Born: April 21,1895, Krynica, Austro-Hungarian partition of Poland (presently Poland)
Died: October 10, 1968, Krynica, Poland.
Summary. Nikifor painted over forty thousand pictures - on sheets of paper, pages of notebooks, cigarette cartons, and even on scraps of paper glued together. The topics of his art include self-portraits, panoramas of Krynica and Orthodox and Catholic churches. Underestimated for most of his life, in his late days he became one of the most famous primitivist painters. Orphaned during World War I and unable to communicate with people around him, he was initially treated by the population of Krynica as a misfit, was ridiculed and isolated physically and emotionally. Experts say that the finest of Nikifor's works date from the 1920s and 1930s, the time by which he had defined both his preferred themes and esthetics. He gave away or sold for pennies many of his works at the time of greatest poverty.
Early days. His father was reportedly a local Pole. A legend has it that he was a recognized painter, code-named "T". His mother , Evdokia Drowniak, was a mute Lemko-Ukrainian woman who raised him on her own, in extreme poverty and hardship, hiring herself out for various household jobs. He had difficulties talking and was almost illiterate. It was not until late in his life that it was discovered that in fact his tongue was attached to his palate, which was the reason why his speech was unintelligible to most. For most of his life he lived alone in extreme poverty in Krynica.
Artistic career. Wrote Tadeusz Szczepanek: "The majority of the preserved drawings are par excellence study sketches, with traces of erasing and correcting wrong lines. Nikifor strives to master convergent perspective, plots axes of symmetry, moves the crossing point of lines to other spots, tests his ability to use the frog and bird perspectives". One gets the same impression browsing through Nikifor's sketch-book of sacred architecture. Dating from a few years later, it points to his particular inspiration - the Greek Catholic church. Indeed, many of his works are landscapes with a church outline in the background, a church interior, or a hieratic image of a saint. These are supplemented by secular themes: Krynica, Cracow and Warsaw landscapes, views of architecture - some of them pure fantasies, interiors, railway stations and railway tracks winding through the hills, Nikifor's particular fascination: mountain views. Nikifor also liked to portray acquaintances and passers-by, and, even more so, himself. His numerous self-portraits were painted chiefly in the 1930s. Regardless of the theme, the dimensions of Nikifor's works are often not much larger than a copybook sheet. Initially he would use the scraps he was given: Austrian office forms, used school copybooks, chocolate wrappers, cigarette boxes, wrapping paper. Poverty and the resulting thrift made him make double-sided pictures. His talent was discovered in 1930 by a Ukrainian painter Roman Turyn. The first collector of Nikifor's watercolors, Turyn gathered almost two hundred of them. While in Paris, he showed them to members of the KOMITET PARYSKI (Paris Committee - later abbreviated to "Capists"), with whom he was friends. That made Nikifor gain some fame among them. However, this did not change his fate as his art was still being underestimated in Poland. In 1938 Jerzy Wolff published an enthusiastic review of Nikifor's art in Arkady monthly and bought some of his works. However, the war prevented Nikifor from gaining any notoriety. After WWII Nikifor was deported twice to a remote corner of Poland under the Akcja Wisla (the 1947 deportation of southeastern Poland's Ukrainian, Boyko and Lemko populations, carried out by the Polish Army), he stubbornly returned to his home town.. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that he started to grow in artistic stature following his re-discovery by the couple Ella and Andrzej Banach. Andrzej Banach's first book on Nikifor, titled "Nikifor, mistrz z Krynicy / Nikifor, the Master from Krynica", was published in 1957 and was followed by other books and articles by the couple). For many years Nikifor's art was also actively promoted by Aleksander Jackowski, the indefatigable researcher of Polish "naïve" art. In the early 1960s Nikifor found a daily companion and dedicated caretaker in Marian Wlosinski, the painter who died recently. Wlosinski, who would become Nikifor's legal custodian, sacrificed his art and his life to Nikifor, whom he believed to be a genius. The story of this unusual friendship is told in Krzysztof Krauze's feature MOJ NIKIFOR / MY NIKIFOR. The film's 2004 premiere aroused a new interest in Nikifor, resulting in several exhibitions and the reissue of certain publications on the artist and his work. It was not until 1963 that he was officially given the surname "Krynicki" (and a flat from Krynica authorities). The story of Nikifor's fame spans a number of exhibitions, from the first solo one in Poland in 1949 to a series of foreign events in the late 1950s (Paris, Dina Vierna's galery; Amsterdam; Brussels; Liege, 1959, in which critics compared Nikifor to Henri Rousseau) and in the 1960s (Haifa, 1960; Vienna, Baden-Baden, Frankfurt am Main, Hannover, 1961). His first retrospective exhibit was mounted in the Warsaw "Zacheta" in 1967, while the last one was held at the Warsaw Ethnographical Museum in 2004. The Nikifor Museum, a branch of the Nowy Sacz Regional Museum, opened in the Krynica "Romanowka" villa in 1995. In early 2005 the local Lemko community announced the intention to erect the artist's monument. After the death of Nikifor in 1968, most of his works were preserved by Włosiński and donated to various museums. The most complete collection is stored in the Regional Museum of Nowy Sącz and the Krynica-based museum of Nikifor. In 2003 the local court in Muszyna resolved, that his true name was Epifaniusz (Epifan) Drowniak. Following the court's ruling the name on his grave in Krynica cemetery was changed. Currently his tombstone bears two names: "Nikifor Krynicki" in Latin letters and "Epifaniy Drovnyak" in Cyrillic script.
This article uses, among others, material from the Wikipedia article "Jacek Malczewski" licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. :
Wikipedia
Other sources:
Ot-art: biography,; reproductions of several paintings
Biography by Malgorzata Kitowska-Lysiak (Catholic University of Lublin)
Myron L.Pulier: extensive biography, bibliography; three reproductions
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