Organ Chord
This conversation is connected to Organ Chord.
Włodarski painted Organ Chord in 1956, signed and dated in the lower right. Interlocking shapes in blues, teals, rusty reds, grays, and browns fill the composition like a stained-glass window or a geological cross-section — the title suggesting that the color relationships are meant to be understood as sound. Włodarski studied with Léger in Paris in the late 1920s, and Léger's influence is visible in the way forms lock together, but the palette and mood are entirely Włodarski's own. By the mid-1950s, Poland's enforcement of socialist realism was loosening, and Włodarski pushed further into abstraction. He'd spent the war years hiding in Lwów under a false name while his paintings were smuggled out by his future wife.