Roman Kramsztyk .........(2)
(Warsaw 18 August 1885 - 6 August 1942, executed Warsaw)
Roman Kramsztyk studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, attended the private art studio of Adolf Edouard Herstein and later enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Munich. He exhibited for the first time his work at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1911. Exhibitions that followed in Berlin, Barcelona and, in 1913, in Krakow were a resounding success.
After four years in Paris, the events of World War I forced his return to Poland where he joined the avant-garde group Rytm (Rhythm), making him the only portrait painter amongst his peers. He went through a period where he doubted his art and questioned his painting that finally led him to his decision to leave the group in 1932.
During the interwar years, he gained reputation and produced commissioned works for industrialists and politicians. With the outbreak of the second World War II, he moved to Warsaw but found himself trapped in the ghetto. Dedicated to his art, he executed numerous portraits and was devoted in the depiction of the war's atrocities that took place in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw. A sketchbook, which presented tragically realistic drawings is now preserved in Israel as a document of the Holocaust horror.
Several versions of his death exist, which concord for the essential: during the liquidation of the ghetto, he was "mortally wounded by gun shot in the apartment where he was living, among his paintings, by a member of the Ukrainian SS militia ", as per Wladyslaw Szpilman's testimony in his autobiography, The Pianist, which inspired the eponymous film by Roman Polanski.
"Sketch for a Portrait of Jan Lechon", ink, crayon on paper, 48.3 x 35.6 cm (19 x 14 in), private collection
"Portrait of Janina Karlenska", 1930-32, crayon on paper, 40.6 x 30.5 cm (16 x 12 in), private collection
"Provençal Landscape with Goats", 1918-21, watercolour, gouache on paper, 25.4 x 29.2 cm (10 x 11.5 in), private collection
"Sketch for the painting Venus of Lesbos", sanguine, gouache on paper, 27.9 x 35.6 cm (11 x 14 in), private collection
"Lady with a Squirrel", 1935-36, oil on canvas, 66 x 55.9 cm (26 x 22 in), private collection
"Portrait of Adolph Basler", 1912, oil on canvas, 100,3 x 81,3 cm (39.5 x 32 in), private collection
"Landscape from Southern France", c. 1935, Silesian Museum, Katowice
"Man Eating Crayfishes (Portrait of Karol Szustr)", 1919, oil on canvas, 85 x 66 cm, National Museum, Warsaw
"Little Town", c. 1914, oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81.5 cm, private collection
Artist’s paintings in malarze.com
Auction results
ARTWORKS of CONTEMPORARY POLISH ARTISTS for SALE
    
ARTWORKS of CONTEMPORARY POLISH ARTISTS for SALE
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