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In the Park

Margit Selska (Reich)

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Basic information
ID
Ж-6182
Author
Margit Selska (Reich)
Name
In the Park
Date of creation
1928
Country
France
Culture
Contemporary times
Technique
oil painting
Material
canvas oil
Dimensions (height x width, cm)
53.8 x 64.8
Additionally
Type
painting
Genre
landscape
Plot
Landscape
Provenance
Gifted by Roman Selskyi, 1983
Information about author
Author
Margit Selska (Reich)
Author in the original
Margit Sielska (Reich)
Artist's lifetime
1900–1980
Country
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ukrainian SSR, now Ukraine
Biography
Margit Selska (Reich) (1900, Kolomyia – 1980, Lviv) was a Ukrainian artist, the wife of Roman Selskyi. She was born in Kolomyia to the family of engineer Isaac Reich. She attended the private Free Academy of Arts of Leonard Podhorodecki in Lviv (1918); her teacher was Feliks Wygrzywalski. In 1921, Margit Selska graduated from the State Industrial School in Lviv, then studied painting at the Krakow Academy of Arts (1921–1922) under Wojciech Weiss and Wladyslaw Jarocki, and from 1922 to 1923 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1924, the artist moved to Paris, where she visited exhibitions of modern artists, became interested in cinema and photography, and studied at the Académie Moderne, a private art school of Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. The artist participated in the Salon des Indépendants (Paris, 1926). The following year she had her first solo exhibition in Lviv. She was a member of the artistic association "Artes" (1929–1935) and the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists (1931–1939), participated in the activities of the "New Generation" (1932–1935) and the Lviv Professional Union of Plastic Artists (LZZAP, 1932–1939). During the Holocaust, Margit Selska was imprisoned in the Yaniv concentration camp, from which she managed to escape to Krakow with the help of friends. In 1943, the Selski couple returned to Lviv. In 1978, for the first time after the war, the artist presented her works in an exhibition at the Lviv Art Gallery. Margit Selska authorises numerous portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Constructivism strongly influenced her oeuvre. Her works are characterised by a particular colouristic and compositional solution, especially her early works Hel (1932), Woman with a Cat (1960s), Crimea. Uiutne Village (1962), Carpathian Landscape (1965), Near the Sea (1964), Grape Harvest (1968), Old Ash Tree (1976), etc.
Object description
28-year-old Margit Selska created the landscape "In the Park" (1928) in Paris, the artistic centre of Europe, imbued with the spirit of innovation and the desire for creative pursuits. Melancholic and romantic, it absorbed the experience of Polish capitalism and embodied a deep philosophical meaning in subtle colour harmonies. Thus, the white stone classical statue of an ancient deity against the backdrop of a regular French park symbolised the timeless meanings of culture, the inviolability of its axial vertical, and its context-independent aesthetic content. Beautiful and majestic, she appeared as a mirage, a memory, a dream of lost harmony and the Golden Age. A vase on a pedestal added a nostalgic tone to the work: exquisitely ornamental, with scatterings of red flowers, as if borrowed from tapestries or classical engravings. The image is filled with echoes of Versailles and French fête galante. Subtle emotional parallels have been drawn to the paintings by Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Pater, and Nicolas Lancret. The inexorable passage of time was reminded by the harsh grey sky, which ran away over the horizon, and the solemn verticals of yellowed autumn trees. Above the flow of everyday events, the park, the vase, and the sculpture have been elevated to signs of artistry, cultivation, creation, and belonging to artes. A staircase and a white stone pedestal outline the boundary between chronotopic registers, the eternal and the fleeting, the everyday and the present. The framed sculpture and the corner of the ancient park seem to evoke – ars longa, vita brevis – and are perceived as a self-sufficient pictorial reality regarding the fragile female figure, as if she had stepped out of Edouard Manet's paintings. At the same time, with purely plastic means – a variety of statics and restrained colours of the background, the organic nature of the female figure, flashes of brown-ochre and red on the umbrella and clothes – the artist convinces that the cultural heritage exists only in new lives and readings, in completions in everyday, constant perception.
Inscriptions
Signature in the lower right corner: "Selska".
Legal regulation
Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

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