Nikifor Krynicki, Railway Villa in Krynica

Watercolor, paper, 27.3 x 15.5 cm (irregular shape) illegible and incomplete inscription: KRYNICAWILLAKLE
provenance: collection of KendArt, USA; private collection, USA Nikifor Krynicki (1895 - 1968) Nikifor Krynicki actually Epifaniusz Dworniak is a representative of naive, primitivist painters. He was of Lemko descent (after his mother). He was orphaned during World War I. From his mother he inherited a speech and hearing defect. Because of his secretiveness and "otherness" he was isolated from society, often ridiculed and misunderstood. After World War II, as part of the "Vistula" action, he was resettled three times in the north of Poland, but persistently (on foot) returned to his native land. Nikifor's first known works date back to before 1920. The breakthrough in his work came in 1930, when he was discovered by the Ukrainian capist painter Roman Turin. He presented Krynicki's works to the Paris art community. Despite the enthusiastic reception, Nikifor still did not find buyers for his works. The first publication on the artist was a text by Jerzy Wolff in the magazine "Arkady" in 1938. Another publication was a book written by a married couple of art critics from Krakow - Ella and Andrzej Banach, who surrounded Nikifor with care in the first years after World War II. Nikifor's first exhibition was held in the SARP hall in Warsaw in January/February 1949. Nine years later, Nikifor's works were presented to the world at exhibitions in Paris (1958), Amsterdam (1959), Brussels (1959), Liège (1959), Haifa (1960) and Frankfurt am Main (1961). Nikifor's last mentor was painter Marian Wlosinski, who took care of the preservation of his work.

His interest in color, experiments with perspective and the small size of his works are hallmarks of Nikifor's work. The material for the artist's work could be anything - old official prints, pages from a notebook, food packaging or pieces of cardboard. It is this economy of material that is the reason for the frequent double-sided use of a sheet of paper. The artist's first drawings make visible his work on his own technique - erasures, eraser marks, plotting axes of symmetry. A subject Nikifor was keen on was the Greek-Catholic Orthodox Church, as can be seen, for example, in the so-called Sketchbook of Architecture. In addition to landscapes with an Orthodox church, Krynicki was most eager to immortalize what was closest to him - landscapes of Krynica, to a lesser extent of Kraków and Warsaw, portraits of friends and passers-by. A frequent motif that we can find in his works are railroad tracks and railroad stations, most often shown against a landscape background. His awareness of himself as an artist is confirmed by his numerous self-portraits, in which he depicts himself as a painter at work, contemplating the surrounding space. He most readily used watercolor and gouache, and did not shy away from tempera and oil paint. The crayon in his works appears most often in his late works. He contoured individual architectural elements and figures with a black line. The color scheme is simple, reflecting the natural character of the environment. Despite the use of primary colors, without toning or gradation, he achieved remarkable realism in his works. Nikifor left behind several thousand works (according to some sources, even about 40,000). Most of them he sold for a penny to, as he himself wrote, survive.