Family Life

Andrzej Wróblewski (1925-1957) was a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1945-1952), where he studied under the supervision of colorists like Zygmunt Radnicki, Zbigniew Pronaszko, and Hanna Rudzka-Cybisowa. 

Rebelling against the domination of the colorist school, he sought a return to an integral form based on drawing, figurative and thematic art. In his paintings he returned to the years of the occupation, painting dramatic scenes of executions, touching upon the existential problems of the generation mentally mutilated by the war, symbolically capturing current political issues. 

Family (Composition, Marriage, Portrait of the Family inside) depicts an infant in a high chair and two seated figures facing one another. 

The family members are arranged carefully and discretely. Each stands alone as an individual, not overlapping or ‘blocking’, like players on stage. They’re positioned at different ‘heights,’ a technique which in the Renaissance would have meant different status.

There’s a high degree of tension between them, the demanding color palette heightening a sense of emotional charge, even though the figures themselves are expressionless. Are they struggling financially? Has there been some kind of betrayal? Are they grieving? Or is this a scene of domestic happiness and plenty, the colors warm rather than alarming?

And what is the significance of the strange booming shapes between the figures?

Wróblewski’s painting and his participation in the political changes in Poland developed through moments of elation and painful disappointment. He wanted to develop a new style, adequate to the reality marked by the still-living memory of war, and at the same time consistent with the social and political doctrine of the People’s Republic of Poland. Referring to the style of Italian new realism and Mexican art, which introduced formal elements of folk primitive, Wróblewski tried to develop his own formula of “increased realism.”