The Helena Modjeska Art and Culture Club is pleased to invite the members of the Club to an evening lecture and reception in the hospitable residence of Elżbieta and Jan Iwańczyk on Saturday, April 23, 2022 at 5:30 p.m. We will hold our Easter party (a week after Easter) and two lectures on art presented by Adam Lubas, collector of military memorabilia and historical Polish weapons, as well as our newest member, Dr. Izabella Żuralska-Yeager, an eminent art historian, fluent in four languages, and a long-time employee of the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Żuralska-Yeager will tell us about the most interesting collections of the Getty Institute that she worked on, and about the Polonics in this museum. Mr. Lubas will discuss his collection, show photos of the most unique items in his possession, and bring some examples of Polish militaria.
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Dr. Isabella Zuralski-Yeager is from Warsaw, Poland. In 1984, she graduated in Art History, Film Studies, and Slavic Philology at the University of Cologne in West Germany. She wrote her doctoral dissertation about the work of the Polish painter of the Symbolism period, Jacek Malczewski. After receiving her diploma, fate led her to Los Angeles, where in 1989 she began working at the Getty Research Institute on inventories of old prints and art history related archives. She wrote inventories of materials demanding a range of knowledge and expertise, from old European engravings and woodcuts to notes of the Russian artist and Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky, or documents evidencing art looting for Hitler during the Nazi occupation of Holland.
Dr. Zuralski-Yeager often presented most interesting objects from a given collection to curatorial and research staff from the Getty Research Institute and invited guests. Her numerous articles, inspired by Getty collections, are published online in the Getty Center’s magazine The Iris and the prestigious Getty Research Journal. After more than thirty years of work as an archivist, Isabella Zuralski-Yeager retired but she continues to explore the Getty collections working on her own art history projects and contributing entries to the Art Market Dictionary, an encyclopedia of the British publishing house Bloomsbury. The grandfather of Dr. Zuralski, Tadeusz Żuralski (1894-1940) was a physician and an officer in the Polish Army, murdered in Katyn. The whole family was forced to emigrate in the early 1970s.
Polish kings' coronatioan sword, "Szczerbiec."
Adam Lubas is a psychologist and psychotherapist licensed in California as well as a member of the Society of Admirers of Ancient Weapons and Colors in Krakow (Stowarzyszenia Miłośników Dawnej Broni i Barwy), L’ASSOCIATION FRANCAISE DES COLLECTIONNEURS DE BAÏONNETTES A. F. C. B. , the club "Hetman" of collectors of Polish military memorabilia named after Andrzej Zaremba in New York. He is a noted collector of Polish military artefacts, specializing in firearms and blades (swords, sabres, and similar weapons).
Polish sabre from 1917.
