“When I paint a picture, I paint it as long as I know which direction it is going. If I don’t know that, I put it aside. After some time, I return to the picture I had begun; then, I have such a distance to it that I usually manage to finish it. You shouldn’t do anything by force, neither in art nor in ideology”, said Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004), a painter, poet, avant-garde artist, member of the “Krakow Group” („Nigdy nie zamierzałam się poddać”. Z Erną Rosenstein rozmawiała Urszula Usakowska-Wolff, [I Never Intended to Give up. Erna Rosenstein interviewe
d by Urszula Usakowska-Wolff], “Midrasz” 2014, No. 1, p. 27). Before World War II, while studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Rosenstein was associated with the Krakow Group. In 1945, she belonged to the Young Visual Artists Group which continued its pre-war activity. After the war, she was a co-founder of the Krakow Group reactivated in 1957 although, from 1949 onwards, she lived (with her husband Artur Sandauer) in Warsaw. Her post-war art is often associated with Surrealism (which the artist herself rejected). Her intimate, standalone way of painting required appropriate words. It was said that “she paints somewhat phantasmagoric visions, indescribable in words, surrealistic, billowing, but always expressed in an extremely tender painting play, with beautifully harmonised colours, brilliance, and iridescent light” (I. Witz, „Przechadzki po warszawskich wystawach 1945–1968” [Walking Through Warsaw Exhibitions 1945-1968], Warszawa 1972, p. 474). The small painting “Almost an Icon” from 1957 is one of the relatively early works of the artist who did not exhibit it during the Stalinist period. In “Almost an Icon”, the motif of knives, sharp shapes piercing the space of the artwork, spots of colour, yellow (gold) of the background with accents of blue, the concealed silhouette of a woman seem to refer to some (unspoken) tragedy.
Rosenstein’s oeuvre, rich, multifaceted and multidimensional, is still being discovered, we find in it the expression and lyricism of the surreal metaphor along with ugliness, non-artistic materiality of “homeless” things: a string, a piece of wood, a telephone...
The POLIN Museum collection includes a photographic portrait of Erna Rosenstein by Krzysztof Gierałtowski, see MPOLIN-M735. Renata Piątkowska
