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Kobro and Strzemiński Revisited Downloaded from by Guest on 01 October 2021 Kobro and Strzemiński Revisited Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00250/1753959/octo_a_00250.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 YVE-ALAIN BOIS Some thirty years ago, I published a long essay on the work and theory of the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro (1898–1951) and her husband, the painter 1 Władysław Strzemiński (1893–1952). At the time, I expressed my dismay at the global lack of recognition, outside of Poland, of their remarkable artistic ven- ture, which they called Unism—even though their works had been included in several exhibitions in the United States, France, Germany, and Holland, and sev- eral of their texts had been published in various languages (including an excel- lent anthology of their writings in French). Things have greatly improved since then. The Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, to which they had donated all their surviving works in 1945, had long been a shrine to Polish Constructivism, but in the 1990s, as Strzemiński and Kobro were becoming national heroes in Poland, it launched a series of publications in English that vastly increased our knowledge. The cata- logue of the centennial retrospective exhibition of Strzemiński in 1993 includes a catalogue raisonné of his work, and the same is true for Kobro in the lavish cat- alogue of her centennial retrospective that traveled from Łódź to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 1999.2 From the tribute paid to Kobro by her daugh- ter, Nika Strzemińska, in this last publication, we learn in grisly detail about the dreadful last years of the artist after her bitter separation from Strzemiński, end- ing in misery and horrendous illness. But we also learn several important new facts: that for both Kobro and Strzemiński, their works (at least their Unist works) were not for sale (they were research material); that one of the reasons so few abstract sculptures by Kobro survive is that many of them were maquettes made in cardboard that would have eventually been realized in sheet metal, funds permitting, if they had not been thrown away by a landlord (while others, 1. Initially published in French in 1984, “Strzemiński and Kobro: In Search of Motivation” appeared in English in Painting as Model (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 123–155. 2. Władysław Strzemiński: On the 100th Anniversary of His Birth (Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 1993) and Katarzyna Kobro 1898–1951 (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 1999). These publications revealed the extent of Strzemiński’s and Kobro’s production after the end of the Unist adventure (from 1933 on) as well as sev- eral nudes that Kobro sculpted intermittently from 1925 to 1948 (for fun and relaxation, as she explained in response to a questionnaire from the French journal Abstraction Création in 1933). These nudes, clearly indebted to Archipenko, contravene the principles advocated in Composing Space/Calculating Space-Time Rhythms (in which Archipenko’s work is abundantly reproduced yet curtly dismissed). OCTOBER 156, Spring 2016, pp. 3–11. © 2016 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 4 OCTOBER made in wood, ended up in the stove when the family ran out of coal).3 In fact there is evidence that the Spatial Compositions numbered one to five (and dating from 1925 to 1929) were actually realized in metal in 1930 so as to be repro- duced in Composing Space/Calculating Space-Time Rhythms.4 The Henry Moore Institute catalogue contains an excellent sampling of Kobro’s writings, but not—understandably, given its length—the text just men- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00250/1753959/octo_a_00250.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 tioned. Strzemiński and Kobro wrote it in the first half of 1929 (it was ready to be sent to press in August of that year), but the publication was delayed for lack of funds and difficulty in obtaining the illustrations. It was finally published in February 1931, with a run of fifteen hundred copies, as the second volume of the “Bibljoteki ‘a.r.’”5 It includes forty-six illustrations at the end of the volume, 6 including three in color. Nika Strzemińska recalls that Kobro “told me that she had written it with my father. She had written about problems concerning Unism in sculpture in Russian, and he had translated it into Polish, or corrected her style and spelling in Polish.”7 The dual authorship might explain the general clunkiness of the prose and the tedious repetitiveness—since both Strzemiński and Kobro fared much better with regard to clarity of style and coherence in the texts they wrote and published separately. For all its flaws, however, this text deserved to be translated in its entirety, since it offers nothing less than an evolu- tionary account of the history of sculpture from antiquity onward—with the works of Kobro, in the typical historicist fashion pertaining to modernism, pre- sented as the culmination of that history. 3. Nika Strzemińska, “Katarzyna Kobro. Woman and Artist,” in Katarzyna Kobro 1898–1951, op. cit., pp. 13–16. 4. On the basis of several letters by Kobro, Zenobia Karnicka suggests that it was in order to finance the realization of these works that the artist sold several of her plaster nudes. See Karnicka, “Chronology of Kobro’s Life and Work,” in Katarzyna Kobro 1898–1951, op. cit., p. 44, n. 7. 5. “a.r.,” said to be standing either for “real avant-garde” or “revolutionary artists” (or both), was the name of the group founded by Strzemiński, Kobro, Henryk Stażewski, and Julian Pryboś in 1929 (they were joined later by Jan Brzękowski). One of the most remarkable activities of the group was to gather (by exchanges and gifts) a collection of abstract art and to secure a permanent room for it in Łódź’s museum, to which it was officially given in 1931. The “a.r.” collection (which kept growing until 1937) includes works of many non-Polish artists, among them Theo van Doesburg, Alexander Calder, Sonia Delaunay, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and Georges Vantongerloo, as well as many members of the French group Cercle et Carré, with which Brzękowski had close ties. 6. The illustrations are not mentioned in the text, but they run loosely parallel to it, with some obvious discrepancies. Bernini, whose art is discussed several times as the pinnacle of the Baroque, and Michelangelo, whose name is not even mentioned, are represented by one illustration each. Archipenko, mentioned only in passing (and between parentheses), is granted four reproductions; Moholy-Nagy and Vantongerloo, not mentioned, receive three and four illustrations, respectively. Strzemiński took great care over the illustrations. In a letter sent to a friend shortly before the book finally went to press, he writes: “The reproductions are well chosen (the selection and the correspon- dence took me a whole year).” Karnicka, op. cit., p. 43, n. 8. 7. Strzemińska, op. cit., p. 14. Kobro and Strzemiński Revisited 5 The few pages that follow are a slightly updated version of the section that concerned sculpture in my early essay. My mind has not changed in any way about Kobro’s artistic achievement, nor about the value of the treatise she wrote with Strzemiński, but two shortcomings had previously escaped me. The first is the near complete absence of Rodin in their account (he is men- tioned only once, between parentheses, and rather absurdly characterized as a fol- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00250/1753959/octo_a_00250.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 lower of Canova and Thorwaldsen who would have flirted with the “early Baroque”). This absence also explains that of Adolf von Hildebrand, Rodin’s theoretical neme- sis, which is all the more surprising since Hildebrand’s dread of space would have helped Kobro and Strzemiński better articulate their major argument concerning space as a sculptural material and the relationship between the sculptural object and the surrounding space. In his 1969–70 Slade lectures that were posthumously pub- lished in book form as Sculpture, Rudolf Wittkower famously declared: “None of the important sculptors of the first half of the twentieth century could have avoided reacting to the work of Rodin and to the principles propounded by Hildebrand. You can be sure that a sculptor who was unaware of these issues had no contact with the vital events of his time and shows it in his work.”8 Kobro provided the exception that confirms the rule and contradicts Wittkower on two counts: by her very gender (note that for the venerable art historian a sculptor was necessarily male), and by what seems to be her complete ignorance of Hildebrand’s theories, which her own works unknowingly yet brilliantly refute. The second oddity that I had failed to notice in Kobro and Strzemiński’s text is the lack of attention they pay to Cubist sculpture (while Strzemiński was remarkably perceptive in the pages he devoted to Cubist painting in numerous essays). In fact, they subsume Cubist sculpture almost entirely under either Futurism, particularly Boccioni’s (in order to dismiss it for its dynamism), or Archipenko (about whom they say practically nothing, but whose work they abundantly reproduce), and they allude in passing to Lipchitz’s work as offering a shallow pseudo-modernist coating on the most archaic conception of sculp- ture: as solid mass. There is no mention whatsoever of Picasso’s Cubist construc- tions, particularly of his 1912 Guitar, which is widely acknowledged today as a major turning point in the invention of empty space as sculptural material. That omission per se is not very surprising, given that at the time of their writing, the only reproductions of these works had been those published by Apollinaire in the Soirées de Paris, in 1913; but Kobro and Strzemiński both knew firsthand the production of the Russian avant-garde, in particular that of Tatlin, whose debt to Picasso’s Cubist constructions Strzemiński clearly acknowledged in his “Notes on Russian Art” published in 1922 and 1923.9 Furthermore, in that same early essay, Strzemiński mentions the sculpture of the Obmokhu group, which included the Sternberg brothers, Rodchenko, and Medunetsky, all important participants of 8.
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