Aleksander Kobzdej (1920–1972) was a Polish painter. He was born in, what was then, Ukraine. Kobzdej is best known for being one of the most prominent representatives of the Polish Social Realist group, and for being the creator of unique Polish versions of "matter" painting. Kobzdej began studying architecture in 1939 at Lviv. He finished his degree in Gdansk Polytechnic Institute and later studied under Wladyslaw Lam at the

Kraków Academy of Fine Arts The Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków ( pl, Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Jana Matejki w Krakowie, usually abbreviated to ''ASP''), is a public institution of higher education located in the centre of Kraków, Poland. It is the oldest Pol ...

. Kobzdej started off as a

Post-Impressionist Post-Impressionism (also spelled Postimpressionism) was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction ag ...

. His works eventually became more abstract. Toward the end of the 1940s, he exhibited bits of European

Realism Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to: In the arts *Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts Arts movements related to realism include: *Classical Realism *Literary realism, a move ...

. This led him to Socialist Realism in the early later 1940s. Beginning in 1950 he was an active participant in official arts reviews, including the annual Polish National Visual Arts Exhibitions organized in Warsaw by the Ministry of Culture and Art. Here he presented his most famous painting to date "Pass me a Brick." Slowly though Kobdzej began to stray away from Socialist Realist iconography and he moved toward exotic depictions and more narrative pieces, mainly influenced by his travels to Vietnam and China.

External links

Aleksander Kobzdej Biography
20th-century Polish painters 20th-century Polish male artists 1920 births 1972 deaths Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts alumni Herder Prize recipients Polish male painters Recipients of the Medal of the 10th Anniversary of the People's Republic of Poland {{Poland-painter-stub