Stanisław Noakowski

Stanisław Noakowski was a Polish architect, watercolor painter and art historian. He was educated as an architect at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg from 1886-94 and then traveled in Italy and Greece on a scholarship. After rejecting a proposal to take the chair for architecture at the Warsaw Technical University, he lived in Moskva until 1918. There he worked as a curator and lecturer at the Museum of Industrial Art. In 1906, he was appointed professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

After the October Revolution, Noakowski became a member of the Council of Performing Arts of the People’s Commissariat for National Education but returned to Warszawa before the end of 1918 to become an architecture professor at Polytechnical University, and for some time held the post of a dean. As a draftsman and watercolorist he mainly produced large cycles of architectural drawings depicting Old Russian architecture, French palaces, classic antique architecture, and buildings and art treasures destroyed in World War I in Poland. During his lectures Noakowski drew pictures with chalk on the blackboard, of which only a few have survived. He died in 1928, the year of the Amsterdam Olympics.

At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics Noakowski participated in the Art Competitions in the category Drawing and Water Colors with a series of 18 drawings under the title Free Architectural Designs of a Painter. Most of them, except for the tournament drawings, came from the cycles Olimpiada I (1924, created in connection with the Olympic Games in Paris) and Olimpiada II (1928, in connection with the Amsterdam Olympics). Like his other drawings, Noakowski produced them in ink and sepia. Many of these works are now in the National Museum in Warsaw. The formats are about 48 x 52-62 cm.