Nikifor

Nikifor (21 May 1895,Krynica-Zdrój, Austria-Hungary - 10 October 1968, Folusz, Poland) (also known as Nikifor Krynicki and Epifaniusz Drowniak¹) was a Lemko folk and naïve painter. Nikifor painted over 40,000 pictures - on sheets of paper, pages of notebooks, cigarette cartons, and even on scraps of paper glued together. The topics of his art include self-portraits and panoramas of Krynica, with its spas and Orthodox and Catholic churches. Underestimated for most of his life, in his late days he became famous as a naïve painter.

Little is known of Nikifor's private life. For most of his life, he lived alone in extreme poverty in Krynica, and was considered mentally challenged. He had difficulties speaking and was almost illiterate. It was not until his later years that it was discovered his tongue was in fact attached to his palate, causing his speech to be unintelligible to most people. In 1930, his first paintings were discovered by Roman Turyn, who brought them to Paris. That gained Nikifor some fame among the Kapists, a group of young painters formed around Józef Pankiewicz. This did not, however, change his fate, as his art was still underestimated in Poland. In 1938 Jerzy Wolff did publish an enthusiastic review of Nikifor's art in the (Polish) Arkady monthly, and purchased some of his works. However, the advent of World War II prevented Nikifor from gaining much popular notoriety.

In 1947 Nikifor was deported during Operation Vistula, where the Lemko and Ukrainian minorities were forcably resettled by the communist puppet regime to northern and western Poland, away from their ancestral homelands in the southeast. Three times he attempted to return to Krynica. He was actually exceptionally lucky that the authorities allowed him to stay the third time, as others who attempted to return to their native villages were often sent to the concentration camp in Jaworzno.

...
Wikipedia