Bolesław Biegas, actually Biegalski (born on 29 March 1877 in Koziczyn - often given the wrong date 1879, died on 30 September 1954 in Paris) - sculptor, painter and writer. Born and raised in the Mazovian countryside, he was orphaned at an early age and worked as a shepherd and carpenter's helper, among other things. His amateur clay sculptures were already appreciated by the local priest, Aleksander Rzewnicki, and a doctor from Ciechanów, Franciszek Rajkowski, who provided Biegas with the opportunity to learn to read and write, and encouraged him to develop his artistic skills. Another guardian of the budding artist became the influential Aleksander Świętochowski, thanks to whose initiative in the pages of the magazine "Prawda" funds were collected for Biegas' further education. The first publications in the "Kurier Warszawski" and in the "Tygodnik Ilustrowany" (also reproductions of his works) contributed to a certain popularity of the self-taught artist from the Mazovian countryside, also thanks to the rural subject matter of his early works, and additionally, the change of his surname to sound more "peasant" Biegas.

In 1897, he began his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Kraków under Alfred Daun, quickly achieving success and awards. He was even noticed in the circle of the Vienna Secession society and invited to participate in its 10th exhibition in 1901. He went through the entire training course, but in 1901 he was expelled from Konstanty Laszczka's studio and from the university due to his disregard for academic norms. In Kraków, he came under the influence of the ideas and personality of Stanisław Przybyszewski, which left a decisive mark on the mentality of the young artist. Expulsion from the Krakow academy, invitations to exhibitions in Vienna and Munich (also 1901), contributed to the growing popularity of the rebel sculptor. In December of the same year, Biegas arrived in Paris thanks to a scholarship from the Warsaw Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. He was to remain there until his death, only rarely visiting Poland.

From 1902, he benefited from the patronage of Baron Henryk Trutschel and his wife Jadwiga, who provided Biegas with financial independence in Paris. His career there developed rapidly, and the most eminent critics of the new independent art wrote about him, not only those of Polish origin (Guillaume Apollinaire, Adolf Basler, Mieczysław Golberg, Jan Topass), but also native Frenchmen (including André Fontainas, Gustave Kahn, Charles Morice, André Salmon) and the famous Belgian poet and critic Emile Verhaeren. As early as 1902, he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Independents, and the influential avant-garde culture magazine, La Plume, dedicated a special issue to Biegas. The next few years were full of high-profile (sometimes scandalous) solo exhibitions by the sculptor - in Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Kyiv; after 1910, he also exhibited in Krakow, Lviv and Rome, among others. After 1911, he gave up participating in major Parisian exhibitions, showing his works in his own atelier in Montparnasse. His last visit to Poland took place in 1913, but he maintained links with Polish émigrés in Paris, for example, in 1918 he was one of the initiators of a large exhibition at the Hôtel Potocki, the proceeds of which were donated to Polish veterans of the First World War. After 1919, he again began to take part in French exhibitions, including at the Salon des Independents and prestigious Parisian galleries (Bernheim Jeune, Seligmann), showing only paintings.

After World War I, Biegas abandoned sculpting in favour of writing and, above all, painting. The exhibition at London's Arlington Gallery in 1930 seems to have closed Biegas' public career - he is increasingly criticised (especially as a painter), remains misunderstood, and finally forgotten. The artist spent the entire period of the Second World War in Paris; in 1943 his studio was damaged in a bombing. After 1945, he still tried to exhibit in his own studio (the last time in 1949), but was rarely visited anymore, mainly by Polish emigrants, and lived in extreme poverty. He joined the Historical and Literary Society in 1951, to which he bequeathed his work before his death. Biegas is buried in the most important cemetery of Polish emigration, Champeaux in Montmorency.

Already the sculptural works from the period of his studies (Conversation of Thoughts, Night, Book of Life, Love of Death) placed Biegas among the leading representatives of Symbolism in Polish sculpture and the most radical in Europe, formally initially close to Art Nouveau. Visible in them was a tendency to express the inexpressible, depicting the mysterious, building a complex pyramid of contents that seem to overflow visions. In its fullest form, this style manifests itself in the composition Marsz żałobny Chopina [Chopin's Funeral March] from 1902 (National Museum in Warsaw), which is also a materialisation of Przybyszewski's strong influence. The musical references of Biegas's symbolism are, in fact, extensive, including, for example, a sequence of works dedicated to Bach, Beethoven, Wagner. Stanisław Brzozowski called Biegas a "musician of sculpture". In 1909, he submitted a project for the competition for a monument to Chopin in Warsaw. In most of his works from the first decade of the 20th century. Biegas operates with a complicated, dishevelled form, however, hardly going beyond the depiction in relief - the multidimensionality of the solid does not seem to interest him, the sculpture remains a silhouette viewed frontally. The enchanted palace (1902) even seems merely a drawing carved in plaster. After 1902, the expressiveness of the texture will be simplified, in some works the form is subject to reduction; the geometrisation visible, for example, in the famous sculpture God was considered to be a prefiguration of the Cubist search, but it certainly stemmed from completely different reasons in Biegas's case. The Art Nouveau fluidity of the form will not disappear, and the sculptor will often manneristically repeat solutions already used many times, which makes it difficult to discern a clear evolution in his artistic search.

Already in his early works there appears a characteristic feature of Biegas's entire oeuvre: an excess of content (signalled also in poetic titles such as Dream of God, Eternity of Mystery) over care for form, emotional and ideological saturation (or even over-saturation) of the works, as a result of which formal disinvolvement seems to be out of control. Literary inspirations at the same time, evident for example in the dedication of many sculptures to Adam Mickiewicz, Zygmunt Krasiński, Juliusz Słowacki and Charles Baudelaire, seem to be of a superficial nature. This unfettered freedom or even anarchic attitude to the use of means of expression was often treated as an advantage of Biegas's works in the first decade of the 20th century, seeing him as an avant-garde revolutionary and even placing him near the Italian Futurists. As he wrote in 1902. Antoni Potocki, Biegas "improvises breathlessly".

An important, and least shocking, part of Biegas's sculptural production at the time were portraits (including those of Olga Boznańska from 1902, with whom he became friends in Paris, Elijah Mechnikov from 1903, Verhaeren from 1906). In these it is possible to point out analogies with, or perhaps even inspirations from, the work of Laszczka or Stanisław Ostrowski.

On the other hand, the most controversial in Biegas's activity is painting, both due to its artistic level, poetics, as well as subject matter and sometimes adventurous iconographic ideas. As early as 1907, he caused a scandal by exhibiting the painting Russian-Japanese Struggle (private collection), in which he portrayed the rulers of the time naked in a bizarre allegory. In contrast to his work in the field of sculpture, in painting Biegas became politically involved on several occasions, violating all norms, including customs. Between 1914 and 1918, he created a series of dozens of paintings titled Vampires of War (Paris, owned by the Historical and Literary Society); in the last years of his life, he painted portraits of world leaders (including Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi) and personifications of nations. In the interwar period, however, his paintings were dominated by mystical motifs, realised in various painting manners, including Biegas's favourite convention of so-called spherism, which was associated - without much basis - with inspiration from Italian futurism. What remains unquestionable, however, is the then visible fascination with the paintings of Arnold Böcklin (e.g. in the 1928 vision Juliusz Słowacki; private collection). Stylistic inconsistency, manneristic repetitions and thematic dispersion reached their apogee in this period. The problem of the limitation of artistic means in Biegas's uneven oeuvre (painting, but to some extent this also applies to his sculpture) remains unresolved. Was his primitivism a consciously applied poetics, or was it the result of an awareness of his own technical limitations and lack of skill? Were the departures from all rules precisely due to limitations or to an unbridled, explosive creative imagination? His painting has sometimes been classified as naïve, unprofessional, even confused with the oeuvre of Henri Rousseau, known as the Cellist. Undoubtedly, Biegas's bifurcation of thought and visual art makes his judgements difficult and prompts him to be seen as an outsider. This creative universe was perhaps most aptly described by Jan Topass in 1928:

"This born symbolist [...], with a brush or chisel in his hand, wishes to depict that which is difficult to express in words and which music barely allows to be intuited: the vague secrets of the soul, the fears and expectations of the diversity of life, the mystery of death. In this dream, which usually turns out to be a nightmare [...] he sees spectres, ghouls, vampires, chimeras [...], monsters powerful and terrible, distorted masks..."

Biegas' considerable literary output, including dramas (Michelangelo, which was staged in Paris in 1912; Lechit, Saturn), remains completely forgotten.

In the period from around 1901 until the outbreak of the First World War, Biegas was regarded as a star of the Parisian avant-garde and enjoyed international fame. Gradually forgotten thereafter, for many decades he was known for only a few reproduced and exhibited sculptures, considered more as curiosities, extravagant efflorescences of late symbolism. The slow discovery of his work, the reconstruction of his biography and the reception of his work has been going on since the 1980s and is mainly due to Xavier Deryng, who devoted several dozen texts to Biegas (initially only in French and known in French scholarly circles, later also in Poland). In 1992, he organised a large monographic exhibition in Paris (Trianon de Bagatelle), accompanied by a monumental catalogue with full documentation. He also strove to popularise the person and work of the artist. European re-appreciation of Biegas's oeuvre has been slow; as late as the 1980s, single works of his were purchased by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (one sculpture and then a unique textile) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. From the end of the twentieth century, Biegas's works abundantly appear in museums and exhibitions throughout Europe. The largest collection of his works, in the Polish Library in Paris, was used to create the Biegas Museum there in 1974, and this was the first official sign of his ennoblement. The Mazovian Museum in Płock, which has had a permanent Biegas section since 2011, also has a significant collection. In 2015, a permanent exhibition of his paintings and sculptures was also opened in Warsaw, thanks to the cooperation of the Bolesław Biegas Foundation and the Polish Library in Paris.