Objects

The monumental sculpture "Libera Me", carved from the trunk of an olive tree and about three metres high, is Marek Szwarc's last work, created in the year of his death. It is located in the Benedictine Abbey of Notre Dame in the French town of Jouarre (Abbaye Notre-Dame de Jouarre). The monographer of Szwarc, Eleonora Jedlińska, believes that this sculpture: "Through such a clear return to expressionist form, it seems to condense within itself the history of modern Jewish art and to encapsulate, as it were, the history of that generation of Jewish artists who, in the early twentieth century, reached back to the sources of Jewish art and tried to define its specificity - on the one hand referring to tradition, to the art of the ancient East, to Jewish folklore, and on the other, processing European models, shaping an art that in the second half of the twentieth century became a module for the world. The ecstatic dance of the "liberated soul" combines features of expressionist deformation and geometrisation, which we remember from the graphics of Jankiel Adler ("Ecstasy", 1919), Yitzhak Brauner ("Tkiya gdula" [Devil Dances], 1919). Jung Idysz's friendship with the artists of the Poznań Rebellion, their fascination with the idea of Christ as a "new man", regarded as an ethical ideal, an eternal revolutionary, Szwarc's conversion to Christianity and his fidelity to Judaism, his lament over the murdered European Jews - it seems that "Libera Me" expresses all these problems. We can understand it as his artistic and spiritual credo, as a legacy left to the next generations" (E. Jedlińska, "Rzeźby Marek Szwarc w latach 1910-1958: neoclasscyzm - ekspresjonizm - synteza" [Sculptures by Marek Szwarc in 1910-1958: Neoclassicism - Expressionism - Synthesis], "Pamiętnik Sztuk Pięknych" [Memoir of Fine Arts], 2017, no. 12, p. 159).

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