Lucjan Mianowski (1933–2009), A Walk in a Pink Meadow, 1970

Lucjan Mianowski (born February 2, 1933, in Strzemieszyce Wielkie; died July 23, 2009, in Poznań) was a Polish painter and graphic artist, and a full professor at the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań.
In 1950, he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in the poster studio led by Maciej Makarewicz, and continued his studies under Konrad Srzednicki in the lithography studio. Lucjan Mianowski made his debut in 1955, exhibiting his works at the National Exhibition of Young Artists “Against War—Against Fascism” in Warsaw. He received his diploma with honors in 1956, and three years later, thanks to a French government scholarship, he went to Paris to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He was a student of Pierre Clarin in the lithography studio; his studies lasted from 1959 to 1960 and from 1963 to 1964. In 1964, he traveled to Scandinavia to work on his art and stayed there for a year, after which he returned to Poland and became a lecturer in lithography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. In 1967, he went on an artistic residency to France and Algeria, and four years later, in 1971, he was awarded a prize for his lifetime achievement by the Minister of Culture and Art in recognition of his creative accomplishments and teaching work. Mianowski’s early works are expressionistic and grotesque; later, influences of Surrealism and, subsequently, Informel appear. In the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the artist drew on the achievements of Pop Art and began his first experiments with photography; from the late 1970s onward, the influence of hyperrealism appeared in his works. During the last dozen or so years of his life, he experimented with computer graphics. The artist was a master of color lithography. In the 1960s and 1970s, he participated in the world’s most prestigious graphic arts competitions, festivals, and presentations of Polish art in the West. He was well-known and highly regarded in the Scandinavian countries, France, and Japan. His 1964 work “Sunset” was featured in Sidney Pollack’s film “Three Days of the Condor.”

Lucjan Mianowski’s works are included in the collections of many museums and galleries in Poland and abroad, including the National Museums in Warsaw, Kraków, Bydgoszcz, and Poznań, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, and others.