Henryk Berlewi (1894-1967), Portrait of a Man, 1953
Pencil on paper, 73 x 52.5 cm (frame) /50 x 40 cm,
Signed and dated in the lower left corner ("H. Berlewi Paris 11.6.53").
*
Henryk Berlewi - painter, typographer, graphic artist, art critic and theoretician. He was born in 1894 in Warsaw. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1904-1909), Antwerp (1909-1910) and at the École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (1911-1915). In 1921 he settled in Berlin, where he met El Lissitzki, Theo van Doesburg, Ludwig Miese van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, among others. There he formulated the principle of mechanofacture, published in Poland in 1924. He was one of the most important representatives of geometric abstraction in Poland, a member of the "Blok" group. In the late 1920s, he returned to figurative art, but in 1957 he became interested in abstraction again. He died in 1967 in Paris, where he had lived permanently since 1928.
[JR]
