Henri Hayden, Landscape With The Church

HENRI HAYDEN
LANDSCAPE WITH THE CHURCH

HENRI HAYDEN
Warszawa 1883 – 1970 Paris
Pen and black ink on paper, signed and dated "HAYDEN 42"
29.5 x 47.5 cm / 11.4 x 18.5 inches,  with frame 66 x 79 cm / 26 x 31.1 inches

PROVENANCE
France, private collection

Henryk Hayden, one of the most prominent representatives of the ecole de Paris, came from an old Warsaw Jewish family (his birth name was Henryk Hayden-Wurcel). Despite all the efforts of the parents, who wanted to see in the son the successor of the family trading business, Hayden decides to devote his life to art. After receiving his initial education at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute, he entered the School of Fine Arts, where he entered the workshop of Konrad Krzyzanowski, one of the brightest representatives of Polish Symbolism. Having mastered the stylistic method of his teacher, which was largely formed from the adaptation of Edvard Munch's decorativeism, Hayden, already a fully formed painter, moved to Paris in 1907. In France, he organically merged into the vast Polish colony, traditionally living in France. Acquaintance with Władysław Ślewiński, a great friend of Paul Gauguin and a prominent representative of the Pont-Aven school, also influences the manner of the young artist. But the decisive factor for the artist is his own "discovery" of Cezanne, which completes the creative evolution of early Hayden from decorative symbolism to cubism.
Acquaintance with the painters of the "new style" Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gris, and especially with the "ideologist" of cubism Anre Salmon fully integrated Hayden into the artistic world of Paris and pushed him to a contract with one of the best galleries in the French capital - Galerie de L'Effort moderne operated by Léonce Rosenberg.
The interwar period for Hayden was the time of his greatest success. After the contract with Rosenberg, (which in many ways strengthened the growing popularity), there followed successful solo exhibitions organized in the Leopold Zborowski galleries in 1923, Bernheim in 1928, in Drouant in 1933. Hayden's collaboration with Jadwiga Zak, the widow of one of the most famous Polish painters of early Cubism, Eugeniusz Zak, was especially fruitful. Madame Zach, who specialized in promoting Eastern European and Latin American avant-garde artists (in particular, she was the first to organize a solo exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky, and her constant "favorites" were Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani and Jules Pascin) regularly exhibited Hayden's works, including including in two solo exhibitions in 1928 and 1933.
The Second World War found Hayden in Paris. Unlike many of his friends who remained in Paris (such as Jadwiga Zak, who was later arrested along with her sons and deported to Auschwitz. Where she died in 1944), he leaves the French capital and first moves to Auvergne where he meets Robert Delaunay and later, in 1943, at Roussillon in Vaucluse, where he shares a shelter with his friend the writer Samuel Beckett.
After the war, Hayden returned to Paris, where he opened his own art studio. He leaves practically his Cubist style, and his style evolves towards laconic decorativeism.
Already in the early period of his work Hayden began to regularly turn to the landscape genre - an example of which can be found in works performed in an absolutely cubist manner, such as "The Factory" in 1911 (Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries) (Fig. 1) or "View at Saint Lunaire "1911 from York Art Gallery. The artist enthusiastically works with large object planes, achieving an emphasized monumentality of landscapes.
The drawing "Landscape with a Church", dated 1942, was executed during the most intense period for the artist's life - the time of his forced flight from occupied Paris, marked by his wanderings in the south of France. Despite attempts to identify the area, this species, despite its topographic accuracy, remains unknown. Meanwhile, this work is interesting for us as a result of "conservative evolution", Hayden's style from mature cubism to the aesthetics of late impressionism. Perhaps the nature of the South of France, praised by Hayden's brilliant predecessor Paul Cézanne, pushed the artist to change his style? The ability to generalize the visible, an artistic technique well known to Hayden from many years of painting practice in Cubism, finds a different embodiment in this case - the artist thinks in terms of large landscape planes, opposing them with a clearly recognizable accent in the form of an old church.
Before entering the gallery, the drawing was in a private collection in the South of France.

Wladyslaw MAXIMOWICZ

RELATED LITERATURE
Les Muses, encyclopédie des arts, Éditions Gtange-Batellière, 1969-1974.
Dictionnaire universel de la peinture, Le Robert, 1975.
Pierre Mazars, Jean-Marie Dunoyer et Jean Selz, L'année de la peinture, Calmann-Lévy, 1980.
Françoise Woimant, Marie-Cécile Miessner et Anne Mœglin-Delcroix, De Bonnard à Baselitz, estampes et livres d'artistes, B.N.F., 1992.
Patrick-F. Barrer, L'histoire du Salon d'automne de 1903 à nos jours, Arts et Images du Monde, 1992.
Gérald Schurr, Le guidargus de la peinture, Les Éditions de l'Amateur, 1996.
Emmanuel Bénézit, Dictionnaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs, Gründ, 1999.
Christian de Bartillat, Deux amis. Becket et Hayden, Etrepilly, Les presses du village, 2000.
Jean-Pierre Delarge, Dictionnaire des arts plastiques modernes et contemporains, Gründ, 2001.
Philippe Chabert et Christophe Zagrodzki, Hayden, Paris, Fragments éditions, 2005.
Christophe Zagrodzki, HENRI HAYDEN 1883-1970, Société Historique et Littéraire Polonaise, 2013.
Artur Winiarski, Henri Hayden Mistrzowie Ecole de Paris, Muza, Varsovie, 2013.
Nadine Nieszawer, Deborah, Arthur et Boric Princ, Marie Boyé-Taillan et Paul Fogel (préface de Claude Lanzmann), Artistes juifs de l'École de Paris, 1905-1939, Éditions Somogy, 2015.