and settled in Madrid, which had become an artistic center for refugees. There he met Diaghilev and Stravinsky. Once the war was over, he returned to Paris but it was already the light, the landscapes and the motifs of the South that attracted him. In the 1920s and 1930s, he actively participated in the intellectual and artistic effervescence of the capital, and especially of the community of Montparnasse and the School of Paris of which he was a member. But the painter is already getting into the habit of staying in Aix-en-Provence. Finally, he settled there permanently in 1945, in Orcel, where he would be much visited by the intellectual society of his time. The revival and the last years in Aix Aged around fifty, Zawado is experiencing the most significant period of his artistic career. It represents Provençal life through sumptuous colors and its pictorial design is purified, until it becomes a kind of giant tachism where color and light are exalted. The painter then no longer takes any influence into account – although he is often given the label of “fauve”. He affirmed his own poetic vision of the world and reached a peak in his art that would never falter, writing in 1948: “I will show the world with new eyes, in the way that no one before me has ever seen it. […] I paint the French landscape with Polish eyes and soul”. From the 1950s, he participated in the cultural life of Aix-en-Provence where the majority of his exhibitions will now be held. The years 1975 and 1976 were marked by two major exhibitions: a retrospective was dedicated to him at the Palace of Art in Krakow and then at the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York the following year. (Polish Library Exhibition Paris 2018)