Jozef Pankiewicz, MALE PORTRET, 1912

82.0 x 65.5cm - oil, canvas signed p.g.: Pankiewicz 1912

On the upper strip of the stretcher in the middle (chalk): 1P 2070; on the left sticker: A3 Pankiewicz.



Provenance:

The painting comes from the collection of Tom Podel (1938-2011) in Seattle. The collector acquired it from Andrzej Ciechanowiecki (1924-2015). It was a deposit at the Museum in Stalowa Wola. It is currently in a private collection in Warsaw.



The painting has been exhibited and reproduced:

- Discovering Eye. Polish Painting in the Collection of Tom Podl / A Discovering Eye. Polish Painting in the Collection of Tom Podl, The Polish Museum of America, Chicago, Illinois 1993, pp. 54, 55;

- Anna Król, Artur Tanikowski, Colors of Identity. Polish Art from the American Collection of Tom Podl, National Museum in Cracow, Cracow 2001, p. 81, cat. no. 25;

- Józef Pankiewicz 1866-1940: Life and Work. To the artist on the 140th anniversary of his birth, catalog compiled by. E. Charazinska, MNW, Warsaw 2006, p. 87, cat. no. 189.



A significant place in Pankiewicz's work is occupied by portraiture. His likenesses of members of the Oderfeld family, among them Portrait of a Girl in a Red Dress, are today counted among the most outstanding achievements of Polish portrait painting. As an artist, Pankiewicz was a fanatic for novelty - he constantly explored changing trends in European art. Hence, the portraits he painted throughout his life are extremely different in terms of form, while they are all united by technical mastery, as exemplified by the presented Male Portrait.



Pankiewicz's outstanding work from 1912 has a very interesting provenance. It comes from the collection of Tom Podel (Podlewski), an American of Polish descent and owner of a famous collection of Polish paintings. Some of the works from this collection were exhibited in Poland in 2001-2003. Among them were three oil canvases by Pankiewicz, including the offered painting. They are listed among the most important works in the Podel collection. The male portrait was also counted by the collector himself among his most outstanding paintings, as we learn from his account, in which he writes about how he built up his collection: Through ties with the Kosciuszko Foundation, I entered into relationships with Zbigniew M. Legutka and Andrzej Ciechanowiecki. Objects acquired from Legutka were priced at an affordable level (...) Ciechanowiecki's higher financial expectations were largely due to his efforts to make Polish painting better appreciated on the international market. Such rarities of my collection as works by Jozef Chelmonski, Olga Boznanska, Jozef Pankiewicz and Jan Stanislawski I still managed to acquire from him for unaffordable sums (A. Król, A. Tanikowski, Colors of Identity..., op. cit. pp. 19-20).

Andrzej Ciechanowiecki was a Polish art historian, a famous art dealer active in Great Britain, a patron of culture and art collector, a philanthropist, and the founder of the Ciechanowiecki Foundation at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

Jozef Pankiewicz (Lublin 1866 - Marseille 1940) painter, printmaker, educator; in 1884-1885 he was a pupil of Wojciech Gerson and Aleksander Kaminski at the Warsaw Drawing Class. He then studied for a year at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Upon his return, he lived in Warsaw. At that time he painted realistic genre scenes and also did illustrations for Warsaw magazines. In 1889, together with Władysław Podkowiński, he went to Paris and there succumbed to his fascination with Impressionism. At the end of the century, he created nocturnes and symbolic compositions. In the following years he traveled extensively in Europe painting still lifes, landscapes and portraits inspired by Japanese art and the paintings of Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse. He spent the years 1914-1919 in Spain. From 1906 he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, and from 1925 he headed the Paris branch of the academy, established under his patronage. He was a teacher of many painter-colorists from the so-called Capist group. During this period he lived permanently in Paris, and spent the summer months in the south of France. He was involved in printmaking - his works are among the most outstanding achievements in this field of Polish art. In 2006, the National Museum in Warsaw held a major exhibition "Józef Pankiewicz. Life and Work", accompanied by an extensive catalog, which is a superbly researched, comprehensive monograph of the artist and his work.