Visual Arts

Jerzy Panek: Self-Portrait im a White Hat III; woodcut, 64 x 49 cm

Nineteenth-century Polish painting developed under the influence of great Romantic poetry: Matejko, Grottger, and later Malczewski and Wyspiañski, created a real canon of Polish symbols, to which succeeding generations still refer.

The social role of art was a challenge and a burden for Polish artists. Polish culture's central problem, freedom, entailed also fighting for artistic sovereignty and the autonomy of art. The reconstruction of the Polish state after 1918 ran together with the search for a "Polish road to independence in Art". Art no longer had to be custodian of the national memory, so it began to reach towards international patterns, adding local significance to them. This was the path of the interwar groupings "Polish Formalists", or "Rhythm", whose achievement was a synthesis of Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and the home-grown influences of folk art. This style was fruitfully employed chiefly in functional art and architecture. The success of handicrafts and poster art, the popularity of the "Zakopane style" and the "Country House style" is the Polish input into the elegant international convention of art déco.

Another important current of these times was Constructivism, the Polish variety of the progressive avant-garde. The artists gathered together in groups such as "Block", "Praesens", and "a.r." linked a belief in progress and reason with a thirst to experiment. Into the visual landscape of the country, they wanted to introduce order, discipline and functionalism. The group of colourists also laid out new tasks for themselves. Painters from the "Paris Committee" outlined their aim as a change in Poles' tastes. Referring to French Postimpressionism, they fought for the quality and independence of painting. After the Second World War, they dominated in art schools, and the aesthetic doctrine of colourism turned out to be one of the more influential and long lasting.

A key stage, fundamental to understanding Polish mentality, is the years of the Second World War. The trauma of the occupation, the experience of the camps, deportations, executions, the tragedy of the Holocaust, all appear in Polish art, literature and film to this day, an ever-present point of reference, an eternal memento. The first few years after the war, before the decreeing of socialist realism, is one of the most interesting periods in Polish art. The view of these years was coloured by the "Cracow Group", artists who had come from the Occupation Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor. His thoughts about "independence under all conditions" were essential for the history of post-war art. The work of the "Cracow Group" is the art of the "domesticated avant-garde", linking the necessity for contemporaneity with a loyalty to tradition. Spatial searching and lyrical metaphor on the borders of abstraction enable us to name this Polish variety of surrealism "Metaphorical Painting".

The Stalinist years were a period of obedient, manipulated art. At that time, there was a Europe-wide discussion concerning the idea of realism and the great, monumental style - the Polish response was the art of the "Self-educating Group" with Andrzej Wróblewski, the proposal of a strong, harsh figuration expressing the tragedy of war and the post-war dreariness. The current known as "Socially engaged art" was started by artists exhibiting in Warsaw's "Arsenal" in 1955, who fought for the right to spontaneity and a tragic vision of the world, painting aggressive, pointed pictures following the conventions of Expressionism. The "Arsenal" legend has survived as an attitude, an ethos of non-neutral art, a witness to the times reminding us of the wronged person.

The political thaw at the end of the Fifties brought fascination with the world movement of informel, and also a so-called "painting of matter". The best example of this is the original oeuvre of the "Nowa Huta group", or the paintings of Jan Lebenstein, who was the discovery of the Paris Biennale in 1959. Since the Sixties, in spite of political interference and the limitations imposed by Communist censorship, Polish art developed parallel with European, experiencing successive stages: new figuration, conceptualism, performance art, minimal-art. The link with the living "contemporary impulse" was nurtured by independent galleries and avant-garde artists. Artistic life in the People's Poland created, however, constant tension between artists and the authorities. The turning point was 1981 - the squashing of the first "Solidarity" and the imposition of martial law.

The art of the Eighties, the time of the "war between state and nation", had its serious side - the Independent Culture Movement, close to the Church, the return to national and religious symbols - and also its comic side - paintings of "wild" expression (Warsaw's "Gruppa"), the quasi-performance movement of Wroc³aw's "Orange Alternative" or the £ód¼ underground in the "Attic" gallery and the anarcho-dadaist group "£ód¼ Kaliska" n On regaining independence, Polish culture ceased to be a battlefield. The return to democracy, however, has not automatically solved all social or national problems, it has only changed their character, context, and sometimes colour. New times have brought new threats, new "hot" topics. Some artists have escaped into privacy with relief, while others still tilt at windmills. The turn of the century has brought a wave of "critical art", utilising new media in a discussion about the problems of religion, sexuality and intolerance. This is also "socially-engaged art", arising out of the need to announce the truth about life in society and the interrelationships between society, history and stereotypes.

Jan Matejko: Prussian Tribute, 1882; 388 x 785 cm, oil, canvas, Royal Castle at Wawel, Cracow

"Art is a kind of weapon in your hand, and you must not separate patriotism from art" - said Jan Matejko (1838-1893), the leading Polish historical painter of the nineteenth century. Born barely a year before Paul Cézanne - he was a classical academic, but his art has shaped the imaginations of many generations of Poles. Matejko's big, crowded canvases illustrate the most important moments in the history of the nation. At a time when Poland had been wiped off the map of Europe, Matejko, recalling moments of greatness and national sins, called for the people to examine their collective conscience. In Poland, his works still live and wake the emotions.

The decor of Cracow's Franciscan Church is among the most beautiful modernist decorative art in Europe. Its creator, Stanis³aw Wyspiañski (1869-1907), a student of Jan Matejko, was the greatest individual in the so-called Young Poland movement - the art at the turn of the twentieth century. It is from him that the new epoch of Polish art begins. His multi-facetedness recalls the Renaissance masters: revolutionary playwright, innovator in painting and remaker of the art of design.

Jacek Malczewski: Spring - Landscape with Tobiasz, 1904; 76 x 97 cm, National Museum, Poznañ

Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929) was the enfant terrible of Polish symbolism. A student of Matejko, into his painting he introduced folk tales, Greek myths and end-of-the-century angst. Malczewski's art is an explosive mixture, joining eroticism with mysticism, folk art with classical, brutal sensuality and unbearable pathos with irony. However, his mad, unpredictable imagination did not merely create symbolic brainteasers, but also moody, lyrical landscapes - roadside willows, storks circling above a freshly ploughed field, a cloudy sky. w

During the 19th century, discussion about "Polish national art's right to exist" broke out in Poland. On the road from Romanticism to Modernity, the turning point was the Positivists' fight for the autonomy of painting and the attempt to bring art closer to reality. Among the campaigners for a new aesthetic was the outstanding art critic Stanis³aw Witkiewicz (1851-1915), who worked out the theoretical basis for the new national style. His proposals were based on the Highland folk art "Zakopane Style". His unique villas in Zakopane, fully furnished and with characteristic Highland decor, are an original home-grown example of the artistic design movement, which swept Europe at the turn of the century.

There are many interesting museum collections in Poland, the most curious of which arose in an industrial city, £ód¼, among the Polish Constructivists. As early as the 1920s, W³adys³aw Strzemiñski (1893-1952), along with his colleagues from the avant-garde group "a.r." began collecting avant-garde works from all over the world. In February 1931, the £ód¼ Gallery of Contemporary Art was opened, one of the world's first permanent museum exhibitions of avant-garde art. This unique collection became the kernel of the £ód¼ Museum of Art - a collection which today consists of works by over 1,500 artists.

Katarzyna Kobro: Spatial Composition 4, 1929; polychrome steel, 40 x 64 x 40 cm, Museum of Art, £ód¼

In Twenties Poland, the avant-garde found their voice. The regaining of independence had freed artists from their patriotic duties. The watchwords became aesthetic functionalism, rationalism and modernity. The most outstanding representative of Polish Constructivism was the sculptress Katarzyna Kobro (1898-1951). Kobro's researches were pioneering. Her spatial, abstract constructions of wood, glass and metal are an original conception of a sculpture which has ceased to be a shape, and become an analysis of space and "space-time rhythms".

Stanis³aw Ignacy Witkiewicz: Portrait Multiplied, c. 1916; photograph, private ownership

The most interesting personalities in Polish twentieth-century culture are the multi-talented artists who work in many disciplines. The classic example is Witkacy - S.I. Witkiewicz (1885-1939), an outstanding playwright, philosopher, art theorist, and also painter and photographer. The creator of the theory of "Pure Form", wishing to express metaphysics and the "mystery of existence" in his works, painted fantastic surrealist-expressionist compositions. He left a fascinating gallery of portraits completed within the ambit of his so-called Portrait Firm, but within his artistic oeuvre, his innovative and experimental photography was more important. Witkacy proclaimed a catastrophic vision of the impending collapse of Western civilisation.

In the Fifties, the Communist authorities wanted to use art as a tool for agitation and propaganda. The works that arose under the pressure of Socialist Realism had little in common with art, being a kind of ideological folklore. Some artists, however, managed to link art with an engagement with the important matters of their time. The tragically politically-entangled Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-1957) left the most valuable painted documents of those years. His outspoken figuration is a metaphor of a degraded, straitjacketed reality. Wróblewski was artist with a sense of mission; he believed that art, by enabling us to distinguish Good from Evil, would change the world for the better.

One of the most important and longest-lasting traditions in Polish painting is colourism - the Polish version of post-impressionism. The artists gathered in the "Paris Committee" took the pilgrimage to the Seine in search of inspiration and light, and after their return fulfilled the function of apostles of "good painting". For them, the most important things were harmony of colours and the beauty of canvas evoking shining cloths. Their successive generations dominated artistic education, founding the Polish school of colourism: sensitivity to colour and the decorative elegance of canvas.

Henryk Sta¿ewski: Colour Relief 9, 1961; 47 x 61 cm, acrylic, chipboard, Starmach Gallery, Cracow

The history of the Polish avant-garde has colourful legendary characters. The long-lived Henryk Sta¿ewski (1894-1988) was named a "classic of modernity" even while he was still alive. He was one of the pioneers of geometric abstraction and a member of several avant-garde groups - BLOK "Praesens", "a.r." - and also the international groups "Cercle et Carré" and "Abstraction-Création". He worked closely with the famous Paris Galerie Denise René. He remained faithful to geometry to the end, constantly expanding its language with new questions of space, colour and movement.

In the culture of every nation, there are emblematic characters, person-symbols. For contemporary Poland, one such person is Józef Czapski (1896-1993), a moral authority and a true witness of the 20th century. His is one of the most beautiful Polish biographies: multi-talented educated aristocrat, participant in wars, concentration camp prisoner, strong patriot and Catholic. He was a simultaneously writer, an erudite and a sensitive painter. His books about Soviet war crimes closed his road back to Poland. His nostalgic, shocking pictures: snapshots of Paris streets and cafes, or the Metro, strike us with the freshness of their vision and the bravery of their colour choice.

Eugeniusz Mucha: Echoes. A Tribute to Jêdrzej Wowro, 1999; oil, canvas, artist’s frame, 82 x 34 cm, private ownership

Folk art is today not merely for ethnographers and researchers of country customs. The fashion for "art at the edge" and "borderland artists" is enjoying a visible renaissance. Professional painters, too, borrow from the rich treasure house of folk culture, using the ethnic and homegrown motifs in a new, creative way. Eugeniusz Mucha (1927), the person behind many church polychromes, bestows a brave, untypical interpretation on the religious subjects. In Mucha's painting, we can see the Polish countryside with its carved shrines, scenes painted on glass, the fairground dazzle of village fetes, but also the golden mediaeval altars and gravestones.

Since the cubist period, naive, or primitive, art has been an important source for artists. In its sincerity and outspokenness, people look for real emotion, passion, and simplicity - something the cultured and avant-garde academics have lost. The most famous Polish self-made painter, compared with Rousseau himself, is Nikifor (1895-1968), actually Epifan Drowniak - a Lemko beggar and illiterate gifted with an unusual talent and diligence. For many years linked with Krynica, a small town in the Beskid S±decki, in his simple aquarelles, he uncovered the beauty in the sub-Carpathian landscape: lonely stations or villages set in fields, but also the fantastic architecture of the towns.

Magdalena Abakanowicz: Unrecognised, 2001-2002; cast iron, 112 x (210 x 70 x 95 cm), Poznañ

Magdalena Abakanowicz is the first entry in almost all international dictionaries and encyclopaedias of art. The world's best-known Polish sculptress' (1930) works can be found in the most important museum collections as well as in the open air. Her creativity has revolutionised artistic weaving, earlier considered to be exclusively as an example of craft or decorative design. The thickly woven, meaty and spatial "Abakans" won the top award at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1965. With time, Abakanowicz moved in the direction of sculpture, open-air installations and architectural design. Her Crowds, Backs, Herds and Swarms, consisting of tens of figures of resin-soaked burlap, wood, stone, and bronze, are a striking metaphor of the human condition in the contemporary world.

At the end of the Fifties, Polish artists, too, undertook experiments with the "painting of matter", including in their pictures unconventional materials such as gravel, sand, and scrap metal. Jonasz Stern (1904-1988), Jew and Pole, interpreted structuralism in his own way, using organic remains: prepared bones, fish scales and bones, dried plants. Stern's original art connects his tragic life - periods in the camps and the ghettoes, a miraculous rescue - with his private passion, angling. The monochromatic Boards in which painted animal bones take the form of a Jewish headstone, is a symbolic epitaph for the Chosen People.

Among Polish artists working in other countries, many successfully integrate into artistic life abroad, writing the Polish tradition into the visual landscape of Europe. True success was achieved by the graphic designer and representative of the "Polish school of Poster Art" Roman Cie¶lewicz (1930-1996), settled in Paris since 1963. He used his experience as an illustrator and typographer, gained in Poland, as the artistic director of "Elle" and "Vogue" magazines, and also as a long-time associate of the Paris Centre Georges Pompidou, for whom he designed posters and catalogues. In his works, Cie¶lewicz employed collage and quotations, using mirror images and enlarged screens of photographs. His greatest mastery was achieved in his colourful, surreal photomontages, based on reproductions of the Old Masters.

One of the main themes in contemporary art is the problem of the human body - it fragility and lack of permanence. Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) was one of the first European artists to show a desperately brave and no-holds-barred corporeality. For the last 10 years of her life, she lived in France. She enjoyed technical experiments: cement, iron filings, colourful stones and sap, which enabled French critics to categorise her as a member of the New Realism. The greatest impression is made by her work in polyester, in which she employed casts of the human body.

Jerzy Nowosielski: A Part-Nude in Black, 1971; oil, canvas, 99 x 79,5 cm, National Museum, Wroc³aw

The eminent painter and Orthodox theologian Jerzy Nowosielski (1923), the creator of Orthodox and Catholic polychromes, was able to utilize the heritage of Byzantium also in his secular painting: landscapes, nudes, and abstracts. His inimitable style was a blend of Western and Eastern traditions, of the avant-garde and Byzantine art. From surrealism, Nowosielski borrowed an aura of ambiguity and mystery. From iconic art - religiousness, strong contours and flatness of form, as well as the deep symbolism of light and colour. In Nowosielski's art, as in the Byzantine tradition, all reality is holy.

During the Communist era, poster art was one of the islands of artistic freedom. The phenomenon of the "Polish School of Poster Art" - created by painters and full of fantasy and freedom - depended on the fact that in socialist realism there was no such thing as a commercial poster, and advertising was concerned with spiritual and cultural matters. In posters for the theatre, the circus, or film, the avant-garde tradition of photomontage and decorative artistic merits were made use of. In 1968, in Wilanów near Warsaw, the world's first Poster Museum was opened. Since 1966, the International Poster Biennale has been organised in Warsaw. One of the more important representatives of the "Polish School of Poster Art" is Jan M³odo¿eniec and his recognisable hand: thick, superficially clumsy, though decisive line, vivid colours, childlike styling and a warm sense of humour.

W³adys³aw Hasior: Golgotha III, 1972; assemblage, 93 x 35 cm, National Museum, Wroc³aw

International pop art blended various conventions and techniques, mixed high art with low, borrowing from mass culture as it wished. In Poland, an original home-grown version of pop art was created by W³adys³aw Hasior (1928-2000), member of the Phases Association, author of poetic assemblages, monuments and monumental outdoor sculptures. His metaphoric compositions allude to the form of liturgy, travestying the shapes of altars, gravestones and feretories. Hasior's works, betraying a fascination with kitsch, using cheap votive objects, broken toys and baubles is enjoyed all over a world which values its hidden picturesque and somewhat exotic poetry from the Polish provinces.

One of the world's most important artistic festivals is the International Graphic Design Triennale (at one time Biennale) organised since 1966. It is not accidental that the site of this prestige festival is Cracow. Since the time of modernism, there has been a strong tradition of artistic graphic design here, often created by painters, who have enriched it with painterly and colouristic effects. A respect for technique, incredible precision and an atmospheric language of metaphor are the common thread in sometimes very different works: the symbolic constructions, ruins and Towers of Babel from the copper engravings of Krzysztof Skórczewski (1947), the visionary and mysterious architecture from the gloomy aquatints of Tadeusz Jackowski (1936), the poetic and erotic landscapes of Andrzej Pietsch (1932), the grotesque and radical portrait woodcarvings of Jerzy Panek (1918-2001), and the human comedy in crowded scenes from the copper engravings of Jacek Gaj (1938). One of today's most interesting representatives of the "Cracow school of graphic design" is Anna Sobol-Wejman (1946), Grand Prix laureate at the International Graphic Design Biennale at Györ (Hungary) in 1995. Her rhythmically ordered, multi-segmented works form a type of picture writing, and, at the same time, a discreet and far from humourless commentary on life and reality.

Miros³aw Ba³ka: Memento of a First Communion, 1985; Art Museum, £ód¼

One artist who, in recent years, has frequently represented Poland at international arts festivals is the sculptor Miros³aw Ba³ka (1958), an exhibitor at, among others, Documenta in Kassel (1992) and the Biennale in Venice (1993), as well as the person behind an individual exhibition in the Tate Gallery (1995). His sculptures and installations are examples of a personal, autobiographical art, referring to experiences in his childhood and constructing a private mythology. Ba³ka creates ascetic, geometric forms from wood, metal, or concrete, recalling the human body, its proportions, temperatures, and imprints. In his installations, he uses untypical materials: cheap soap, salt, lastriko slabs. Ba³ka's subtle and thrifty art is also very well received outwith his home country.

The Nineties, known as the "first decade of freedom", was a difficult stage in the change of systems which aimed to bring Polish society into the circle of modern democratic civilisations. This period of transformation left its mark on culture, too, bringing the need to once again define a national and social identity. The answer to these questions has been a wave of "critical art", using new media, drastic visual effects and the poetry of provocation. Artists are taking on all the current situation's "hot" topics, like AIDS or racism, demolishing successive taboos without hesitation, be they sexual, religious or national. Poland's leading scandalist is considered to be Katarzyna Kozyra (1963), who won an award at the Venice Biennale (1999) for her video installation Bathhouse. Her photographs, films and installations, circling the subjects of corporeality, disease and death, have instigated a discussion in Poland on the rights of the artist and the limits of artistic freedom. Embarking on her discourse about suffering, Kozyra also employs new media in order to undertake a sensitive aesthetic dialogue with European culture: the painting of Ingres or Manet, or the music of Stravinsky.

Koji Kamoji: Reed Boats, 1997; Centre of Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Palace, Warsaw

Down the ages, Polish culture has often turned out to be very attractive to new arrivals. Many foreigners, having permanently settled in Poland, have enriched her culture with their own national traditions. This has been, and is, particularly true of our closest neighbours, although there is no lack of more exotic examples. The avant-garde Koji Kamoji (1935), a Japanese artist who has lived in Warsaw for 40 years, is today exhibited and awarded prizes as a Polish artist. Counted among the avant-garde linked with geometry and constructivism, he brought to Polish art a particular poetry, full of the symbolism of the elements and references to nature and the spirituality of the Orient. In his frugal installations and objects of stone, sheet metal, wire, and other building materials, he organises intriguing spatial situations, full of surprising connections and internal tension.

Leon Tarasewicz (1957), belonging to the generation of "wild expression", is one of the most eagerly exhibited Polish artists in the world today. A Belarussian with Polish citizenship, he works and lives on the edge, in the Bia³ystok village of Wali³y. His expressive canvas balances on the edge of abstraction, however the starting point is always nature, the homely landscape of the Polish borderlands: snowy forests, boulders, flying birds and the furrows of ploughed earth. Tarasewicz's canvases are a new, enlightening synthesis of the Polish landscape, although the artist ever more frequently concerns himself with questions of pure painting. The dense brushstrokes cover walls, pillars and interiors. The rhythmic composition of coloured stripes painted straight on the ceiling or walls creates a painterly environnement, enabling one to enter the very centre of the work. Bright, luminescent colours radiate a strange energy - this art, too, is a creative development of traditional symbolism of Byzantine icons.

Poland is a country with a strong Catholic tradition, in which Christian iconography is treated with a particular piety. In spite of this, or perhaps precisely because of it, there is no lack of artists interpreting religious symbols shockingly independently, ripped out of their traditional context. The brave, frequently scandalous treatment of sacred topics need not signify blasphemy. In Poland, such provocativeness has a social connotation, as an attempt to rock the psychic boat, overbalancing unthinking, automatic religiosity. Demasking hypocrisy, artists once again pose fundamental questions, attempting to break the viewer out of customary routines and mental stereotypes. Eugeniusz Get-Stankiewicz's (1942) shocking collage, the suggestion of a personal participation in the action of the crucifixion, forces one to ask oneself about the real consequences of faith and shows the foremost sense of Christianity - a personal responsibility for undertaking the challenge of the Gospels.

Roman Opa³ka: Description of the World 1965/1 -..., Detail 1-35327, 1965; oil, canvas, Art Museum, £ód¼

There exists a category of "total artists", who want to subordinate their whole lives to one idea and transform their existence into a work in progress. One example is Roman Opa³ka (1931), one of the world's best-known artists of Polish descent. Once a talented graphic designer, since 1965 he has exclusively painted Counted Pictures: white-grey canvases consistently covered in rows of numbers. This desperate idea of devoting one's whole life to an artistic counting from 1 to infinity demands respect, although it more resembles a stoic philosophical attitude than any kind of artistic expression. The gradually lightening pictures are accompanied by a taped recording of counting and a photographic record of the artist's face, further underlining the inevitable passing of time.