HENRYK BERLEWI

Henryk Berlewi was a painter, typographer, graphic artist, critic, and theorist of art, born in Warsaw in 1894. He studied at Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw (1904-1909), Antwerp (1909-1910), and at Fine Arts Academy and Ecole des Arts décoratifs in Paris (1911-1915). He settled in Berlin in 1921, where he met, among others, El Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. During his time in Berlin he formulated his theory on Mechanical Engineering, published in Poland in 1924. He is one of the most important representatives of geometrical abstraction in Poland and a member of the “Blok” group. In the late 20s, he returned to figurative art although in 1957 he became interested again in abstraction. He died in 1967 in Paris, where he had been living since 1928.