Tadeusz Makowski

Tadeusz Makowski was born in 1882 in Oświęcim, in what was then Austrian Galicia. He did not start out as a painter. From 1902 to 1906 he studied classical philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. At the same time he took classes at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers included the landscape painter Jan Stanisławski and the Symbolist Józef Mehoffer.

Stanisławski was famous for small, intense landscapes painted outdoors, and his influence is clear in Makowski's early work. Our collection includes several of these pictures from 1907: Winter Landscape, Sunset in a Forest and Landscape with Windmills (Pejzaż z wiatrakami). They are small in scale and big in mood, with low horizons, snow and evening light.

In 1908, after finishing his studies, Makowski moved to Paris, and he lived there for the rest of his life. The city's art world was changing fast. His paintings Landscape with Notre-Dame Cathedral (1910) and Fragment of a City in a Fog (1911) record his first years there, with the city seen through haze and soft colour.

In Montparnasse he came into contact with a circle of Cubist painters around Henri Le Fauconnier, which had a decisive effect on his work. For a time he painted in a geometric, Cubist-influenced style. During the First World War he spent the war years in Brittany at the invitation of the Polish painter Władysław Ślewiński, and returned there several times afterwards. Painting the Breton landscape pulled him back towards nature, and he developed stylised, simplified landscapes.

In the 1920s Makowski found the subjects he is best known for today: children, carnivals, fairs, village musicians and processions. Small figures with round heads and doll-like faces fill these pictures, painted in muted, earthy colours with simplified, almost geometric forms. He drew on the old Dutch masters, on Polish folk art and on naïve painting. He also made woodcut book illustrations, and he spent a short period living in the Netherlands. Beach (1927) in our collection is from this mature period.

From 1912 to 1931 he kept a diary that is an important source on Polish artists in Paris. It was published in Warsaw in 1961.

Makowski died in Paris in 1932, aged fifty. He is regarded as one of the most important Polish painters of the School of Paris, and his work is held by the National Museum in Warsaw and the National Museum in Kraków, among others.