The works of Alicja Halicka, who belongs to the group of Polish-Jewish modernist painters and authors of literary texts, are mostly found in foreign collections due to the route of her travels. They can be found, for example, at the Centre Pompidou or the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai (NGMA Mumbai).

Metrics

Type of polonics : paintings, collages

Chronology : 20th century

Location: France, United States, India

Creator: 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 intersection of different cultures. The future painter and author of literary texts was born in Kraków, in partitioned Poland, to a wealthy family of a Jewish doctor who had converted to Catholicism. Halicka spent her youthful years in Austria and Switzerland. She studied at the Maria Niedzielska School of Fine Arts for Women in Kraków. The good knowledge of foreign languages - German and French - she had acquired from home facilitated her first to continue her studies in Munich, in the studio of the Hungarian realist painter Simon Hollósy (1857-1917), and then, from 1912, to develop her artistic career in Paris. There, in 1913. Halicka married the Polish-Jewish caricaturist and Cubist painter Ludwik Marcoussis (Louis Marcoussis, 1878-1941). She willingly rotated among writers and artists with Polish roots, including Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918, writer, literary critic, poet), Olga Boznanska (1865-1945, painter), among others. Another important source of inspiration for her art over the years was her contact with the international bohemian art 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 exclusively to one cultural circle. Over the years, she consciously emphasised her multicultural identity, taking advantage of her hybrid position. This enabled her to develop different artistic strategies in parallel, allowing her to reach diverse audiences.

Searching for a place on the French art scene

Fascination with the paintings 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 during this time. The earliest known compositions from this period are in a monochromatic colour scheme, with ochres, browns, greys and blacks predominating. One example is the 'Self-Portrait' in a private foreign collection, showing the artist wearing an elegant hat and coat with a fur collar, which at the beginning of the 20th century was still considered a sign of high social standing. The painting also echoes the painter's fascination with early art, particularly Mannerist portraiture. This combination of tradition, modernity and fashion testifies to her aspirations to belong not only to the ranks of modern artists, but also to the social elite.

Images of Polish shtetls and ghettos

After travelling to Kraków and Kazimierz Dolny in 1919 and 1924, Halicka began to take up Jewish themes in her paintings. Perhaps in search of exoticising subject matter, she produced a series of paintings depicting mostly undefined landscapes of Polish shtetls and ghettos, in which genre scenes from the lives of the Jewish population, such as conversations, games or festivals, recur. Examples of such works characterised by an atmosphere of freedom and carefreeness can be found, for example, in the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris. Four undated compositions figure there: "Boy and Two Women", oil on canvas; "Conversation", oil on canvas; "Jewish Holiday", gouache on laminated paper, "Jewish Quarter" in Krakow, pencil on paper. The collection is completed by a copy of Israel Zangwill's book Children of the Ghetto , illustrated by Halicka in 1925. The series of lithographs was commissioned by the artist from the then owner of Éditions Henri Jonquières et Cie, Henri Paul Jonquières (1895-1975), following the great resonance that her work on Jewish themes had generated in the early 1920s in France. Halicka's work owed its popularity at the time in part to a brief revival of interest in Jewish art. One of its manifestations was the First Exhibition of Jewish Art, organised by the critic Gustave Kahn (1859-1936), in which the artist participated, revealing her ethnic identity in the process.

Paintings inspired by the art of the old masters

Perhaps, as the art historian Klaudia Podsiadło suggests, driven by a desire for 'artistic naturalisation', for belonging to the centuries-old tradition of French painting, Halicka turned to inspiration from the paintings of the great masters in her art in the 1920s. The artist was most eager to engage in a dialogue with 17th-century Dutch painting in her work, which is evident, for example, in the undated 'Still Life' from the collection of the Paris Centre Pompidou. In this painting, Halicka, drawing on the tradition of Jan Vermeer, creates an intimate composition bathed in soft light and maintained in light colour tones, in which she demonstrates her mastery by showing a subtle interplay between the transparency of the glass and the openwork 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 eagerly revisit the theme of roles traditionally assigned to women, particularly after the birth of her daughter Malène in 1922, in an attempt to fit in with social expectations.

Avant-garde experiments

Between 1924 and 1938, Halicka created a series of 'Embossed Romances' - works composed from scraps of fabric and paper, inspired by the art of the old masters, belle époque aesthetics and the technique of avant-garde collages. These works were intended primarily for wealthy female collectors; her clients included the Polish-Jewish entrepreneur and collector Helena Rubinstein (1872-1965). It was largely thanks to these that Halicka won public acclaim in London, Paris and New York between the wars. Interestingly, there is probably only one 'Embossed Romance' listed in foreign public collections - in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Dated 1932 and entitled 'Arabian Nights', the collage was once part of the collection of the legendary painter and promoter of modern art Katherine Sophie Dreier (1877-1952). Maintained in an orientalist convention, the composition, which shows two women - one playing the mandolin, the other reclining - refers, as art historian Anna Miller has shown, to the tradition of depicting odalisques. Such an eclectic combination of different, often seemingly incompatible aesthetics, based on the adaptation of existing formal solutions and the exoticisation of women, was intended to make a successful appearance in the artistic circuit by achieving an attractive visual effect.

Theatrical costumes and sets

From the 1930s onwards. Halitskaya designed sets and costumes for theatrical productions, reminiscent of productions by the Russian Ballets. The works were created during the artist's several solo stays in the United States, as well as in France. Several projects, examples of which can be found in the Bibliothèque-musée de l'Opéra in Paris and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others, are maintained in a fairy-tale convention. Among the most famous of these is a series of ten costume designs for the ballet The Kiss of the Bard, with music by composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer George Balanchine, from 1937, now in the MoMa collection. Maintained in pastel colours, they show the artist's fascination with fashion, folklore and the aesthetics of so-called 'women's art'.

Fairytale and surrealism

Between the two world wars, Halicka's work sometimes features dreamlike scenes such as the oil on canvas titled 'Agreement Square' (1933) from the Centre Pompidou collection. Desolate spaces, night, hybrids, enigmatism, an atmosphere of unreality with a touch of melancholy - these are just some of the elements of the uncanny (understood as the experience of the familiar but repressed and therefore anxiety-inducing) repertoire of motifs that bring her close to Surrealist art. Reaching for the surrealist repertoire enabled Halicka to convey emotions that were difficult to name. Halicka also returned to the conventions of the dreamlike, the fairy-tale, in the second half of the 20th century, as evidenced by a painting from her trip to India in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (NGMA Mumbai).

Cubist mystification

Halicka is best known today for the Cubist episode of her work. The story of the discovery of the artist's paintings in this style, dating to the World War I period and found in an attic at her friends' house in the 1970s, has been the subject of lively debate among scholars for more than a decade. Expert reports carried out by the auction house Lombrail-Teucquam in 2014 revealed the presence of titanium white in several of Halicka's analysed works, ruling out their creation between 1914 and 1918 and calling into question the artist's own narrative regarding the circumstances of their creation. It is likely that Halicka created these works towards the end of her life in an effort to have her work recognised and included in Western European art historiography. This gesture can be read as a conscious self-creation strategy, representing an attempt to co-create the canon of modernism from which women had long been excluded. In a wave of renewed interest in the avant-garde of the early 20th century. Halicka created works in the spirit of analytical cubism. Examples of such compositions can be found today in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris ('Cubist Still Life', gouache on paper, dated 1915) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux ('Still Life with Violin', oil on canvas, dated 1918), among others.

Further reading:

• A. Halicka, Yesterday: memoirs, Cracow 1971.
• A. Millers, Romances capitonnés. Alice Halicka (1894-1975), l'étoffe d'un peintre, vol. I-II, MA thesis, Ecole du Louvre, Paris 2017.
• K. Zagrodzki, Alicja Halicka. Ecole de Paris, exhibition catalogue, Villa la Fleur, Konstancin-Jeziorna 2011.
• Ibid. Alicja Halicka's works from 1913-47 in foreign collections, ed. N. Słaboń, W. Szymański, Łódź 2024.