Objects

Female Nude by Henryk Berlewi, 1922, is one of his most recognisable works from his constructivist period. At this moment Berlewi parted from the national Jewish style and started his collaboration with an avant-garde group – the BLOK.

In 1928, as he was saying goodbye to the Warsaw audience before leaving for Paris, he exhibited his works at the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts [Polish: Żydowskie Towarzystwo Krzewienia Sztuk Pięknych]. There he summarised his previous achievements saying: "Wanting to expand my study of structure and brushwork in 1923 I drifted away from ‘object’ and came closer to the pure elements of form, I got closer to the elementary forming. […] I aspired to fundamental artistic elements, to simple painting, to simplifying artistic measures, to the economy of form and its mechanisation – all of this together appointed the path to the popularisation of art and making it simply ‘coarse bread’. […] I reduced lyricism and romanticism, I tried to direct my work to a narrow group of wide masses. Geometrical figures, urban style of the times, went hand in hand with the rapid technical industrial development. " (H. Berlewi, Main Oisshtelung [My Exhibition], Literarishe Bleter, 1928, no. 2, pp. 31–32).

Female Nude features a distinguishable silhouette of a woman sitting on a chair, contained in a matrix of simplified, geometrical cubist shapes outlined by plain, rounded lines and colours reduced only to brown and black. Despite being one of Berlewi’s earlier works in his new style, it can be described as his work’s credo. Many years later he wrote: "I ascribe the poetic function – in the most absolute sense of that word – to all the simple, geometric forms, to all the simple serial structures" (H. Berlewi, Post scriptum, Poezja, 1966, no. 11).

Renata Piątkowska