Strike

'Strike' (1910) belongs to a brief but significant wave of socially engaged Polish painting produced in the decade following the 1905 revolution, when industrialisation and labour unrest were reshaping the Russian-occupied Kingdom of Poland. Warsaw's factories had become flashpoints for worker organisation, and the strikes of 1905–1907 left a vivid mark on Polish cultural memory. Lentz, primarily celebrated for his portraiture of Warsaw's intellectual and bourgeois elite, here turned toward the working class — a shift that carried both artistic risk and social statement. The subject of striking workers was politically charged under Russian censorship; depicting collective action sympathetically required careful framing. Lentz worked within the realist tradition that treated labour subjects with dignified seriousness rather than sentimental condescension, aligning his approach with Western models such as Courbet and Käthe Kollwitz. The 1910 date suggests the painting responds to the aftermath rather than the heat of the 1905 events, viewing labour conflict with a degree of historical distance. Held by the National Museum in Warsaw, the work remains an unusually direct engagement with social politics from a painter whose career otherwise centred on individual portrait commissions.

The composition likely employs the massed-figure structure characteristic of Lentz's mature style, grouping workers to convey collective solidarity. His palette in genre scenes favours sombre earth tones — dark blues, blacks, and charcoals — that read as working dress while reinforcing the painting's grave emotional register. Paint handling is firm and deliberate.