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Junior High School
Number 24 in Lodz


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  Polish:

Wladyslaw Strzeminski

    Born 21 November, 1893 in Minsk (now Byelorussia) into a family of Polish gentry. As an eleven-year old boy he joined the Tsar Alexandre II Cadet School in Moscow, from where he graduated in 1911 . Began studying in The Tsar Nicholaus Military School of Engineering in Petersburg. Here he gained wide knowledge in the field of the history of architecture and military construction.
At night 6/7 May 1916, near Pershaye in Byelorussia, he was seriously injured by the explosion of a grenade in trenches. After the amputation of his right thigh and left forearm he recuperated in Prochorov Hospital in Moscow. The splinters of the grenade also injured his eyeball. This accident ruined his hopes for the continuation of a military career. In the hospital he met Katarzyna Kobro (1898-1951), future sculptor and wife. She was a sister of mercy who looked after wounded officers during the war.

    In Moscow he was fascinated by the private art collection of the factory owner Shchukin, which included a wide variety of French paintings from Impressionism to Cubism. Since there are no historical documents, we can only guess that Strzeminski started to study history and theory of art.
    In 1931 he moved to Lodz. In 1945 he started to teach in Academy of Art and he handed down all his works to the Museum of Art.

    He was considered the most original artistic personality in Polish art of the 20th century. He was a painter and theoretician, one of the artists who were underestimated or disdained during their lifetime. He did not accept social realism, was dismissed from his job of a university teacher in 1950. He was one of the most outstanding representatives of the Polish vanguard, creator of the radical concept of abstract painting known as unism.

Unism, the artistic concept formulated by Strzeminski in 1927, assumed neutrality, timelessness and the lack of illusion in painting which was supposed not to express anything. And it was by no means supposed to have a decorative function. What we as viewers perceive was to form an inseparable unity of form and colour in a flat picture totally unified with the canvas. Strzeminski put the unistic theory to practice painting pictures on whose surface he eliminated all contrasts, however not completely giving up the rich surface quality and colour. In Strzeminski's understanding of art, the artist did not work under the influence of artistic inspiration. He was rather identified with a constructor and the process of the creation of an artistic work was seen as a production process.

    He died in 1952 in Lodz.