Henryk Berlewi

Henryk Berlewi (born October 20, 1894 in Warsaw, died August 2, 1967 in Paris) - painter, graphic artist, typographer, art theoretician and critic. Member of the Blok group, Syndicat de la Presse Artistique Française and Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art (AICA). The son of the painter Hel Enri (Helena Berlewi).

Son of Izrael and Helena née Szrajber. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1904–1909), at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (1909–1910) and at the École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (1911–1912). In 1913, he returned to Poland and began three-year studies at the Warsaw Drawing School under the supervision of Jan Kauzik.

His painting and graphic works from 1918–1922 are dominated by motifs derived from Jewish culture. He was a well-known figure in Jewish artistic, literary and theatrical circles: he was associated with the Wilner Troupe, he was the leading creator of the Chaliastre artistic group, he created designs and graphic works for the Jewish magazine "Albatros" published in Warsaw and Berlin. He created in the spirit of expressionism and experimented in the field of graphics and typography.

The year 1921 was a breakthrough in Berlewi's work: he turned to pure art, towards constructivism and suprematism. He moved to Berlin, where he met El Lissitzki and came into contact with Theo van Doesburg, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and László Moholy-Nagy. There he formulated the principle of mechano-invoice, announced in Poland in 1924.

He was a leading representative of avant-garde geometric abstraction in Poland, a member of the "Blok" group. Important works: Mechanofaktura white-red-black, 1924 (Museum of Art in Łódź), Mechanofaktura composition (National Museum in Warsaw).

In 1926 he returned to representational art, and in 1928 he settled permanently in Paris. After 1957, under the influence of the exhibition "Precursors of Abstract Art in Poland" held in Paris, he returned to abstraction and worked to recognize mechanofacture as a pioneer of pop art.

In Elbląg you can see a spatial composition created during the 2nd Biennial of Spatial Forms in 1967. It is an intimate form, created after Berlewi's death, referring to one of the artist's works.