Władysław LAM (1893–1984), Sancho Panza with a Friend

woodcut, paper; 22 x 20 cm (inside the passe-partout);


Władysław Lam—painter, printmaker, and art critic—was born in Konjic, Bosnia. His talent for painting was recognized as early as his childhood. From 1912 to 1918, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (under, among others, Teodor Axentowicz and Józef Mehoffer). In 1925, he was in Paris, from where he traveled to the south of France, where he painted numerous landscape studies and architectural views. During the interwar period, he taught drawing at the Faculty of Architecture of the Lviv Polytechnic, and after World War II, at the Gdańsk University of Technology and the School of Fine Arts in Sopot. He was a member of several artistic groups, exhibiting, among others, with the “Jednoróg” Guild of Visual Artists and the “New Generation” group. In addition, he participated in numerous exhibitions abroad, including the international exhibition “Art and Technique” in Paris (1937) and the World’s Fair in New York (1939); he also exhibited in Brussels (1926, 1929), Stockholm (1927), Amsterdam (1929), Philadelphia (1933), Hamburg (1935), Munich and Tokyo (1939), Berlin (1947), and Vienna (1949). He held several solo exhibitions in Poland. He was the author of books on painting. He painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and figurative compositions. His early works reveal a fascination with the art of Wyspiański; later, the artist became interested in Cubism and, over time, Post-Impressionism. His work from the 1950s is associated with the allusive abstraction movement. In addition to painting, the artist also worked in printmaking.