Left: A 1970 Dean Ellis cover to ‘Star Born’ by Andre Norton. Right: A 1970 Dean Ellis cover to ‘The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde,’ by Norman Spinrad.
This week we have another great set of plates featuring folk costume, this time from Poland. Polish
Peasant Costumes, published in 1939 by
C. Szwedzicki in Nice, France, in an edition of 400 copies signed by the publisher, features 40 pochoir plates of paintings by Polish
artist Zofia Stryjeńska.
One of the most influential Polish women artists of the interwar period,
Stryjeńska
learned her craft at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where she
enrolled as a man to circumvent the proscription on women students. Stryjeńska’s works mostly utilized the tempura
technique, often combining Polish folk iconography with Christian religious
motif.
Very little is known about the publisher, C.
Szwedzicki, including their first name. What is known is that they operated a
fine arts press out of Nice, France. Szwedzicki became known to an
international audience in 1929, when they published the portfolio, Kiowa Indian Art, commissioned by
Swedish-American painter and curator Oscar
Jacobson. Szwedzicki produced 6 volumes of Native American Art with Jacobson, but work on these volumes
was interrupted when his business was seized, either by German Nazis or French Pétainists, and Szwedzicki was shipped
off to Poland. Szwedzicki survived and Jacobson, with some difficulty, located him
in Nice after the war as Szwedzicki worked to rebuild his business.
Polish
Peasant Costumes and the 6 portfolios of Native American
art produced for Jacobson are the only extant works known to be produced by this publisher, but
the skill of the printing indicates a larger body a work that has likely been
lost to the ravages of WWII and the march of time. Printed in 1939, Polish Peasant Costumes would have been published prior to Szwedzicki’s
internment in Poland.
Included is an introduction and descriptions of the
plates in English and French by Polish artist, museologist, and researcher of
folk art Seweryn
Tadeusz. He writes, “The costume is a child of the soil, for it is the
outgrowth of the crops that are raised, of the beasts that are bred and of the
means whereby raw materials are worked. Hence, it forms a part of the
landscape.”
Colour illustrations by Sarah Noble Ives (1864-1944) taken from ‘Teddy the Bear’
(watercolour, pen and ink, graphite, with paste-over, circa.1907)
and ‘Cinderella’
(watercolour, pen and ink, circa.1912). Original artwork for the book published by McLoughlin Brothers.