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Virgin Mary and Child

Luna Drexler

Basic information
ID
С-I-1073
Author
Luna Drexler
Name
Virgin Mary and Child
Date of creation
1920–1925
Country
Poland
Culture
Contemporary times
Technique
moulding
Material
plaster
Dimensions (height x width x depth, cm)
45.5 x 31 x 33
Additionally
Type
sculpture 3D
Genre
symbolic art
Plot
Madonna. Mary with the Christ-child
Provenance
Purchased from a private individual
Information about author
Author
Luna Drexler
Artist's lifetime
1882–1933
Country
Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, France
Biography
The artist came from the family of Ignacy Drexler, a Lviv merchant who owned a textile shop in Kapitulna Square. He was known for his artistic talent and for encouraging children's involvement in the arts. Up to the age of 17, Luna was fond of music and later became interested in painting and sculpture. In 1899, she entered the private art school of Marceli Harasimowicz in Lviv, where she studied under the portrait painter and illustrator Stanislaw Reichan (from 1899), a member of a famous Lviv family of artists and a graduate of the Vienna Academy of Arts. She improved her skills by taking lessons from Stanislaw Batowski-Kaczor and the sculptor Antoni Popiel. At the same time, the future artist attended the public drawing and modelling studio of the Lviv Art and Industrial School. She improved her skills at the Adrian Baraniecki Higher Women's Courses in Krakow for some time. In 1907, Luna Drexler studied in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Jean-Antoine Injalbert and the famous sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. She was fascinated by the work of Auguste Rodin, whose symbolic Impressionist style is reflected in a number of her works. In 1908, the artist returned to Lviv and took over the former studio of the Lviv sculptor Tadeusz Baracz, who had died in 1905. In the same year, the first personal exhibition of Luna Drexler was held in the exhibition hall of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts (Towarzystwo przyjaćół sztuk Pięknych), which included more than twenty works.
The collection of European artistic experience continued in 1909: in Paris under Antoine Bourdelle, in Rome – at the Medici Academy, and from 1910 – at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. The ideological foundations of Luna Drexler's work were formed by her acquaintance with the philosopher, writer, architect and sculptor Rudolf Steiner, who founded the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach (Switzerland). During her stay abroad, the artist was involved in the exhibition life of Eastern Galicia. Between 1911 and 1914, she collaborated with Oleksandr Levytskyi's faience factory in the village of Patsykiv near Stanislav (now Pidlissia, Ivano-Frankivsk region). In 1917, the artist returned to Lviv and settled first in house No. 30 on St. Sofiia Street (now - 114 Franko Street), then at 14 Parkova Street (1910, architect Ivan Levynskyi), where she lived until the end of her life. The creative heritage of Luna Drexler consists of more than 200 sculptures and several dozen paintings. Until the early 1910s, her creative work was dominated by the inspirations of Impressionism, Symbolism, and Secession. Later, she was inspired by the cultures of ancient Egypt and Assyria and ancient Greek and medieval French sculptures, which led to an archaic stylisation. Influenced by the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, the ideological core of the artist's figurative and plastic explorations was the revelation of human spiritual principles through artistic means. In line with the fine arts of the early twentieth century, Luna Drexler sought to integrate painterly means of artistic expression into sculpture, which is confirmed by the texture of the surfaces, polychrome colouring, and soft modelling of forms. The artist's painting legacy is made up of landscapes and portraits. It is known that the artist was also interested in graphic art, significantly etching. Drexler's establishment in the socio-cultural space of the twentieth century is confirmed by her active public activity, participation in the founding of the Union of Polish Artists, membership in the Sculpture Association, as well as membership in the Board of the Union of Polish Artists and the Lviv City Council for the Arts.
Luna Drexler died in Lviv at age 51 and was buried in the Lychakiv cemetery. For the construction of the artist's tombstone, one of the reliefs of her 1927 work "Dedication" (a flying angel, reproduced with a cross and seven roses in his hands) was used, which was cast in bronze and installed on the grave in a black marble frame. A posthumous exhibition of Luna Amalia Drexler's work was held in May–July 1937, featuring 189 works, including 126 sculptures and 63 oil and watercolour paintings.
Object description
"The Virgin Mary and the Child" belongs to the mature period of Luna Amalia Drexler's work, when, under the influence of R. Schneider's anthroposophy, the artist turned away from Impressionism and Secessionism and plunged into the world of medieval culture in the unity of its meanings and forms. The result was an understanding of art as a mediator of spiritual meanings, a materialisation of the transcendent and an appeal to religious themes and subjects. Defined as "synthetic realism", the sculptor's new creative style was filled with metaphysics, Symbolism, and stylisations of Gothic and Renaissance art forms. The image of the Mother of God is interpreted in a number of the artist's works, including "The Virgin Mary and the Child", exhibited at the First Exhibition of Polish Artists in Lviv (1917), and "The Mother of God on the Throne" (1921–1924), installed in 1924 in the chapel of the Lviv Defenders' Cemetery. Combined with a creative interpretation of the traditional iconographic scheme of the Mother of God on the Throne, the compositions are perceived as an "image paradigm" of motherhood – a semantically multi-layered communicative artistic structure that "broadcasts" a differentiated set of meanings and appeals to the cultural experience of the viewer. In contrast to the majestically static, sublime "Madonna and the Child", the sculpture from the collection of Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery is characterised by less plastic integrity, active texture, differentiation of the figurative solution and artistic forms. Thus, the intricate outlines of the throne, the pedestal and the drapery reflect the decorative style of the Secession; the gently inclined beautiful female head has absorbed the harmony of antiquity and the Renaissance; and the image of the child has acquired domestic-genre features. The peculiarity of the work is the emphasis on Madonna's enlightened face, full of tenderness – a symbol of maternity that unites traditions, cultures, and times.
Inscriptions
On the base on the right: "LUNA DREXLERÓWNA".
Legal regulation
Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

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