The book appears at a highly appropriate time, coinciding with a vast monographic exhibition of Jerzy Nowosielski's works at the Zacheta National Contemporary Art Gallery in Warsaw.
"Nowosielski and his art have been in my life for years, practically throughout the entirety of our adolescence and adulthood," writes Mieczysław Porębski. The book is the result of years of observing the artist at work, the fruit of a friendship that has existed for decades between Nowosielski, a great artist, and Porębski, an exceptional art critic. In Porębski, the painter found an insightful and loyal interpreter - there is no one else quite as capable of defining the precise place of this highly original artist's work, which exists between the East and the West, between Surrealism and the broad referencing of religious icons.
Nowosielski, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie (Literary Publishers), brings together all of Porębski's hitherto dispersed and never-before published texts about the artist - from his very early critical sketches dating from the 1940s, through his program texts, to his analyses of specific canvasses from the author's private collection.
Krystyna Czerni, author of the book's epilogue, believes that the 60-year-long friendship between the exceptional humanist and one of Poland's most interesting contemporary painters constitutes a fascinating research subject in and of itself.
"By reading the texts in sequence and analyzing the paintings they refer to, one can see the shared path, the process of parallel development of both exceptional personalities. Porębski's book gives readers an opportunity to follow the development of both artists, to observe the gradual crystallization that occurred over time in their styles and skills. Reading the volume, we observe them even trading roles at times, Nowosielski writing and Porębski - especially at the beginning of this path - participating in exhibitions," writes Czerni.
"We went to the same school. One of us was supposed to become a painter, the other an art theoretician," recalls Nowosielski in a text that appears in a catalogue of Porębski's early drawings, watercolors and prints, published by friends to commemorate the author's 70th birthday. "How did it happen that he spent his entire life thinking and writing about art, while I spent mine painting? What caused Porębski to become a writer, though he could have been an excellent painter, while I chose the path of painting, though I showed no potential, did not have his drawings or his sensitivity? I do not know, and now, when our destinies have in a sense been fulfilled, it is too late to ask," writes Nowosielski.
Źródło: Dziennik internetowy PAP
- Mieczysław Porębski
Nowosielski
Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2003
145 x 205, 294 pages, paperback
ISBN 83-08-03361-X
