Henryk Berlewi

Henryk Berlewi (1894, Warsaw - 1967, Paris) was a painter, graphic designer and art theorist - one of the most radical creators of the Polish avant-garde. A child prodigy, he trained successively at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw, the academy in Antwerp and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before he was eighteen. His early works, close to Expressionism and Chagall, he combined with work for the Jewish avant-garde - he designed Hebrew typography and the covers of poetry volumes.

The turning point was El Lissitzky's lecture in Warsaw (1921) and a stay in Berlin (1922-1923), where he came into contact with the leaders of the European avant-garde - Theo van Doesburg, László Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe - and abandoned figuration in favour of constructivist abstraction.

In 1924 he formulated his own theory of „Mechano-facture”. Fascinated by the precision and the magic of the machine, he rejected the painting of spatial illusion in favour of the two-dimensionality of the canvas, limited his palette to white, black and red, and used stencils, building the image from repeatable, geometric elements. He held its premiere on 14 March 1924 in the Austro-Daimler car showroom on Wierzbowa Street in Warsaw - in order to emphasise emphatically the links between art and technology.

At the same time he co-created the „Blok” group - alongside Mieczysław Szczuka, Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro - the most radical formation of Polish Constructivism. He translated theory into practice: he founded the Reklama-Mechano agency in Warsaw, promoting functional printing (including an advertisement for Plutos chocolate, 1925), and became one of the fathers of modern applied graphics and advertising. In 1926 he showed his works at a solo exhibition in the Berlin gallery Der Sturm.

In 1928 he settled permanently in Paris and - surprisingly for such a radical pioneer - moved away from the avant-garde, devoting himself to portrait painting. Only in the 1950s did French criticism rediscover him: „Mechano-facture” was shown in Paris as one of the sources of abstract art, and Berlewi began to be named among the precursors of op-art and minimal art. Today, as geometric abstraction returns to the centre of attention, his cool, „mechanical” canvases of the 1920s are read as one of the earliest and most prophetic chapters of that current.