Chair with Red Matter

The painter, graphic designer, and typographer Henryk Berlewi was born into an acculturated Warsaw family. He trained in Warsaw, Antwerp, and Paris and became known for his theater posters, book jackets, and page designs in Hebrew and Yiddish. In the 1920s, he took up constructivist abstraction, creating paintings that employed simple geometric forms. In 1928, after moving from Warsaw to Paris, he abandoned the avant-garde and began painting portraits and nudes in a figurative style. He survived the war in Nice, serving in the Resistance, and in 1957, he returned to painting abstract works. He is often considered a progenitor of optical art.