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From Poland: An emerging artist

Not yet available on Amazon.com, Rafal Olbinski's exciting book on women must be ordered from Poland. Because the book contains graphic material, the Post recommends parental guidance to purchasers in homes with young children. Available from the publisher, Polpharma, Warsaw, Poland.

This Olbinski poster for Verdiâ€™s opera La Traviata appeared in front of the Lincoln Center, New York.

Also see

• Photo gallery: Rafal Olbinski Women

From the March/April 2006 Issue

Motifs and Variations: Rafal Olbinski Women
176 pages, $50.00

Next to God, we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth having," wrote the oft-quoted American author and editor Christian Bovee. That sentiment is borne out throughout the history of art, where the feminine motif has been as potent a force for artistic inspiration as has the world's religions.

Shakespeare said, "Women are the books, the arts, the academies, that show, contain, and nourish all the world." That sentiment is foremost in the works of a rising new Polish-American illustrator, Rafal Olbinski, whose art is now available in a new book, Motifs and Variations: Rafal Olbinski Women.

Olbinski's surrealistic style and his graphic use of metaphor have made him a popular cover illustrator for European and American magazines. He is also an accomplished poster designer. His posters commissioned by the New York City Opera have been a catalyst for his intense focus on women, since opera is primarily about and revolves around female characters. Olbinski's personal favorite is his poster for Verdi's La Traviata, in which a man in coat and tails forms the mouth of a sleeping lady. In another, for Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti, a woman's long blond hair morphs into hands holding the sides of her head in painâ€"an echo of Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Scream.

In his art paintings, Olbinski's women are beautiful, but his depictions of them are not portraits. The women instead become part of the sceneryâ€"woman as interior, woman as landscape, and woman as dreamscape. Flat like posters, his images are mostly devoid of sentiment, but not of a certain calculating beauty filled with images and references drawn from famous works by Picasso, Degas, Goya, VelÃ¡zquez, da Vinci, and Botticelli, to name some, as well as from Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine, and the Bible. The paintings are puzzles, and the fun of them lies in tracing their literary, historical, and artistic references and possibly discovering their meaning.

"I am not particularly exploring the intellectual side," Olbinski says about his women. "I have plenty of paintings about relationships, but 90 percent of the time I am taking the side of the womanâ€"making fun of myself as a man, this kind of ridiculous machismo."

In addition to beautiful women, clouds and trees appear frequently throughout Olbinski's works. Trees, he notes, are nature's magnificent sculptures. Clouds, he says, he could paint all day long.

The book includes helpful commentary on Olbinski's paintings by New York cultural writer Matthew Gurewitsch, as well as a conversation with The New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Weschler in which Olbinski talks about his early life and influences growing up in communist Poland, and of his rise to prominence as an artist.

-- Ted Kreiter

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