Jan Lebenstein was a Polish painter and graphic artist who was born in 1930 and died in 2000. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and made his debut in the Polish National Exhibition of Young Visual Arts in 1955. In 1956, he linked up with the independent Tarczyńska Street Theatre and had his first solo exhibition, which showcased his drafted figures and hieratic figures. The originality of his highly personal figural art formula, which was saturated with existential fears, drew the recognition of French critics, who awarded him the Grand Prix at the First International Biennale of Young Artists in Paris in 1959. He eventually settled in France and became a French citizen in 1971.

Lebenstein was inspired by great texts of world culture and believed that the road to modernity led through the processing of tradition. He was fascinated by the mythologies of ancient civilizations, such as Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Greece, as well as the Bible. This inspired him to create works that reflected an apocalyptic vision of the world, such as “Zoology Lesson”, which was a personal myth about the derivation and animalistic nature of humans. Lebenstein focused mainly on erotic aspects and themes, such as the Great Mother and the Great Vamp, as well as on the concept of Thanatos. He created strange creatures barely recognizable as being of "human derivation," caricaturing "human fauna" and pre-evolutionary representatives of archaic tribes.

At around the same time, Lebenstein created a series of paintings that portrayed “prehistoric” animals and imagined “vertebrates”. He drew inspiration for subsequent works from this rich, baroque bestiary. His compositions of this time were carefully and arduously formed, almost sculpted in wrinkled, dough-like layers of paint, and radiant with a subtle richness of pictorial effects.