FISHERMEN

A reproduction of this painting – titled Fisherman and dated 1926 – is found in the artist’s portfolio (containing archival materials and cuttings) in the Special Collection at the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, and comes from the weekly "Pion" (1935, no. 27/92, p. 7).

The section depicting landscape references the horizontal and wiggly gouache On the Boat, once offered to an auction house in Warsaw. A reproduction of its replica, titled Rowers (1926, oil, paper) is kept in the Iconographic Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw and the work itself used to belong to Erich Cohn, the greatest collector of Gottlieb’s work in America.

It is plain from the signature that the painting was produced in Collioure, a piece of information (alongside the date) that applies to all the artworks mentioned above. Twinned with the gouache On the Boat are: Storm (Rowers) from 1926 (Krzysztof Musiał’s collection) and Fishing (Jacek Malczewski Museum in Radom), created two years later. If one put all these works together to form an informal narrative cycle, Fishermen should be seen almost as the final scene. It seems to be representing the culmination of the protagonists’ efforts: the return with baskets full of fish to the port that looms in the background – let us add: the same port that we see in the gouache On the Boat – a boat that is still empty, possibly before a fishing trip.

Visited by Gottlieb in 1926, Collioure is a town with strong Catalan culture, situated by the French-Spanish border in the French Pyrenees. Its picturesque nature attracted other Polish painters as well, Gottlieb’s friends, Mela Mutter and Tytus Czyżewski, would also visit the place.

Artur Tanikowski [in:] Leopold Gottlieb (exhibition catalogue), Wejman Gallery, Warszawa 2018, pp. 24-25.