oil, cardboard, 100 × 70 cm
Signed and dated p. d.: A.Karpiński 1952
On the back the author's inscription: Portrait of P. J/ mal. A.karpiński/ in Cracow in 1952/ (...) illegible
Alfons Karpinski was a brilliant portraitist of women. Fascinated by this complexity of female nature, he painted beautiful Parisian women, famous actresses or exquisite ladies with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. The painter's passion and talent were noticed by critics and appreciated by the ladies of the time. He became the painter to whom women were most eager to pose. It was for these extraordinary female portraits that he was awarded at the progressive Art Propaganda Institute in 1937. The women in Karpinski's paintings are "not the typically Polish woman of Matejko, stately prudish, bearing the spell of her virtue with dignity, or the one with the painful reverie of Grottger, not the one with skinny, long lines of Wyspianski, or the stylized saint of Mehoffer, not the rampant passion of Podkowiński, or the lazy one in the splendor of Żmurka's lush body, marble-cold of Czachórski, statuesque and always almost tragic of Malczewski, anemic, emaciated of Axentowicz, boasting of her body, on which she creates such magical color symphonies of Weiss, not quiet, pensive, bourgeois and humble of Hoffman, not even elegantly dressed, strikingly posing, most meticulously painted in every way, of Szańkowski. Karpinski's female progenitor goes back to Paris - she is in a straight line a colleague of mostly those from the Seine, who smell of pungent perfume, sometimes lipstick, who smell of a secluded boudoir, where there is room only for two - in whose eyes you know the tempting foreboding. Only from those of her female colleagues is she.... by necessity, more reserved, posing mostly halfway, beautifully dressed and not, like those others, often only in stockings. One almost feels that she can't get off so virtuously-quiet, so she shoots up her blackened eyes and only part her fed-up lips, where some forbidden promise wanders. It's all the same whether she's a model or a so-called society lady. Because there is in Karpinski, even when he paints society persons, some desire, consciously or subconsciously, to discover, to guess in a woman more coquetry than soul, more hidden passion than tranquility.
"Schroeder", 1927/28, pp. 302-304, [quoted in:] Alfons Karpinski 1875-1961, exhibition catalog, Sandomierz District Museum, Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola, Sandomierz 2001, pp. 22-23
