MARIA PAPA ROSTKOWSKA, (1923-2008)
was born in Warsaw, where she studied architecture and fine arts. In 1943, she married Ludwik Rostkowski Jr, a young politician, Vice President of Polish Democratic Youth Organization (« Stronnictwo Demokratyczne »), a leading participant in saving the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto for which he was awarded the Medal of Rightful. During the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, she joined the Underground and actively participated in combats against the Nazis. After the War she was awarded the Medal of Virtuti Militari by the Polish Army. Her only child, Nicolas Rostkowski, was born in 1945. In 1947, she received a grant from the French Government, later renewed by UNESCO, to study and work in Paris.
1n 1950, she became a widow, her husband dying tragically in the Stalinist repression in Poland. She left Warsaw and was appointed Assistant Professor in the Fine Arts Department of Sopot University (Gdansk), from 1950 to 1953, and thereafter Associate Professot at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
She participated in numerous exhibitions and also executed murals in the Old City of Lublin (south-eastern Poland) for which she was awarded the Prize of the State of Poland.
In 1957, with the assistance of Edouard Pignon, she emigrated to France where in 1958, she married Gualtieri Papa di San Lazzaro, owner and managing director of the leading Parisian Gallery « XXème Siècle », and publisher of the famous « Revue XXe Siècle »,and « Editions XXe Siècle . She settled in France and Italy. Around « XXème Siècle » gathered a number of prominent artists and personalities who became her friends : Miro, Chagall, Hartung et Anna Eva Bergman, Serge et Marcelle Poliakoff, Estève, Marino Marini, Henry Moore, Dubuffet, Soulages, Pignon, Magnelli, Signori, Emile et Babet Gilioli, Arp, Anita et Roger Vieillard, Istrati et Natalia Dumitresco, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Guadagnucci, Ionesco, Vittorio de Sica, Cesare Zavattini, Nina Kandinsky, Sonia Delaunay, André Verdet, Alicia Penalba, Olivier Debré, Music, Roberto Crippa, Scanavino, Cesar, Adolf Rudnicki, Krajcberg, Sutherland, Bona de Mandiargues…
Giuseppe and Costanza Capogrossi, Lam, Vittorio di Sica, Signori, Agam, Sonia Delaunay, André Verdet…
She executed many sculptures in terra cotta and bronze and participated in a very significant number of exhibitions in France and Italy. In 1966, she was invited to the Marble Symposium at Henraux & Marble Industries in Querceta (Versilia, Italy). Her encounter with marble was a landmark in her work as she decided to concentrate on marble sculptures from then on. In the same year she received the Copley Award for Sculpture.
Gualtieri di San Lazzaro wrote in one of his articles that she selected marble, this noble material, in the very years when the artists of her generation insisted it was necessary to use exclusively the new plastic materials which in their eyes symbolized the dynamism and genius of modernity.
Encouraged by Carlo Cardazzo, Lucio Fontana, Miro and Arp, she
« found in Versilia the antique marble in which sculptures sleep »
(« Gualtieri di San Lazzaro »).
She lives in Pietrasanta where she works, visited frequently by her son Nicolas Rostkowski with his wife Joëlle and daughter Edith--Laure, in a circle of old friends such as Rosetta Corsetti, Guido Belli, Dr Consoglioni and surrounded in her studio by sculptures and cats.
Throughout the years she held numerous exhibitions in Western Europe, Poland and Russia. Her works are in private, church and state collections in France, the United States, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland, Japan and Russia. Several of her sculptures are on public display, in particular in the city of Paris. Three of her monumental sculptures (The kiss, The lion and The Seated lady) were donated in June 2009 by Nicolas Rostkowski to the Polish State and are since then on a permanent display in the parc of the National Museum of Poland at Krolikarnia in Warsaw.
Thank you www.mariapapa.fr
