CLARINETTIST MARCHING

The period he spent with the Legions witnessed advertent curtailment of the modern form that developed in Gottlieb’s work before the outbreak of WWI. When at war, the artist portrayed, for the most part, his comrades-in-arms and the day-to-day life in the Legions with the zeal of a war correspondent, using his consummate drawing and graphic skills to this end. He applied his abilities to capture a particular moment in time and to meet the requirements of his patrons in the Legions. He searched for a form that would be both clear and evocative.

Warrant Officer Józef Andrzej Teslar, a soldier and poet depicted by a number of artists (including Gottlieb who dedicated one of his works to Teslar) compared Gottlieb’s drawings to legionaries’ portraits by Jan Rembowski, a Legions sympathiser and a friend of Gottlieb from the Group of Five: “Rembowski and Leopold Gottlieb sought to capture in their drawings the Polish soldier type among a multitude of legionaries. But whereas Rembowski approaches the faces he draws with a touch of near religious sentiment, expressing their higher spiritual strength through idealisation, Gottlieb uses the expressiveness of his drawing and sharply rendered types and masks to unveil insolence and brutality in strength.” [J.A. Teslar, Sztuka wobec Legionów (z powodu warszawskiej kwietniowej Wystawy), "Wieś i Dwór. Ilustracja Polska" 1917, v. 4–5].

Artur Tanikowski [in:] Leopold Gottlieb (exhibition catalogue), Wejman Gallery, Warszawa 2018, pp. 18-19.