Still Life with Roses and Lemons
This conversation is connected to Still Life with Roses and Lemons.
Józef Pankiewicz painted this still life during the interwar period, when his style had shifted from his earlier Impressionist work toward something more decorative and color-driven. A pale blue vase of red roses sits on a heavily patterned tablecloth alongside a plate of lemons and an orange — the composition built almost entirely from competing saturated color. Pankiewicz had spent WWI in Spain, where he encountered Fauvism and Delaunay's color theories, and the still lifes he made after that absorb both. He was by then running the Kraków Academy's Paris branch and mentoring the Kapists, a Polish Colorist movement whose entire doctrine was built around the primacy of color in painting. The critics who told him to see an optometrist when he first brought Impressionism back to Poland in 1890 did not get the last word.