Eugeniusz Zak

He befriended many Polish artists there, including Roman Kramsztyk, Wacław Borowski, Leopold Gottlieb, Jerzy Merkel, Elie Nadelman, Mela Muter, Tytus Czyżewski and Zygmunt Menkes.

The French government purchased of one of his paintings for the Musée du Luxembourg (1910), he organized a one-man show at Galerie Druet (1911), he was connected with important personalities of Parisian cultural life, including the critics Adolf Basler and André Salmon, and he became an exhibiting member of the Société Normande de Peinture Moderne.

He visited Berlin and later Bonn, where he carried out a commission to decorate the interior of the villa of the architect Fritz August Breuhaus with paintings.

[citation needed] From the beginning, Żak expressed his artistic temperament through a sophisticated application of line, referring in his sanguine portraits to works by Leonardo, Botticelli, Holbein and Dürer.

In the early stage of his career, he approached the style of the Nabis, through the manipulation of flat areas, enclosed within distinct contours and faded, slightly matte colors.

Their physiognomies recall the profiles of ancient Greek art, with the nose angled straight from the forehead and distinctly outlined eyes, while the faces bear a languorous, nostalgic expression.

Żak, like Modigliani, by means of sophisticated drawing and a poetic imagination with a romantic tint, created a very special "human race" found only in the figures of his pictures.

They enter an interesting dialogue with achievements of certain representatives of the German New Objectivity, and also some of the Italians from the Valori Plastici group, though by no means can we speak here of direct influences.

Around 1917-1920 social outsiders, the nostalgic loners who spend their lives in saloons or interiors with scanty furniture, replaced the earlier fishermen and their families, sailors, and merchants.

The important feature of Żak's grammar of forms was his treatment of the human silhouette, which the painter endowed with elongated proportions that had little in common with those of the real models, a mannerist over-emphasis on contrapposto, and dance-like postures usually ascribed to marionettes or dummies rather than to people.

His late paintings seemed to open a new chapter in his oeuvre: he now began to draw on the color and painterly effects of the Impressionists (primarily those of Renoir) once so much despised by him.