Kowarski, Felicjan SzczÇsny

Born Sept. 8, 1890, in the village of Starosielce, near Bialystok; died Sept. 22, 1948, in the village of Konstancin, near Warsaw. Polish painter.

Kowarski studied at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg under D. N. Kardovskii between 1910 and 1918. He was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1923–29) and at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw (from 1930). Kowarski painted murals and easel compositions, including portraits, landscapes, and genre pictures. His works of the 1920’s and 1930’s are distinguished by democratic feeling, austere epic imagery, a restrained color spectrum, and an expressive painting manner, reflecting the artist’s indirect protest against bourgeois values (Wanderers, 1930, National Museum, Warsaw). After the establishment of People’s Poland, Kowarski gave expression to humanistic and heroic revolutionary ideals in several series of paintings entitled The Ghetto (1946), Man (1947), and Fighters for Democracy (1948), which are displayed in the National Museum in Warsaw and other collections. His composition Members of the “Proletariat” Party (1948, property of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party) was one of the first works of socialist realism in Poland.