Piotr Potworowski

Piotr Tadeusz Potworowski (14 June 1898 – 24 April 1962) was a Polish abstract and figurative painter who lived and exhibited in Paris, Poland, Sweden and England. During his seven years in Paris he became personally acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Jean Cocteau, Constantin Brâncuși and attended for a short time Fernand Léger's studio. In 1943 he settled in London where he joined the London Group and exhibited regularly. In 1948 he was invited to work in the Bath School of Art, in order to bring his experience of twenties Paris to an English art world untouched by the deep changes taking place on the continent. His much-needed European influence on painting, specifically abstraction, was acknowledged by contemporaries including Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Adrian Heath and William Scott. Potworowski's paintings and constructions were considered some of the finest works of British art in the 1950s. In 1958 he was invited to return to Poland to take up the post of Professor of Painting at Poznań and in 1960 he was a prize winner at the 30th Venice Biennale. He died in Warsaw in 1962. In 1996 a major retrospective exhibition was held at the Polish National Gallery of Contemporary…Citește mai mult

Life Piotr Tadeusz Potworowski was born on 14 June 1898, in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. The family owned an engineering factory and a summer villa on the River Wisła. He was considered a "difficult" child and attended a school for the disturbed. His mother was killed in a sledging accident in 1913 and in August 1914 at the start of the war he and his two brothers were sent for safety to relatives in Moscow. His sketches from that period show interest and talent which was put aside when he volunteered for the Polish Cavalry Brigade, part of the Russian Army, fighting first the Germans then the Ukrainians and finally the Bolsheviks. After the war in 1920 he studied design in the Warsaw University of Technology then in the following year moved to the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and discovered French painting. In 1924 he travelled to Paris as a member of Komitet Paryski (KP), a group of young painters, and stayed there for seven years immersing himself in avant garde culture of that period. For a short time he joined the studio of Fernand Léger and was a leader in organising the Bal Polonaise…Citește mai mult

Influence Kenneth Armitage, fellow tutor at Corsham, said: "... while we were all individuals before his arrival we must have seemed, thereafter, rather ordinary compared to Piotr's personal approach to everything. He came from an outside world, from a longer time-life span; he brought a foreign flavour and his values and approach were different. Once or twice in a lifetime at just the right moment — somebody else can move into one's own small private world endowed with mysterious authority to push and pull in directions that, without such encouragement, one might only slowly (or even never) take necessary and positive action. Such a one was Peter ... We became close friends". Adrian Heath, fellow tutor at Corsham said: "To this community (of artists at Corsham) he brought a catholic taste and breadth of understanding that can truly be described as cosmopolitan; a quality that was hungrily accepted by men who had been insulated from continental opinions by seven years of war".