The portraits – Young Woman, Young Woman in White and Portrait of Mrs D. – were bought by the French state between 1904 and 1913 but had long languished in storage. They went on display on 15 April, the anniversary of Boznańska’s 1865 birth, in gallery 69 alongside other late-19th-century European works.
Institute director Joanna Wajda told Polish Press Agency the showing is part of Poland’s nationwide “Year of Boznańska,” marking 160 years since her birth. “We hope Paris rediscovers an artist who triumphed here but has since faded from view,” she said.
Curator Leïla Jarbouai, head of European painting at the Musée d’Orsay, approved the presentation after lobbying by art historian Ewa Bobrowska, a Boznańska specialist living in Paris. The museum, housed in a former railway station on the Seine, draws more than three million visitors annually, mainly for its Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings.
Boznańska was born in Kraków and moved to Paris in 1898, exhibiting at the Salon and winning a gold medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Influenced by Whistler, she specialized in muted, psychologically intense portraits. She died in Paris in 1940.
To accompany the display, the Polish Institute plans a walking tour of Boznańska’s Paris addresses in June and an autumn symposium with Jarbouai, Bobrowska and Warsaw National Museum curator Renata Higersberger. A bilingual calendar featuring her paintings has been distributed to French cultural partners.
The Boznańska initiative comes ahead of a major Magdalena Abakanowicz survey opening in November at the Musée Bourdelle and other shows of Polish émigré art slated for the Paris region this autumn.
The three paintings are expected to remain on public view at the d’Orsay until year-end, Wajda said.
(jh)
Source: PAP