The works of Alicja Halicka, a Polish-Jewish modernist painter and writer, are mostly held in overseas collections due to the route she took during her travels. They can be found, for example, at the Centre Pompidou or at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai (NGMA Mumbai).

Details

Type of Polish artefacts: paintings, collages

Chronology: 20th century

Location: France , the United States, India

Artist: Alicja Halicka (née Rosenblatt, 1889–1974)

In the Footsteps of Alicja Halicka

The identity and art of Alicja Halicka (née Rosenblatt, 1889–1974) were shaped at the crossroads of different cultures. The future painter and writer was born in Kraków, in the parts of Poland under foreign rule, into the affluent family of a Jewish doctor who had converted to Catholicism. Halicka spent her youth in Austria and Switzerland. She studied at the Maria Niedzielska School of Fine Arts for Women in Kraków. The good command of foreign languages – German and French – which she had acquired at home – initially enabled her to continue her studies in Munich, in the studio of the Hungarian realist painter Simon Hollósy (1857–1917), and subsequently, from 1912, to develop her artistic career in Paris. There, in 1913, Halicka married the Polish-Jewish caricaturist and Cubist painter Ludwik Markus (Louis Marcoussis, 1878–1941). She enjoyed moving in the circles of writers and artists of Polish descent, including, amongst others, Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918, writer, literary critic, poet), Olga Boznańska (1865–1945, painter). Over the years, her contact with the international bohemian artistic community in Paris and her travels—including to Poland, the Netherlands (1919), the United States (where the artist travelled three times between 1935 and 1938) and India (1952–1953). Halicka never belonged to just one cultural circle. Over the years, she consciously emphasised her multicultural identity, drawing on her hybrid position. This enabled her to develop various artistic strategies in parallel, allowing her to reach diverse audiences.

Finding her place on the French art scene

Fascination with the painting of Paul Cézanne

Although in the second decade of the 20th century Halicka, inspired by the work of Paul Cézanne, actively experimented with the geometrisation of form, she did not join the Cubists or any avant-garde group at that time. The earliest known compositions from this period are rendered in a monochromatic colour scheme, dominated by earth tones, browns, greys and blacks. One example is the ‘Self-Portrait’, now in a private collection abroad, depicting the artist in an elegant hat and a coat with a fur collar – an item which, at the beginning of the 20th century, was still regarded as a sign of high social standing. In this painting, one can also discern an echo of the artist’s fascination with the art of the past, in particular Mannerist portraiture. This blend of tradition, modernity and fashion testifies to her aspirations to belong not only to the circle of modern artists, but also to the social elite.

Depictions of Polish shtetls and ghettos

Following her trips to Kraków and Kazimierz Dolny in 1919 and 1924, Halicka began to explore Jewish themes in her painting. Perhaps in search of exotic subject matter, she produced a series of paintings depicting mostly undefined landscapes of Polish shtetls and ghettos, in which genre scenes from Jewish life—such as conversations, festivities and holidays—recur. Examples of such works, characterised by an atmosphere of freedom and carefreeness, can be found, for instance, at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris. Four undated compositions are on display there: ‘Boy and Two Women’, oil on canvas; ‘Conversation’, oil on canvas; ‘Jewish Festival’, gouache on laminated paper; and ‘The Jewish Quarter’ in Kraków, pencil on paper. The collection is complemented by a copy of the book *Children of the Ghetto* by Israel Zangwill, illustrated by Halicka in 1925. The series of lithographs was produced by the artist on commission from the then owner of Éditions Henri Jonquières et Cie, Henri Paul Jonquières (1895–1975), in response to the significant resonance her works on Jewish themes had generated in France in the early 1920s. Halicka’s works owed their popularity at that time partly to a brief resurgence of interest in Jewish art. One manifestation of this was the First Exhibition of Jewish Art, organised by the art critic Gustave Kahn (1859–1936), in which the artist took part, thereby revealing her ethnic identity.

Paintings inspired by the art of the old masters

Perhaps, as art historian Klaudia Podsiadło suggests, driven by a desire for ‘artistic naturalisation’ – a sense of belonging to the centuries-old tradition of French painting – Halicka turned in her art, during the 1920s, to the paintings of the great masters for inspiration. The artist most frequently engaged in a dialogue with 17th-century Dutch painting in her work, as is evident, for example, in the undated ‘Still Life’ from the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In this painting, Halicka, drawing on the tradition of Jan Vermeer, creates an intimate composition bathed in soft light and rendered in a light colour palette, in which she demonstrates her mastery by portraying the subtle interplay of the transparency of glass and the openwork nature of the objects depicted. Another example of this fascination is the oil on canvas ‘Motherhood’, dated 1920, from the collection of the Association des Amis du Petit Palais in Geneva. Halicka would frequently return to the theme of roles traditionally ascribed to women, particularly following the birth of her daughter Malène in 1922, whilst striving to conform to social expectations.

Avant-garde experiments

Between 1924 and 1938, Halicka created the series ‘Embossed Romances’ – works composed of scraps of fabric and paper, inspired by the art of the old masters, the aesthetics of the Belle Époque and the technique of avant-garde collage. These works were intended primarily for wealthy female collectors; her clientele included, amongst others, the Polish-Jewish entrepreneur and collector Helena Rubinstein (1872–1965). It was largely thanks to them that Halicka gained public recognition in London, Paris and New York during the interwar period. Interestingly, there is probably only one ‘Embossed Romance’ in public collections abroad – in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Dated 1932 and entitled ‘Arabian Nights’, this collage was once part of the collection of the legendary painter and patron of modern art, Katherine Sophie Dreier (1877–1952). The composition, rendered in an orientalising style and depicting two women – one playing the mandolin, the other reclining – alludes, as art historian Anna Miller has demonstrated, to the tradition of depicting odalisques. Such an eclectic blending of diverse, often seemingly incongruous aesthetics—based on the adaptation of existing formal solutions and the exoticisation of women—was intended to ensure a strong presence in artistic circles by achieving an attractive visual effect.

Theatre Costumes and Set Designs

From the 1930s onwards, Halicka designed stage sets and costumes for theatre productions, reminiscent of the Ballets Russes. These works were created during several independent stays by the artist in the United States, as well as in France. Several of her designs, examples of which can be found, amongst other places, at the Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra in Paris and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, are rendered in a fairy-tale style. Among the best-known of these is a series of ten costume designs for the 1937 ballet *The Kiss of the Sorceress*, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by George Balanchine, now in the MoMA collection. Executed in pastel colours, they reveal the artist’s fascination with fashion, folklore and the aesthetics of so-called ‘feminine art’.

Fairytale-like quality and surrealism

During the interwar period, Halicka’s work occasionally featured dreamlike scenes, such as the oil on canvas entitled *Plac Zgody* (1933) from the Centre Pompidou collection. Deserted spaces, night, hybrids, enigmatic qualities, an atmosphere of unreality tinged with melancholy – these are just some of the elements of the uncanny (understood as the experience of the familiar yet repressed, and thus unsettling) repertoire of motifs that brings her closer to the art of the Surrealists. Drawing on the Surrealist repertoire enabled Halicka to convey emotions that are difficult to name. Halicka also returned to the conventions of dreamlike and fairy-tale-like imagery in the second half of the 20th century, as evidenced by a painting from her trip to India, now held in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai (NGMA Mumbai).

Cubist mystification

Halicka is known today primarily for the Cubist phase of her career. The story of the discovery of the artist’s paintings in this style—dating from the First World War and found in the attic of her friends’ home in the 1970s—has been the subject of lively debate amongst researchers for over a decade. Expert analyses carried out by the Lombrail-Teucquam auction house in 2014 revealed the presence of titanium white in several of Halicka’s works examined, which rules out their having been created between 1914–1918 and undermines the artist’s own account of the circumstances of their creation. It is likely that Halicka produced these works towards the end of her life, in an effort to ensure that her body of work would be recognised and incorporated into Western European art history. This move can be interpreted as a deliberate strategy of self-creation, constituting an attempt to help shape the canon of modernism, from which women had long been excluded. Riding the wave of renewed interest in the early 20th-century avant-garde, Halicka produced works in the spirit of analytical Cubism. Examples of such compositions can now be found, amongst other places, at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris (‘Cubist Still Life’, gouache on paper, dated 1915) and at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux (‘Still Life with a Violin’, oil on canvas, dated 1918).

Further reading:

• A. Halicka, Yesterday: Memoirs, Kraków 1971.
• A. Millers, *Romances capitonnés. Alice Halicka (1894–1975), l’étoffe d’un peintre*, vols. I–II, Master’s thesis, École du Louvre, Paris 2017.
• K. Zagrodzki, Alicja Halicka. Ecole de Paris, exhibition catalogue, Villa la Fleur, Konstancin-Jeziorna 2011.
• Ibid. Works by Alicja Halicka from 1913–47 in foreign collections, ed. N. Słaboń, W. Szymański, Łódź 2024.