The watercolour Flowers in a vase from 1957 was a gift of Hel Enri to Maria Kuryluk, wife of Karol Kuryluk; Helena and her son Henryk Berlewi visited Poland in 1958. The elderly, 86-year-old artist, had an exhibition at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw, prepared by an art historian, a friend of Izabela Czajka-Stachowicz from pre-war years. The modest still life – a bouquet of small red flowers amid bright green large, long, sharp leaves, standing in a vase of multicoloured glass, painted on paper torn from a notebook / sketchbook – is a work from the series which the artist called Herbarium.
Hel Enri is the pseudonym of Helena Berlewi (1873–1976). It would seem that a destiny of a Jewish girl was to marry before the age of seventeen and to run a house and raise children. And this is how Helena's life in Warsaw looked for many years – she raised three children. Perhaps nothing would have changed in her life if not for the fact that her eldest son Henryk was a talented, avant-garde artist. (see his works from the POLIN Museum collection: MPOLIN-M162; MPOLIN-M212). In 1928, as a widow, she left for France, where Henryk lived. She survived World War II in France, where she was, inter alia, detained with her daughter in Tours prison. In 1952, she painted her first picture, as she told Polish journalists, by accident, because "when her son left the house and she started to get bored, she picked up painting utensils and painted flowers (apparently they somewhat resembled a Van Gogh drawing, which marvelled Henryk), that gave rise to her artistic path". (Kwiaty Hel Enri, Życie Warszawy 1958, No. 119). Two years later, she made her debut at the Galerie M. Bénézit in Paris (owned by Lunia Czechowska, Modigliani's model), and in 1955 she took part in a collective exhibition entitled Découvrir [Discoverings] at the Parisian Galerie Charpentier. Since then, she has exhibited her works all over the world.
Many critics placed her work in the circle of naïve art, but after an exhibition at Zachęta Andrzej Osęka wrote: "Despite the lack of painting studies, despite the late disclosure of talent, Hel Enri can hardly be classified as a primitive artist. In her painting one can feel the unquestionable art culture, a culture so alien to those circles that gave rise to Celnik Rousseau, Ociepka, Nikifor"(A. Osęka,Kwiaty i kwiatki, Przegląd Kulturalny 1958, No. 22).
A gift of Ewa Kuryluk
Renata Piatkowska