Mieczysław Tadeusz Janikowski

Mieczysław Tadeusz Janikowski (1912, Zalishchyky - 1968, Kraków) was an abstract painter and constructivist, one of the most important Polish artists working in Paris. He studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts (under Władysław Jarocki, Kazimierz Sichulski and Stefan Filipkiewicz). During the Second World War he was an officer of General Maczek's 1st Armoured Division - he was wounded in the battle of Alphen; after the war he completed the College of Art in Edinburgh, and thanks to a scholarship he travelled to Paris in 1947, where from 1952 he settled permanently, in the famous artists' colony „La Ruche”.

From the end of the 1940s Janikowski drew closer and closer to geometric abstraction, working out an individual style through a complicated path of consistent reduction and simplification of form - from post-Impressionist landscapes, through a disciplined Informel, to mature geometric compositions. His work is dominated by austere, monochrome arrangements of flat patches of colour with a subtle colouring and a deep, symbolic message; Józef Czapski described this „hard” abstraction as geometry composed with an almost mechanical, impersonal precision. In parallel he painted French landscapes of Provence, and a separate thread was the cycle „The Way of the Cross”.

Recognition came too late, posthumously - in his lifetime the artist had only three solo exhibitions (the first in 1956 at the Galerie Colette Allendy in Paris and at the New Vision Centre Gallery in London). He knew Jadwiga Maziarska, whom he had met during his studies in Kraków. His oeuvre was recalled by the large monographic exhibition „Towards Abstraction” at the National Museum in Warsaw (2004); the artist's works are held, among others, in the National Museums in Kraków, Warsaw, Gdańsk and Poznań and in the Museum of Art in Łódź.