The magnificent watercolour art by Grzegorz Wrobel

Grzegorz Wrobel, born on March 11th, 1983 studied and graduated architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology. His interest in watercolours started at the age of 12 and although using drawings and watercolours at the university he gained his exceptional skills and style from own study. 

By controlling the water his art shows fresh colours, reflections and atmosphere. Grzegorz developed his own precise technique to capture lights, shadows and realistic motions among architecture structures. Check out his impressive style and more artwork here.

Source: WATERart, http://grzegorz-wrobel.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=1 (photos used with artists permission)

Czeslaw Niemen

Czeslaw Niemen (1939 - 2004), real name Czeslaw Juliusz Wydrzycki, was born in Stare Wasiliszki, Poland (now Belarus). He made his debut in the early 1960s and soon become one of the most important Polish singer-songwriters, progressive musicians and jazz-rock fusion artists of the last quarter-century. His song, "Dziwny jest ten swiat" (1967) is commonly known as the most important Polish protest song of that era. In 1972 an English version called "Strange is this world" was recorded.

Niemen was a composer and singer. He played guitar, hammond organ, mellotron and moog synthesizers on his records. In the early 1970s, CBS label released three of his records in English language.

Later, Niemen composed film soundtracks and theater music and showed interest in art.

In his career Niemen achieved huge success,
got many awards and the first golden record in
Poland in 1967. He won the Sopot International
Song Festival in 1979. "Legendary actress and singer Marlene Dietrich was so astonished by Niemen's performance while visiting Warsaw in
1964 that she asked him for permission to sing his
song "Czy mnie jeszcze pamietasz" ("Do You Still Remember Me"). It was later re-titled as
"Mutter, hast du mir vergeben". His song
"Pielgrzym" ("The Pilgrim") was re-mixed
and used in  "The Test" by Chemical Brothers."
(IMDB, 2002)



Sources: Czeslaw Niemen - http://niemen.xt.pl , IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0631116/bio

Pola Negri and the Golden Era of Hollywood

Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec (aka Pola Negri) was born in Poland in 1894, although some sources state 1897. She was a Polish film actress who achieved huge international fame in silent films in the most extravagant and glamorous era between 1910s and 1930s.
When she was young she trained to become a ballerina but her delicate health forced her to stop dancing. Later Apolonia attended the Warsaw Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts and after two years of study she became a stage actress. By the end of World War I she had established herself as a popular actress in Warsaw, appearing in several films. During that time, she adopted the pseudonym "Pola Negri," after the Italian poetess, Ada Negri. Pola appeared in a variety of films made by the Warsaw film industry, including The Wife (Żona), The Beast (Bestia), Students (Studenci), Street Ruffian's Lover (Kochanka apasza) and the Mysteries of Warsaw series. In 1917, her popularity provided her with an opportunity to move to Berlin, Germany, where she appeared in several successful films for film directors of the UFA agency, including Max Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch.

In 1922 she was offered a contract with Hollywood studios and the following year settled in the U.S. Her exotic style of glamour proved popular with audiences during the 1920s and her affairs with such notable actors as Charles Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino ensured that she remained in the public eye.
Pola Negri become one of the most popular and richest Hollywood actresses of the movie industry at the time. She started several ladies fashion trends and was a favorite photography subject of Eugene Robert Richee, the famous Hollywood portrait photographer.

Negri caused a media sensation in 1926 after the death of Valentino by announcing that they had planned to marry. She was following the train that carried his body from New York City to Los Angeles, posing for photographers at every stop. In 1928, Negri made her last film for Paramount Pictures entitled The Woman from Moscow, opposite actor Norman Kerry. The film was only Negri's second talkie (the first being Loves of an Actress, also released in 1928) and Paramount declined to renew her contract after audiences allegedly had difficulty understanding her dialog because of her heavy Polish accent.

Pola Negri with Charlie Chaplin

She made only a few films after 1930, and worked mainly in England and Germany, where she acted in several films for the UFA. In 1951, Negri became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Pola Negri has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to Motion Pictures. She died in 1987 and left most of her estate to St. Mary’s University in Texas and to Polish nuns of the Seraphic Order.



Sources: Pola Negri Appreciation site - http://www.polanegri.com , IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0624470/bio , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pola_Negri ,

K-202 Minicomputer by Jacek Karpinski 1972

K-202 was a multi-tasking 16-bit, dual bus, modular minicomputer constructed by the Polish pioneer in computer science and engineering Jacek Karpinski in 1972. The fourth generation computer was invented far ahead of its time.
It was the first Polish modular computing system with integrated circuits and first to use the paging technique to increase the memory capacity. The machine was built in co-operation with Polish and English companies but again because of the political situation occurring at that time in Poland, (apart from 30 units that were sold), it was never mass-produced.

Feat.: Multiprogramming: ASSK, BASIC, FORTRAN IV, CSL, BICEPS, CEMMA, MOST -2, COMIT, TRAFOK (a conversational language for algebraic problems),...

 
Multi-user operating system, Multiprocessing, supposed to be able to address up to 8MB of RAM.
For more details please check the original K 202 Handbook by MB Metals Limited, Sussex (scanned by Ryszard Zenker)


Source:
http://www.zenker.poznan.pl/k-202/

Czerwone Gitary - heyday years 1965 - 1970

Czerwone Gitary

Czerwone Gitary - one of the most successful Polish bands from the 1960s. Sometimes referred as the Polish Beatles.

The band was founded in 1965 in Gdansk. Their debut album called "To wlasnie my" (Engl. It's us) was released in 1966. From then every following album up till 1970 sold a record number of units. In that time the band achieved the greatest success.

Czerwone Gitary (Engl. Red Guitars) received various Polish awards, won the 1969 MIDEM trophy based on their record sales and in the same year the "Billboard" magazine award.



Line up in 1966:

• Seweryn Krajewski - vocal / guitar
• Krzysztof Klenczon - guitar / vocal
• Jerzy Kossela - guitar / vocal
• Bernard Dornowski - bass / vocal
• Jerzy Skrzypczyk - drums / vocal

 

NAGRA – analogue audio recorders by Stefan Kudelski

Nagra III + Sela mixer

Stefan Kudelski the creator of professional portable audio recorders NAGRA was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1929. Both of his parents had engineering background. His father’s field of work was in the chemical industry and mother was an anthropologist. In 1939 the family fled Poland to escape German Nazi invasion. They travelled through Romania and Hungary to settle in South France where Stefan continued his education and his father took an active part in French Resistance as an officer. The resistance network fell in 1943 and the Kudelski family escaped to Switzerland. For the contributions and their activities during this period both parents were honoured with French Croix de Guerre.

In Switzerland Stefan Kudelski enrolled in studies at the Ecole Florimont in Geneva and quickly become interested in technology and electronics. He built a small laboratory at home and experimented with high frequency oscillators generating extra high tension. Later invented an instrument for measuring the accuracy of watches. Although no commercial interest was made, he took out several patents of his ideas. From 1948 he studied physics and engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique de I’Universite de Lausanne and at the same time started experimenting with magnetic recording. In 1950 he made the first prototype of a tape recorder with spring motor and miniature tubes and called it NAGRA. The word ‘NAGRA’ comes from Stefan Kudelski’s mother tongue (Polish) and stands for "will record".

Nagra III

A year later Kudelski’s NAGRA participated in The First International amateur Recording Contest in Lausanne and won the first price. The sound quality was good enough for the radio studios, but quite poor compared with modern standards. The recorder was constantly perfected and in 1953 ‘NAGRA II’, an improved version with incorporated mechanical filters was released. The movie industry become interested and ‘NAGRA II’ was used during a shooting to the first full length feature film called ‘Black Orpheus’. In 1957 a transistorised version of ‘NAGRA III’, which allowed synchronized recording (camera + tape) was launched and became a technological revelation. 

The ‘NAGRA’ recorders continued with the series IV-L, 4.2, IV-S, T-Audio, SN, SNN, SNS, SNST, SNST-R, IV STC, D, V all with the reputation for extreme ruggedness and reliability. NAGRA become the standard sound recording systems used by reporters, radio and film studios from the early sixties until the nineties. 

Nagra recorders series

Stefan Kudelski received many awards during his career: Academy Awards (Oscars) in 1965, 1977, 1978 and 1990, two entertainment industry awards an ‘Emmy’, Gold Medals from L. Warner, AES (Audio Engineering Society), Lyra and Eurotechnica. In 2008 during the ‘Polish Film Festival in America' (PFFA) Stefan Kudelski received ‘Wings Award’ for his achievements.

‘Wings Award’ – the award to the artists and film professionals of Polish descent for their outstanding contribution to the art of film beyond Poland.

Sources: http://www.filmsoundsweden.se/backspegel/kudelski.html, http://tripatlas.com/Nagra, http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Kudelski

photo sources: http://www.nagraaudio.com/pro/pages/informationHistory.php, http://p.g.elec.pagespro-orange.fr/Le%20magnetophone.htm, http://www.adhocsound.be/?page_id=8

Art Deco by Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka (1898 – 1980), maiden name: Maria Gorska was the most fashionable and glamour Art Deco portrait painter of her generation. She was born into a wealthy family, her mother was a Polish socialite and her father Jewish with Russian ancestry. She grew up in partitioned Poland, was educated in Switzerland. Her first contact with art was in winter of 1911 in Italy while visiting her grandmother. A year later her parents separated and Maria went to live with her Aunt in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she met her future husband Tadeusz Lempicki. In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, she managed a release of Tadeusz who was arrested and prisoned by the Bolsheviks. They traveled to Copenhagen, London and Paris, where her family had also escaped.

 

The new start in Paris was not easy, the money was short, child was born, so she took painting lessons, changed her name to Tamara de Lempicka and soon became well known fashionable portrait painter. With fame and fortune de Lempicka began to change her lifestyle, she divorced Tadeusz and met Baron Raoul Kuffner, an Austro-Hungarian royal who collected her paintings. They married and as the Second World War was due to begin both moved to Los Angeles where Tamara continued painting. She sponsored her own solo exhibitions, became friends with Hollywood stars and was nicknamed: “The Baroness with a Brush.” In 1943 both moved to New York and Tamara stopped painting and disappeared from the art world. 20 years later she tried again venturing into abstract art, but with no success and her husband’s sudden death, de Lempicka gave up on painting and moved to Houston, Texas to live near her daughter, who moved there in 1941.

De Lempicka art enjoyed a renaissance in the 1970s and her art was rediscovered by the art world, but she moved one more time to Cuernavaca, Mexico and died in her sleep in 1980. Her wish to be cremated and to spread her ashes on the top of the volcano Popocatepetl was fulfilled.

Her style was influenced by avant-garde art movement referred as soft cubism. Her technique was novel, precise, symmetrical and elegant. After her death her work experienced an enormous surge in popularity in 1990s. Famous collectors of her work are: Madonna, Jack Nicholson and Barbara Streisand,.. (In 1994, Barbara Streisand sold the artist's Adam and Eve for $1.8 million, a painting she had purchased in 1984 for $135,000.)

Sources:

“Tamara Łempicka” Malarze.com, website, http://malarze.com/plartysta.php?id=134&biografia=f, "Artist: Tamara de Lempicka," SOHO Art website,http://www.soho-art.com,"Bio: Tamara de Lempicka," CGFA: A Virtual Art Musuem
website,http://cgfa.sunsite.dk , "Tamara de Lempicka (1898 - 1980)," Good Art website,http://www.goodart.org , "Tamara de Lempicka: Biography, History," Art City website,http://www.artcity.com