Jan LEBENSTEIN (1930-1999), Figure, 1956

watercolor, ink, millimeter paper; 58 x 38 cm;
signed and dated. lower center: LEBENSZTEJN 56 (in pencil);
On the reverse, signed and described in pencil: Lebenstein 1956 / "figure";
Painting before conservation.

He was a graduate of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (diploma in the atelier of Artur Nacht-Samborski). He debuted in 1955 at the National Exhibition of Young Visual Arts "Against War - Against Fascism" at the Warsaw Arsenal. In 1956 Lebenstein became involved with the independent, alternative Theater on Tarczynska Street, run in his own Warsaw apartment by Miron Bialoszewski. The theater was more of a circle of friends than a real drama troupe. In addition to the poet himself, important roles were played by his friends - mainly Ludmila Murawska and Ludwik Hering. Lebenstein had his first solo exhibition at Tarczynska. In 1955-1959 he created "Drawn Figures", then "Hieratic Figures" to finally take the form of the so well-known "Axial Figures". These were compositions (drawing and painting) with centrally placed, vertical silhouettes of extremely simplified (in the drawing version sometimes resembling insect-like creatures) human figures, usually female (Figure dans un interieur, 1956). The precise, detailed or even "anatomical" drawing brought them close to the art of Wols, while the pictorial values (the freedom to operate with almost autonomously treated painting matter, the richness of tones in the usually narrow and seemingly unimpressive color scale) put them almost on a par with the parallel works of Polish artists Zbigniew Tymoszewski and Rajmund Ziemski. The originality of this personal formula of figurative painting, saturated with existential fears, was appreciated by French critics, who in
1959 awarded Lebenstein the Grand Prix at the 1st International Biennale of the Young in Paris. (source: culture.pl)