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- Title
Rzeźby Marka Szwarca w latach 1910-1958: neoklasycyzm - ekspresjonizm - synteza.
- Authors
Jedlińska, Eleonora
- Abstract
Marek Szwarc was born in Zgierz, near Lodz, in 1892. His parents (Izucher Moshe Szwarc and Sara née Gliksman) were faithful to Jewish traditions. It is worth recalling the position of the artist's father, which was unique in Lodz and in the nearby hometown Zgierz. Izucher in his mature years was an active supporter of Jewish assimilation and the Zionist movement. He was well know in Europe as an advocate of the Europeanization of the Jews but at the same time he remained faithful to the Jewish religion and tradition. In the middle of march 1911, Szwarc started regular studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, under the supervision of Antonin Mercié. During his first years in Paris, Szwarc boarded at the famous La Ruche where he met, among others, Marc Chagall, Pinkas Krémegne, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine. Together with his friends (Leo Koenig, Izaak Lichtenstein, Josef Czajkow) in 1912 he founded the "Makhmadim" journal, the first magazine dedicated to Jewish art. The young artists were fascinated by Jewish folklore, the spectacular Hasidism, the decorative art of Jewish synagogues, and the Russian lubok. They saw these aspects as the sources of the peculiarity of Jewish art. In 1913 he exhibited his first sculpture, Eve, in the Salon d'Automne in Paris. In his sculpture he concentrated on themes from Bible. Just before the outbreak of World War I, Szwarc returned to his hometown of Zgierz and Lodz. This was at the beginning of 1914. Unexpectedly, the turmoil caused by the events of World War I seemed to be incredibly energizing to the artistic and intellectual life of Lodz. The year 1919 is the time when the expressionist artistic and literary group Young Yiddish was established in the city. The Young Yiddish was one of the most important groups in interwar Poland. The artists gathering within the group represented a style of expressionism. They asked question about the specificity of Jewish art and about nature of national art in general. In 1919 Szwarc met and married Gina (Eugenia Pinkus) and together they emigrated to France. Beforehand, they had decided to convert to Christianity. The moment of conversation occurred when the spouses were staying in Poznan. This was at the time when Szwarc joined the Poznan Expressionist art group Bunt. In Paris Szwarc - during the interwar period - he produces some of his most prominent and original works in hammered copper. He exhibited - inter alia - in the Salon des Tuilieries. His sculptures and pictures identified in style with the Ecole de Paris; they were often, but not exclusively, concerned with motifs from Old and New Testament. He was strongly influenced by neoclassicism but always the most important movement for his art was expressionism. Synthesis, which was for him a style of emotions, he explored by working the sculptures of intimacy and emotion (portraits of his immediate family, figures of Madonna and Angles). After WWII he and his family returned from Great Britain to Paris. The theme of the Holocaust in his last sculptures has - if I may suggest so - a "secular" character. He demonstrated his pain in creating sculptures that were expressive but devoid of the meaningful sacred (e.g. La Resistence, Auschwitz). Only his sculpture from the year of his death - 1958 - Libera Me represents the figure in an ecstatic dance of hope and revival. It recalls the form of his first pictures, representing Jesus Christ as the New Man and the New Coexistence of all religions of the world. It was the political and religious beliefs of the expressionist artists of the Young Yiddish group in Lodz and the Bunt group in Poznan.
- Subjects
SZWARC, Marek, 1892-1958; EXPRESSIONISM (Art); BIOGRAPHIES of artists; JEWISH art &; symbolism; JEWISH Christians
- Publication
Fine Arts Diary / Pamiętnik Sztuk Pięknych, 2017, Issue 12, p147
- ISSN
1730-0215
- Publication type
Biography