Olga Boznańska (1865–1940)
The 150th anniversary of Olga Boznańska’s birth on 15 April 2015 has inspired the National Museum in Krakow and Warsaw to organize a presentation of her oeuvre. Boznańska was one of the most renowned Polish painters, classified in the narrow group of the most eminent European female artists. The exhibition under the honorary patronage of the First Lady of Poland, Ms. Anna Komorowska, opens at the National Museum in Warsaw on 26 February and lasts until 2 May 2015.
Olga Boznańska’s diverse artistic heritage was of supreme importance for the Polish art of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in Krakow to a French mother and a Polish father, Boznańska began her artistic education in her home town. She continued to study painting in Munich. Encouraged by her success, in 1898 she settled in Paris, the artistic capital of the world. There, her career as a portrait painter flourished.
The National Museum in Warsaw presents 150 works by Boznańska from various periods of her activity and several paintings by other artists, both those with whom she is customarily confronted and ones opening up new contexts. By contrasting Boznańska’s paintings with masterpieces by such names as Diego Velázquez (Portrait of Mariana of Austria, Queen of Spain from Madrid’s Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza), Édouard Manet, Eugène Carrière, Henri Fantin-Latour and Édouard Vuillard (paintings from the collection of Musée d’Orsay in Paris) as well as Japanese woodcuts, visitors will be able to see her work in the global artistic perspective. In Warsaw, James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s outstanding canvas Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander, on loan from the Tate Gallery in London for the first month of the exhibition, is a definite must-see.