Lot Essay
This is one of 16 paintings by Franciszka Themerson exhibited at Gallery One in February 1957. This was her first exhibition at this London’s West End gallery in D’Arblay Street, behind the Academy Cinema. Franciszka’s paintings at the time were like scratched drawings - a network in paint with precise thin lines, concentrating the image in the centre of the canvas with some intense but mostly pale colour. The paintings told stories which were far from obvious even when there were titles. For six works in her Gallery One exhibition there were titles from literature, and for this painting she used an Alexander Pope epigram.
This painting, like many others of the 1950s, represents an unresolved situation. Perhaps there are several figures, perhaps only one in various stages of becoming. As in most paintings by Franciszka Themerson, we are not really told what the painting is about but we can feel from the colour, texture, and vocabulary of lines with emerging eyes and hands, what she might want to say. Here, as with most of her works we deal with many possible explanations. They change with time and change with looking.
We are very grateful to Jasia Reichardt for preparing this catalogue entry.
This painting, like many others of the 1950s, represents an unresolved situation. Perhaps there are several figures, perhaps only one in various stages of becoming. As in most paintings by Franciszka Themerson, we are not really told what the painting is about but we can feel from the colour, texture, and vocabulary of lines with emerging eyes and hands, what she might want to say. Here, as with most of her works we deal with many possible explanations. They change with time and change with looking.
We are very grateful to Jasia Reichardt for preparing this catalogue entry.