Alfred Lenica was both a successful visual artist regarded as one of the foremost figures in the Polish avant-garde of the 20th century and a professional musician. He began his higher education in 1922 at the University of Poznań in the Department of Law and Economics. A year later, he enrolled at the Music Conservatory in the same city, where he studied string instruments. In 1925, he studied at Adam Hanytkiewicz's and J. Kubowicz's Private Institute of Fine Arts.

During World War II, Lenica lived with his family in Kraków, where he became friends with the artist Jerzy Kujawski. Thanks to him, Lenica became aware of surrealism and joined the avant-garde artists concentrated around Tadeusz Kantor.

Lenica's search for his own individual artistic style began in the 1940s during the war with small works on paper. For him, the dramatic wartime period in occupied Poland was the time when he dared to venture into the forbidden territory of avant-garde art and experimented with abstract art alongside future prominent Polish artists such as Kantor and Kujawski, among others. After the war, in 1947, Lenica was one of the co-founders of the Poznań group 4F+R (Forma – Form, Farba – Paint, Faktura – Texture, Fantastyka – Fantasy + Realizm – Realism), and a year later, thanks to his significant connections within the Polish art scene, he participated in the first modern art exhibition in Kraków.

By the late 1940s, Lenica ceased to paint representationally and figuratively, transitioning to creating dreamlike, desolate landscapes with a monumentalised and simplified form. Between 1945 and 1950, Lenica produced many war-related paintings that were shown without much attention, while quietly experimenting with fantastic, abstract images free from political messages, executed in various complex techniques with many types of paint, varnish, and ink; his first works in the spirit of tachisme. The surface of the canvas was covered with several layers of different kinds of paint and sealed with varnish. This method resembled Jackson Pollock's during the same period. In 1949, Lenica painted "Farby w ruchu" (Paints in Motion), a composition of freely flowing blobs of paint that is considered the first Polish Tachiste painting.

Although Lenica's paintings, at first glance, appear as a play with abstract forms built up of various colours, spots, lines, and dynamic groupings, the titles he gave the works encouraged a more thoughtful interpretation. The artist often emphasised that his primary goal was to find a way to communicate experiences and emotions that are difficult to define through painting. For him, this was also what made painting akin to music, his other life passion. He poignantly wrote on the back of one of his watercolours: “A drawing, a line, is the architecture of a painting, and the paint, colour – it's the music."