Dead city

In May 1904, during his first stay in Paris, Leopold Gottlieb published Album Litografii [Litographs] together with Ludwik Cylkow, a friend from the Kraków Academy two years his senior. It contained five original colour lithographs by each artist: Funeral, Bridge, Dead City, Stream and Depression by Gottlieb, and Twilight, Gates of Eden, Farewell, Quiet Evening and Nocturn by Cylkow. It was then that Gottlieb first displayed his printmaking talent. The lithographs he produced were to be followed by many more throughout his career and he would also go on to work with woodcut, etching and drypoint.

Extremely hard to obtain in its complete form these days, the publication soon won critical acclaim: for one of his lithographs Gottlieb received the second prize in a competition staged by the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts (TZSP) in Warsaw, and Cylkow was awarded by the same institution a certificate of merit for his works contained in the set. Between 1904 and 1907 Gottlieb exhibited the lithographs he produced for Album Litografii at the Salon des Independants in Paris, and at shows organised by the TZSP in Warsaw and the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Lviv (with the Group of Five).

All works from Album Litografii known today are landscapes. Gottlieb’s Dead City (unlike his other pieces from the cycle) is akin to the two surviving lithographs by Cylkow in that it represents very precisely the perspective of an urban square and alleys with their stone architecture. But whereas the visual expression in Cylkow’s prints relies on contrasting colours to differentiate between planes, Gottlieb’s lithographs contain evocative human staffage. Gottlieb’s works are in the spirit of panpsychism, which was typical of Modernism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: trees, water, clouds and architectural motifs add an elegiac and melancholic emotional context to figures rendered in dark colours. In Dead City, a solitary woman in despair lies motionlessly on the stone steps in an empty square. Her head rests on the ground. There is another flight of steps, leading towards a closed door, the shape of which mirrors the silhouette of the only protagonist in this scene. The section of the square with the woman and the winding steps remains in shadow, without light, just as the woman seems to be without hope.

There is an analogy between the elegiac mood of Dead City and the way it is composed and the Passion vedutas executed in oil a few years later, now part of the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Both – The Entombment (Pieta I) and Pieta (Pieta II) – are arranged horizontally, and both show the eponymous scene in a vast square, enclosed by city buildings along the horizon line. Another common trait is the careful representation of stone architecture and clusters of human figures in the middle distance. Similarly to The Lord’s Supper completing the urban New Testamentary cycle and the lithograph Dead City, both depictions bring to mind eloquent scenography in a theatrical performance.

Artur Tanikowski [in:] Leopold Gottlieb (exhibition catalogue), Wejman Gallery, Warszawa 2018, pp. 14-15.