2025 has been declared the year of Olga Boznańska. This year marks the 160th anniversary of the birth and the 85th anniversary of the death of this outstanding painter, who became an icon of women's artistic emancipation. The auction at DESA Unicum aims to celebrate the first lady of Polish painting, but also to commemorate the work of other important female artists from the late 18th century, through the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and the interwar period, ending with the decades after the war.



Olga Boznańska's art was based on color as the basic building block of the painting. The artist developed her own individual style based on light, vibrant paint that blended the model's figure with the surrounding space into a single, integral pictorial whole. The grayish-silver and cool tones of paint applied to roughly primed gelatin cardboard and the diffused and subdued light became a distinctive feature of her painting. The main domain of Boznańska's work was portraiture, in which she reached the psychological depths of her models, but she also created still lifes and views of her studio interiors.

The offer includes four oil paintings by Olga Boznańska, including two floral still lifes exhibited at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung in 1899 and at the 21st Venice Biennale in 1938, as well as three photographs showing Olga Boznańska in her Paris studio at 49 Boulevard Montparnasse. One of them was taken by the eminent French photographer Henri Manuel. The catalog of 50 items also includes works by Anna Rajecka, the first Polish woman to pursue painting professionally and exhibit at the Paris Salon; Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa, an outstanding portraitist who came to Paris to study art a decade before Boznańska; Tamara Łempicka, an icon of art deco, as well as Mela Muter, Alicja Halicka, Irena Hassenberg (Reno), Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska, Zofia Piramowicz, Zofia Stankiewicz, Małgorzata Łada-Maciągowa, Irena Łuczyńska-Szymanowska, and many others.