Author: Stefan Żechowski
Title: Portrait with Palette (1963)
Technique: oil, panel
Dimensions: 89.5 x 69 cm
Dimensions with frame: 106 x 85.5 cm
Signed and dated l.d.: "28.IV.1963 | STEFAN ŻECHOWSKI".
Artwork description:
Stefan Żechowski is an artist recognizable for his highly distinctive style developed in drawing techniques, but also in pastel and oil. Although the painter is usually associated with sensual erotic paintings, which indeed make up a large part of his oeuvre, they were not the only subject in his work, of which "Portrait with Palette" from 1963 is a perfect translation.
The featured oil painting is a depiction of a young woman with long, thick blond hair. The figure is dressed in accordance with the fashion of the 1960s - in a white dress girded at the waist with a wide, scarlet sash. The right shoulder strap of the dress falls gently over the model's shoulder, which adds flirtatiousness to the representation. The woman's facial features are highly individualized, rendered with great care, which is indicative of a portrait-like depiction rather than a work of the author's imagination. The woman sits lightly and gracefully on a trunk, on an unfolded red drapery. In her left hand the model holds a painting palette, in her right a brush. Next to her, on the trunk, a tube of yellow paint and a box of painting tools are still visible.
However, the unmistakable dreamlike and fairy-tale aura of the painting in question is mainly influenced by the idyllic green landscape in the background, cut by a winding stream and enlivened by fantastic figures - the image of a winged man with a wreath of flowers carrying a naked woman, and a centaur aiming a bow at the peculiar couple. Beneath the towering silhouettes of the man and woman was a golden lyre abandoned on the grass. However, this is no exception - angelic and mythological figures (such as fauns and centaurs precisely) recurred repeatedly in the works of Stefan Zechowski, who was inspired by the art of Jacek Malczewski and the Young Poland tradition. Stefan Zechowski's symbolic works are difficult and often even impossible to read. What is certain, however, is that the painter combined the truth of the portrait with the fabulousness of the background in the painting, adding a specific, non-vulgar note of eroticism, and depicting the whole in an individual style, using a subtle blurring of contours, a saturated color range and strong chiaroscuro.
"Portrait with Palette" (1963) is in keeping with the character of other portrait paintings in the artist's oeuvre, in which he relied on the tradition of romantic portraiture shown against a landscape background. The work shows great similarity to a slightly later portrait of the artist's wife, "Marychna. Marianna with a fan against a landscape background" from 1964 (oil, panel; private collection; painting reproduced in the publication Stefan Żechowski (1912-1984). Katalog raisoneé, ed. I. Rajkowska, Kielce 2014, item No. 85, pp. 37, 217). Both works (each with a rather sizable format) show, in a similar stylistic convention, portraits of women against a landscape with fairy-tale staffage.
Stefan Zechowski's biography is available on the Krakow Auction House website [SEE].
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