Portrait of woman sitting on grey-blue background

Artur Nacht-Samborski was a disciple of Józef Mehoffer, Wojciech Weiss, Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski and Józef Pankiewicz, who developed artistically in Berlin and Vienna, learning German Expressionism, and in Paris, where he became acquainted with modern art together with the Kapists (between 1924 and 1939). He spent the beginning of the occupation in Lviv, later hiding near Warsaw. After the war, he taught at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Gdańsk and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The specificity of his artistic search is best reflected by combining two directions of inspiration - German Expressionism on the one hand and the colourists on the other. He constantly returned to specific themes in his works, thus showing his discoveries and the effects of his struggle with the artistic matter. One such theme was the female portrait, which appeared in Nacht-Samborski's work in the 1930s and again in the late 1950s. At that time, he produced many portraits of a conventional and sketchy nature, with clearly oval faces, black eye points and straight nose lines. Most were images of women in intimate, domestic settings. One of the portraits from the early 1960s is in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin. Nacht-Samborski created a gallery of portraits, perhaps not as famous as Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, but undoubtedly highly diverse. Andrzej Kostołowski, one of the experts on the artist's achievements, even claims that these images are an attempt to solve the main dilemmas of post-war figuration, that is, a question about what happens to the image of a human in the contemporary world.

Beata Małgorzata Wolska