A GROUP OF FIGURES

The work was enclosed to a letter sent by Aurelia Gottlieb (Leopold’s wife) to Alexander Koch (1860-1939), a German publisher and journalist (Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration) as a gift expressing gratitude for staging an exhibition of Polish artists (Roman Kramsztyk, Eugeniusz Zak, Henryk Hayden and others), including the creator of this work.

In the early 20th century Gottlieb’s pieces started to depict groups of figures crammed into unspecified interiors. Many of these works had titles that referred to washing fish or, directly, to washing sardines, a theme the artist had explored already before WWI, inspired by his stay in Toledo where he had visited one of the charities operating there, offering support to blind people. Other compositions featuring large groups of people show resting circus folk, comedians, conjurers, or fishermen and their dining families. This group of figures belongs to this iconography.

In these gouaches and watercolours with drawn fragments Gottlieb often uses vivid and contrasting colours which could be associated with later reminiscences of Fauvism. The expression of spectral, highly stylised silhouettes with triangular torsos is heightened by the contrast between the raw unpainted paper of the background and the clear dark contours transforming into schematic chiaroscuro. Apart from A Group of Figures, there are also Jugglers’ Feast I (1922), Rest (1925) and At the Table (1927). A tendency visible in the two latter pieces was to be refined by the artist almost to a fault in his last paintings from the 1930s. It involved gradual reduction and brightening of the palette and stronger exposition of tonal modulation. Whereas in works produced at the early stages of this process (e.g. Fishermen’s Supper, 1926) the concentration of tones is chiefly related to contours and the entire linear frame of depicted figures or objects, over time the line begins to dissolve in the patch it once restricted, while the patch itself has its own internal tonal gradation, autonomous from contour.

Artur Tanikowski [in:] Leopold Gottlieb (exhibition catalogue), Wejman Gallery, Warszawa 2018, pp. 22-23.