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The “mysterious painter”: Artur (Stefan) Nacht-Samborski
Artur Nacht-Samborski was a “mysterious painter” in many ways, says Polish art historian Małgorzata Kitowska-Łysiak, one who remains underrated despite indubitably being an outstanding artist worthy of recognition. His art defies definition, is difficult to describe in words, and remains beyond all “isms.” It is steadfastly independent.(1)
In remembrance of painter and Holocaust survivor Artur Nacht-Samborski, who is relatively unknown in Germany, the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism is displaying two of his still lifes as part of the exhibition titled Tell me about yesterday tomorrow: Martwa Natura z Kwiatami w Wazonie (1950) and Martwa Natura (undated). Not only is his extensive work worth exploring, but his eventful and sometimes dramatic life, which played out against the backdrop of the Nazi persecution of Jews, also reflects the history of the 20th century to impressive effect.
Youth and education
Artur Nacht was born in Kraków on May 26, 1898. His father was a prosperous textile merchant. The family were observant Jews, but also assimilated. Artur and his three siblings went to Polish schools and had Polish friends.
He studied at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts from 1917 until 1919 and again from 1923 to 1924. Nacht pursued various hobbies in his free time, including boxing. He lived in Berlin from 1919 to 1923. Little is known about this period, other than the fact that he moved in Expressionist and Dadaist circles. Although he painted a great deal during that time, few of his works from the years in Berlin have remained. They include a number of sketches reminiscent of the works of George Grosz or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
France
After returning from Berlin in 1923, Nacht made friends in Kraków with various artists who formed an informal group called the Paris Committee (Komitet Paryski) around Józef Pankiewicz, who was then working as a professor. The group was especially interested in French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Nacht traveled to Paris with members of this group in early September 1924.
A branch of the Kraków academy was established in Paris in 1925. Pankiewicz headed the Paris branch until 1937. The members of the group were not enrolled at the academy itself. Instead, they studied privately with Pankiewicz and attended academy courses in some cases as well. In artistic terms, the group was oriented toward the new French painting style. Their goal was to change the understanding of art in Poland, raising the standing of painting in itself through its independence from political and social contexts. The paintings done in this style, known as Polish Colorism or Capism, are dominated by simple, neutral subjects such as landscapes, interiors, and still lifes. Color was the most important design element used by painters in this style. It was used to give images their shape and express moods.
Polish artists already living in Paris introduced the newly arrived members of the Paris Committee to established circles of artists there. Nacht lived off financing provided by his father and odd jobs. He painted a great deal, but also actively participated in the life of the Polish community in Paris. For example, he organized charity balls in 1925 and entered a contest organized by the Society of Polish Artists in Paris in 1929, winning one of the five prizes. He exhibited his work with Polish colleagues in Paris and Geneva in 1930 and 1931. His painting style was heavily influenced by Expressionism during this time, with only minor Post-Impressionist echoes. Toward the end of the 1920s, his paintings displayed similarities with those of Georges Rouault in particular. The group often spent the summer months in La Ciotat, in Provence. Nacht’s landscape paintings from there are a significant departure from Capism, with unmistakable Cubist and Fauvist influences instead.
Nacht’s style began to change around the mid-1930s. The works he produced during a stay in Spain in 1934 are significantly lighter in color, for example. Nacht returned to Kraków in January 1939, much later than his colleagues from the group, and moved into an apartment near his parents.
Lemberg
German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, occupying Kraków five days later. The Nacht family left the city shortly before it fell, moving to the eastern Polish city of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine). The city had been occupied by the Soviets since the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Nacht contacted the artists Marian Wnuk and his wife Józefa and Stanisław Teisseyre, who were living there. He soon adapted to life under the new rulers. In late 1939 and early 1940, he contributed two new still lifes to a major traveling exhibition titled The Art of Western Ukraine and the Hutsul Nation, which made stops in Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkhiv. He earned a living through various means, including by painting propaganda posters and large-format portraits of Soviet leaders.
Still, he was unwilling to give up his view of art and adopt the socialist realist style that was predominant in the Soviet Union, with backing from the state. According to an account by Teisseyre, the normally fairly reticent Nacht spoke publicly at a meeting of artists in Moscow, affirming the influence of 20th-century French art on his work. He said it had made a lasting mark on art all across Europe, much like the art of the Italian Renaissance had done in the 16th century. “Now, in the twentieth century, French art is the leading one. All I have to say to you, my Soviet colleagues, is that I have seen your contemporary painting, your exhibition to which you have taken us. Don’t getoffended, but this is German art from the midddle of the nieneteenth century.” (2)
Warsaw – life under the German occupation
The Nacht family’s financial circumstances, which had been quite stable until then, rapidly worsened after the German attack on the Soviet Union and the occupation of Lwów by German troops in late June 1941. Nacht’s mother had died a short time before. The city and the surrounding region of Eastern Galicia, previously part of Poland, were attached to the Nazi-administered General Government as the District of Lemberg. In just the first few days of the occupation, about 4,000 people, many of them of Jewish origin, were shot to death in the city. The German occupying forces established a camp for forced laborers, followed in November by a closed-off “Jewish residential district” (ghetto), where the Nacht family was forced to move as well. Unlike his family, though, Artur Nacht refused. He went into hiding instead.
In early 1942, he fled Lwów, traveling first to Kraków and then to Warsaw a short time later. Several artist friends of his, Józefa and Marian Wnuk and Jadwiga and Janusz Strałecki, helped him build a false non-Jewish identity under the name Stefan Ignacy Samborski. The first step was to obtain a fake ID. Later, in Warsaw, a priest issued a birth certificate, and Nacht obtained a certificate of membership in the Warsaw branch of the Association of Polish Graphic Artists. With his friends’ help, Nacht also managed to free his father and his siblings Marek and Stefania from the Lwów Ghetto. They survived the second world war and the Shoah in hiding in Warsaw. His second sister, Róża, and her husband were murdered in the ghetto in 1942, during one of the many raids and deportations.
Since Artur Nacht did not have the “typical Jewish” look in the eyes of the Nazis, he was able to move around relatively freely in the city. He tried to live a “normal” life to the extent possible. He frequented cafés and met with friends and artists of his acquaintance. Nacht also continued to paint, primarily flowers and still lifes, building on his prewar work. The war and the drastic circumstances in Poland at the time seem to have left no trace on these paintings. Several of Nacht’s works were displayed in early 1944 at an exhibit of Capist artists in Warsaw. During the Warsaw Uprising, in the summer of 1944, Nacht went into hiding at the villa of an artist friend, where he stayed until the Soviet troops moved into the country, in January 1945. Multiple friends and acquaintances were arrested in the course of the brutal suppression of the uprising, which cost about 200,000 civilian lives and laid waste to large portions of the city.
After the war
After the end of the second world war, Nacht decided to merge his two identities – his actual Jewish identity and the Polish one he had adopted for his own protection. From then on, he used the double name Nacht-Samborski, which he officially adopted in 1956. In 1946, he was hired as an adjunct professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. His friend Jan Strałecki, who was in charge of the academy, had arranged for the teaching position for him. A regular professorship was not possible at first, since Nacht had never finished his studies. He lived in the neighboring city of Sopot in those years.
He was appointed to a fixed-term professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1949, a position that was converted to a permanent extraordinary professorship in 1950. That year, his father and sister emigrated to Israel. Of his immediate family, only his brother remained in Poland. Nacht-Samborski suffered a career setback not long after that. After the Polish communist regime, under the influence of the Soviet Union, introduced socialist realism as the national art doctrine, his Colorism-style painting was no longer considered desirable at the academy. Nacht-Samborski was forced to retire on August 31, 1951. This strict line on art policy was loosened in Poland not long afterward, in 1952, and Nacht-Samborski was able to return to teaching under a contract at the academy in Warsaw in September of that year.
After Stalin’s death, in 1953, socialist realism grew even less important. The Ministry of Art and Culture awarded Nacht-Samborski a degree in painting in 1955 and appointed him to a full professorship at the academy, a position he held until 1968. The ministry forced him to retire that year. He had already reached retirement age, but Nacht-Samborski and his department had both been trying to keep him in office for another three years. The background behind his retirement was an anti-Semitic campaign carried out by the Communist Party in March of 1968, during which numerous people of Jewish origin were removed from office and lost other positions. Nacht-Samborski spent the next few years living a relatively quiet life in Warsaw, where he died on October 9, 1974.
After 1945, Artur Nacht-Samborski continued to paint primarily still lifes, female portraits, and nudes. His style continued to draw on Colorism, but starting in the 1950s increasingly also included elements of Expressionism and new artistic movements such as Art Informel. The continuities in his painting practice can be viewed as expressions of his own suppression of the terrible events of the war. There are hardly any direct connections to the Holocaust or his experiences under the German occupation in his works. After the war, however, his portraits often had strikingly mask-like features. This points to the artist grappling with the subject of constructed identity, which was crucial to his personal life as well.
His work was rarely seen outside Poland, and especially in the West, during the postwar period. Some of his paintings were displayed at the Venice Biennale in 1958. The artist refused to hold larger individual exhibitions of his works. The first individual exhibition was held at the National Museum in Warsaw in 1977, after his death. Another followed at the National Museum in Poznań and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in 1999.
By Andreas Eichmüller, research associate at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism
Sources
(1) https://culture.pl/en/artist/stefan-artur-nacht-samborski; August 20, 2020.
(2) Quoted according to Maria Zientara: Artur Nacht-Samborski, in: Zientara, Maria. Holocaust Survivors. Jonasz Stern, Erna Rosenstein, Artur Nacht-Samborski (Exhibition Catalogue, Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, 8 November 2012 – 7 April 2013), Kraków 2012, pp 94–118, 101.
all articles
The “mysterious painter”: Artur (Stefan) Nacht-Samborski
Artur Nacht-Samborski was a “mysterious painter” in many ways, says Polish art historian Małgorzata Kitowska-Łysiak, one who remains underrated despite indubitably being an outstanding artist worthy of recognition. His art defies definition, is difficult to describe in words, and remains beyond all “isms.” It is steadfastly independent.(1)
In remembrance of painter and Holocaust survivor Artur Nacht-Samborski, who is relatively unknown in Germany, the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism is displaying two of his still lifes as part of the exhibition titled Tell me about yesterday tomorrow: Martwa Natura z Kwiatami w Wazonie (1950) and Martwa Natura (undated). Not only is his extensive work worth exploring, but his eventful and sometimes dramatic life, which played out against the backdrop of the Nazi persecution of Jews, also reflects the history of the 20th century to impressive effect.
Youth and education
Artur Nacht was born in Kraków on May 26, 1898. His father was a prosperous textile merchant. The family were observant Jews, but also assimilated. Artur and his three siblings went to Polish schools and had Polish friends.
He studied at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts from 1917 until 1919 and again from 1923 to 1924. Nacht pursued various hobbies in his free time, including boxing. He lived in Berlin from 1919 to 1923. Little is known about this period, other than the fact that he moved in Expressionist and Dadaist circles. Although he painted a great deal during that time, few of his works from the years in Berlin have remained. They include a number of sketches reminiscent of the works of George Grosz or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
France
After returning from Berlin in 1923, Nacht made friends in Kraków with various artists who formed an informal group called the Paris Committee (Komitet Paryski) around Józef Pankiewicz, who was then working as a professor. The group was especially interested in French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Nacht traveled to Paris with members of this group in early September 1924.
A branch of the Kraków academy was established in Paris in 1925. Pankiewicz headed the Paris branch until 1937. The members of the group were not enrolled at the academy itself. Instead, they studied privately with Pankiewicz and attended academy courses in some cases as well. In artistic terms, the group was oriented toward the new French painting style. Their goal was to change the understanding of art in Poland, raising the standing of painting in itself through its independence from political and social contexts. The paintings done in this style, known as Polish Colorism or Capism, are dominated by simple, neutral subjects such as landscapes, interiors, and still lifes. Color was the most important design element used by painters in this style. It was used to give images their shape and express moods.
Polish artists already living in Paris introduced the newly arrived members of the Paris Committee to established circles of artists there. Nacht lived off financing provided by his father and odd jobs. He painted a great deal, but also actively participated in the life of the Polish community in Paris. For example, he organized charity balls in 1925 and entered a contest organized by the Society of Polish Artists in Paris in 1929, winning one of the five prizes. He exhibited his work with Polish colleagues in Paris and Geneva in 1930 and 1931. His painting style was heavily influenced by Expressionism during this time, with only minor Post-Impressionist echoes. Toward the end of the 1920s, his paintings displayed similarities with those of Georges Rouault in particular. The group often spent the summer months in La Ciotat, in Provence. Nacht’s landscape paintings from there are a significant departure from Capism, with unmistakable Cubist and Fauvist influences instead.
Nacht’s style began to change around the mid-1930s. The works he produced during a stay in Spain in 1934 are significantly lighter in color, for example. Nacht returned to Kraków in January 1939, much later than his colleagues from the group, and moved into an apartment near his parents.
Lemberg
German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, occupying Kraków five days later. The Nacht family left the city shortly before it fell, moving to the eastern Polish city of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine). The city had been occupied by the Soviets since the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Nacht contacted the artists Marian Wnuk and his wife Józefa and Stanisław Teisseyre, who were living there. He soon adapted to life under the new rulers. In late 1939 and early 1940, he contributed two new still lifes to a major traveling exhibition titled The Art of Western Ukraine and the Hutsul Nation, which made stops in Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkhiv. He earned a living through various means, including by painting propaganda posters and large-format portraits of Soviet leaders.
Still, he was unwilling to give up his view of art and adopt the socialist realist style that was predominant in the Soviet Union, with backing from the state. According to an account by Teisseyre, the normally fairly reticent Nacht spoke publicly at a meeting of artists in Moscow, affirming the influence of 20th-century French art on his work. He said it had made a lasting mark on art all across Europe, much like the art of the Italian Renaissance had done in the 16th century. “Now, in the twentieth century, French art is the leading one. All I have to say to you, my Soviet colleagues, is that I have seen your contemporary painting, your exhibition to which you have taken us. Don’t getoffended, but this is German art from the midddle of the nieneteenth century.” (2)
Warsaw – life under the German occupation
The Nacht family’s financial circumstances, which had been quite stable until then, rapidly worsened after the German attack on the Soviet Union and the occupation of Lwów by German troops in late June 1941. Nacht’s mother had died a short time before. The city and the surrounding region of Eastern Galicia, previously part of Poland, were attached to the Nazi-administered General Government as the District of Lemberg. In just the first few days of the occupation, about 4,000 people, many of them of Jewish origin, were shot to death in the city. The German occupying forces established a camp for forced laborers, followed in November by a closed-off “Jewish residential district” (ghetto), where the Nacht family was forced to move as well. Unlike his family, though, Artur Nacht refused. He went into hiding instead.
In early 1942, he fled Lwów, traveling first to Kraków and then to Warsaw a short time later. Several artist friends of his, Józefa and Marian Wnuk and Jadwiga and Janusz Strałecki, helped him build a false non-Jewish identity under the name Stefan Ignacy Samborski. The first step was to obtain a fake ID. Later, in Warsaw, a priest issued a birth certificate, and Nacht obtained a certificate of membership in the Warsaw branch of the Association of Polish Graphic Artists. With his friends’ help, Nacht also managed to free his father and his siblings Marek and Stefania from the Lwów Ghetto. They survived the second world war and the Shoah in hiding in Warsaw. His second sister, Róża, and her husband were murdered in the ghetto in 1942, during one of the many raids and deportations.
Since Artur Nacht did not have the “typical Jewish” look in the eyes of the Nazis, he was able to move around relatively freely in the city. He tried to live a “normal” life to the extent possible. He frequented cafés and met with friends and artists of his acquaintance. Nacht also continued to paint, primarily flowers and still lifes, building on his prewar work. The war and the drastic circumstances in Poland at the time seem to have left no trace on these paintings. Several of Nacht’s works were displayed in early 1944 at an exhibit of Capist artists in Warsaw. During the Warsaw Uprising, in the summer of 1944, Nacht went into hiding at the villa of an artist friend, where he stayed until the Soviet troops moved into the country, in January 1945. Multiple friends and acquaintances were arrested in the course of the brutal suppression of the uprising, which cost about 200,000 civilian lives and laid waste to large portions of the city.
After the war
After the end of the second world war, Nacht decided to merge his two identities – his actual Jewish identity and the Polish one he had adopted for his own protection. From then on, he used the double name Nacht-Samborski, which he officially adopted in 1956. In 1946, he was hired as an adjunct professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. His friend Jan Strałecki, who was in charge of the academy, had arranged for the teaching position for him. A regular professorship was not possible at first, since Nacht had never finished his studies. He lived in the neighboring city of Sopot in those years.
He was appointed to a fixed-term professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1949, a position that was converted to a permanent extraordinary professorship in 1950. That year, his father and sister emigrated to Israel. Of his immediate family, only his brother remained in Poland. Nacht-Samborski suffered a career setback not long after that. After the Polish communist regime, under the influence of the Soviet Union, introduced socialist realism as the national art doctrine, his Colorism-style painting was no longer considered desirable at the academy. Nacht-Samborski was forced to retire on August 31, 1951. This strict line on art policy was loosened in Poland not long afterward, in 1952, and Nacht-Samborski was able to return to teaching under a contract at the academy in Warsaw in September of that year.
After Stalin’s death, in 1953, socialist realism grew even less important. The Ministry of Art and Culture awarded Nacht-Samborski a degree in painting in 1955 and appointed him to a full professorship at the academy, a position he held until 1968. The ministry forced him to retire that year. He had already reached retirement age, but Nacht-Samborski and his department had both been trying to keep him in office for another three years. The background behind his retirement was an anti-Semitic campaign carried out by the Communist Party in March of 1968, during which numerous people of Jewish origin were removed from office and lost other positions. Nacht-Samborski spent the next few years living a relatively quiet life in Warsaw, where he died on October 9, 1974.
After 1945, Artur Nacht-Samborski continued to paint primarily still lifes, female portraits, and nudes. His style continued to draw on Colorism, but starting in the 1950s increasingly also included elements of Expressionism and new artistic movements such as Art Informel. The continuities in his painting practice can be viewed as expressions of his own suppression of the terrible events of the war. There are hardly any direct connections to the Holocaust or his experiences under the German occupation in his works. After the war, however, his portraits often had strikingly mask-like features. This points to the artist grappling with the subject of constructed identity, which was crucial to his personal life as well.
His work was rarely seen outside Poland, and especially in the West, during the postwar period. Some of his paintings were displayed at the Venice Biennale in 1958. The artist refused to hold larger individual exhibitions of his works. The first individual exhibition was held at the National Museum in Warsaw in 1977, after his death. Another followed at the National Museum in Poznań and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in 1999.
By Andreas Eichmüller, research associate at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism
Sources
(1) https://culture.pl/en/artist/stefan-artur-nacht-samborski; August 20, 2020.
(2) Quoted according to Maria Zientara: Artur Nacht-Samborski, in: Zientara, Maria. Holocaust Survivors. Jonasz Stern, Erna Rosenstein, Artur Nacht-Samborski (Exhibition Catalogue, Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, 8 November 2012 – 7 April 2013), Kraków 2012, pp 94–118, 101.