Polish Female Pioneers Shine in Sale of 'Great Masters'

Poland’s pioneering female artists are having their moment—in a sale of “Great Masters” last week.

Desa Unicum’s auction on August 14 in Warsaw, titled Decades: The Great Masters of the 20th Century, saw notable sales of works by the multi-talented modernist Maria Jarema and a painting by veteran artist Ewa Kuryluk.

Jarema’s 1955 gouache and monotype, Two Heads, sold for $80,282 while Kuryluk’s Trend (1975) fetched $112,394, more than twice the low estimate.

Jarema was also an actress and stage designer as well as a leading figure of Polish interwar and postwar modern art. A co-founder of the radical Kraków Group and the influential Cricot theater, Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art (MSN) presented Maria Jarema: Cracked Modernism, earlier this year. Her work is also on show in Venice alongside that of her friend and associate Tadeusz Kantor in a collateral exhibition during the Biennale.

Kuryluk has been a New York- and Paris-based artist since the 1980s but she first made her mark in Poland in the 1970s with her often unsettling, Pop art-inspired paintings and drawings.

Meanwhile, a portrait by the late 19th-century pioneer Olga Boznańska realized $72,253 in the same sale.

There were disappointing results, however. Teresa Pagowska's Olśnienie (1976) sold for $69,577, while the Post-Impressionist painter Mela Muter's View of the Bridge Saint-Bénézet in Avignon (1940) fetched $64,225, both below their low estimates.