Nikifor Krynicki

Nikifor Krynicki, properly Epifaniusz Drowniak (1895, Krynica - 1968, Folusz), was a self-taught Lemko painter, a representative of naïve art and one of the most outstanding primitivists in the world. He came into the world as the son of a poor, deaf-mute Lemko beggar woman; a congenital defect - a tongue-tie - meant that he spoke unintelligibly, did not go to school and remained illiterate. For most of his life treated as an oddity, he lived alone and in poverty.

His only link with the world was painting. On scraps of paper, little cards and packaging that he obtained, he drew with pencil and crayon and painted in watercolour the reality around him - the Orthodox churches and tenement houses of Krynica, railway stations, landscapes, as well as self-portraits, in which he sometimes depicted himself as a bishop or a saint. He was a peculiar documentarian of reality, transforming it according to his own fantasy; the artistic milieu was delighted above all by his flawless handling of colour.

His work was discovered in 1930 by the Ukrainian painter Roman Turyn, who introduced it to the Polish and Ukrainian Capists staying in Paris - it aroused their admiration, although wider recognition came only at the close of the artist's life. Nikifor then exhibited in Poland and abroad, including in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Vienna, gaining worldwide fame. From 1960 until his death he was cared for by the Krynica painter Marian Włosiński, who created the conditions for him to work and, after his death, saved his oeuvre. The story of this remarkable friendship is told by Krzysztof Krauze's film „My Nikifor” (2004), in which Krystyna Feldman played the painter; since 1995 the Nikifor Museum dedicated to the artist has operated in Krynica.

A separate, moving thread was his identity. Until the 1960s he had no surname - he used only a first name; only in 1962 did a court, for the purposes of documents, officially give him the surname „Krynicki”, entering fictitious data. His true given name and surname - Epifaniusz Drowniak - were restored to him only in 2003. Today Nikifor remains one of the most famous naïve painters in the history of art and a symbol of a talent that overcame extreme exclusion.