(b Czortków, Podolia, 27 May 1909; d Paris, 22 June 1949). Polish painter. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1926–9) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1929–34). As a student he joined the Kraków group. His early work was clearly influenced by Chagall and Chaïm Soutine. He produced many watercolours and drawings, views of his native Czortków and studies of Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Kraków. In his oil paintings (still-lifes and landscapes) he employed excessively synthetic form and bold outline, which divides the composition into an arrangement of fields filled with saturated colour, as in Landscape with Dwellings and a Tree (1934). In time he turned to abstract compositions, for example Yellow Triangle (1934). In the drawing entitled Demonstration (1935) the crowd attacked by the policemen changes into a two-dimensional arrangement of interwoven lines. After leaving Kraków in 1935, Blonder ran a Jewish children’s theatre in Bielsko. He then moved to Warsaw and in 1937 settled permanently in Paris. In 1937 he was expelled from the Union of Polish Plastic Artists for his Communist activities. In France during World War II he adopted the name Blondel and in 1940 joined the Resistance. After the war he lived in Paris and Sète, in southern France. He became a member of the Artistes Méridionaux group. In his post-war works (landscapes of Sète and abstract pictures) the former bold outline and forceful, static composition are replaced with light strokes and a subtle, unforced field of colour.

• Blonder, Sasza
  • Kraków group