Jean Waclaw Zawadowski [a.k.a. Zavado] (1891-1982)
Born in Volhynie in Russian Poland. Studied at the Fine Art School of Cracovie in Józef Pankiewicz's studio, beginning in 1910. Moved to Paris in 1912, became a part of the experimental arts scenes in Montmartre, and then Montparnasse, which included artists like Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Nina Hamnett, and poets and writers like Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean Cocteau, among many others.
During the war Zavado went to Spain, and then back to Paris, but did not have his first major solo exhibit until the 1960s, followed by retrospectives in Cracovie and then in New York, in the 1970s. By this time he was mainly known for his “post-impressionist” landscape and still-life paintings. While he never became widely-known, over 100 of his works still circulate at auctions today, selling for anywhere from $500 to $10,000. Zavado’s family have also started a website, seeking to “gather as much information, knowledge and pictures of his productions that we can… documenting his pictorial work.”
While I like Zavado’s paintings a lot, this drawing, originally published in the underground arts magazine Coterie in 1921—the only thing by Zavado I can find from this early period, and in this style—I am absolutely in love with! There is a tenderness in the expression, a deftness to the line-work, and an overall sense of gestalt that I simply adore.
For Waclaw Zawadowski by Dick Whyte outlines of bodies sun-washed and shimmering, before the earth: horizons rubbled by distance rebuilding xoxo dw
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Interesting. Oddly enough, just before reading yours above I was reminded of this self-description by Eliot: “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion”. It’s in a brilliantly understated book by Molly Murray called “The Poetics of Conversion”. The book actually makes me laugh: her manner is so unassuming, but her topic is essentially liminality - though that’s the last word she’d use haha. 🙂
Hi Dick, no need to say sorry - I’m glad if my comment touched a meaningful chord. Also glad to hear your view of Pound. Normally I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole. But as you say, he’s unavoidable - your possible PhD project to displace him with the likes of Flint therefore seems excellent (to me). The reason I’m suddenly re-interested by the modernists stems from that Nietzsche quote I mentioned a while back - “I’m afraid we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar”. I’ve been musing over it for a while - years really - and being in a rather unusual, experimental place right now (with time, the first time in years - hence also my poetry and Substack!) I’m trying to pursue it as an article on the intersection of theology and literature. So despite really being an early modernist, I’m reading lots of Nietzsche and Pound and Eliot etc. - and enjoying the change. It’s a holiday, really - but one I’m enjoying while I’m on it!