Jan Lebensztejn (1930-1999)

Aliases: Jan Lebenstein

Professions: Painter; Illustrator

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  Lebenstein Jan Transsiberien, 1964

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  Lebenstein Jan Reptile, 1974

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  Lebenstein Jan VOL DE GRIS, 1963

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  Jan Lebenstein Polish/French, 1930-1999 Figure Axiale, 1960

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Jan Lebensztejn Biography

(b Brzesc nad Bugiem [now Brest, Belarus’], 5 Jan 1930). Polish painter, draughtsman, printmaker and illustrator, active in France. From 1949 to 1954 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. After winning the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris at the Biennale des Jeunes in 1959 he settled permanently in Paris. His early works (1954–6) are a direct response to the Socialist Realist devaluation of iconography and the studio. His masterly, picturesque Landscapes from Rembertów depict a world of mean suburbs banished to the periphery of official mythology through the image of an industrialized town and industrious countryside. People vanishing from run-down outlying districts appear elsewhere as Figures in Interiors —dumb, hieratic beings imprisoned in cramped, anonymous spaces. In the extensive series Axial Figures (1956–60) the shapes change into semi-insects bordering on abstraction; reduced to an impastoed skeleton by thick layers of paint with a texture resembling sand and stone, they are transformed into creatures of inanimate matter. The Abominable Creatures (a series of 1960–65) are half-human, half-bestial monsters; represented in dark colours, the figures come to life, quietly threaten each other and perform gloomy and secret rituals. Beginning with the Bestiaria series (1966–74), oneiric, mythological scenes steeped in fin-de-siècle eroticism are transferred to the modern metropolis: to metro stations, cheap cinemas, sleazy bars, hotels, and salons of the demi-monde (e.g. Café Vanitas , 1976). In the works of the 1970s, drawing, chromolithography and gouache gradually begin to prevail. The mythology of minotaurs, sphinxes and satyrs blends with images from ‘high’ and ‘mass’ urban culture and resembles the art of the comic strip, while at the same time echoing the conversation-piece tradition and the prints of Hogarth. There are quotations from Max Ernst and improvisations on subjects taken from Arnold Böcklin and August Strindberg. Lebensztejn’s range of subjects was broadened by his illustrations to the Polish edition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (Farma zwierzt , Paris, 1974), to the Book of Job (Ksiega Joba) and the Apocalypse (Apokalipsa). In his later works the earlier stylizations are intermingled with allusions to medieval miniatures.

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