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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 several of their texts had been published in various languages (including an excellent 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 catalogue 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 catalogue 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 several 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).

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 reproduced 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 published 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 sculpture: as solid mass. There is no mention whatsoever of Picasso’s Cubist constructions, 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. Rudolf Wittkower, Sculpture (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 248.

9. Strzemiński, “O sztuce rosyjskiej. Notatki” (1922–23), translated into French as “Notes sur l’art russe” in W. Strzemiński and K. Kobro, L’espace uniste: Écrits du constructivisme polonais, Antoine Baudin and Pierre-Maxime Jedryka, eds. (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1977), pp. 41–54. 6 OCTOBER

the Constructivist movement whose work proceeded directly from Tatlin’s—but none are discussed in Composing Space/Calculating Space-Time Rhythms, even 10 though Kobro and Strzemiński reproduce a work by Medunetsky. ***

The starting point of Strzemiński and Kobro’s theory of sculpture is the 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 dogma of medium-specificity, to which they were perhaps alone in having fully subscribed. The notion that each medium is governed by a specific set of rules pertaining to and issued from its material components is a modernist cliché (the whole mantra about the flatness of the picture plane derives from it)—but it has been constantly betrayed even by its most forceful advocates: Despite all their claims in this regard, a Mondrian or a Greenberg, for example, never ceased to judge sculpture according to pictorial criteria and thus to decry its spatiality as an inherent flaw. Unism was first theorized as an essentialist search for motivation in the field of painting. Suffice it here to say that the pictorial solutions that Strzemiński came up with in his quest for a pictorial “zero degree” (the mono- chrome; the deductive structure; the figure/ground, positive/negative undecid- ability; the abolition or neutralization of contrasts) all rest on the fact that a painting is a material object, with irreducible physical properties. It is necessarily a delimited field with specific dimensions (he called them the “natural” limits of a painting). For Strzemiński, any painting that does not exclusively stem from these specific properties of the material support, and that is not entirely self-sufficient, without the slightest input from outside of the picture plane, is arbitrary, illusionistic, or “baroque”—to use the word that encapsulates best for him what he wants to eradicate. This sounds very familiar today (very often Strzemiński’s manifestos as well as his works recall those of the Minimalist generation forty years later), but what is much less common is the manner in which Unism takes stock of the divergent implications of the “medium-specificity” dogma when applied to sculpture: A painting has no business relating to what is external to it—it is separate, indifferent to its environment, and constructed according to

10. Except for his participation in the now-famous debate on “composition versus construction” held at the Inkhuk (Moscow) in 1921, and his contribution to the Obmokhu’s exhibitions, not much else is known about K. Medunetsky. (On these two chapters of the Soviet avant-garde, see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005].) Scrutinizing two installation photographs of the Second Spring Exhibition of the Obmokhu (Moscow, 1921), Gough identifies five sculptures by Medunetsky. One of them (Gough’s number XIX), his only extant sculpture, is the polychrome Spatial Construction, bought in 1922 by Katherine Dreier at the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung in Berlin (and now in the Société Anonyme Collection in the Yale University Art Gallery), a work that reveals Kobro’s debt to this artist. The work that Kobro and Strzemiński reproduce resembles very closely another sculpture included in the second Obmokhu exhibition (Gough’s number XV) and might be an earlier version of it—or, on the contrary, a later, simplified one (it has one fewer linear elements). To my knowledge, this photograph has not been published anywhere else. Kobro and Strzemiński Revisited 7

organic laws proper to it. Sculpture does not possess this kind of a priori natural limit. There are no predetermined boundaries that exist before the sculpture is even made, no natural restrictions. According to its natural law, sculpture should not close off limits it does not possess, that would isolate it from the rest of space and close down its mass, but

should connect with all of space, with infinite space. The organic law of 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 sculpture is to unite with space, to be intimately related to space, to meld into and absorb space.

In exactly the same way that a figure, in one of Strzemiński’s “architectonic” paintings, must be in an “undecidable” relationship with the ground of the painting (a positive/negative relationship) and consist only in the “motivated” division of the surface of the painting (on the basis of the work’s physical dimensions), a Unist sculpture must divide and shape interior as well as exterior space. For Kobro and Strzemiński, the “fundamental question” to which every sculpture had to respond throughout history is “the relationship between the space it encloses with the space that sur- rounds it.” “This is the basic question,” they add; “all other questions are relatively subsidiary to it. Static or dynamic characteristics, the dominance of line versus volume, the presence or lack of color, the manipulation of light and shadow or mass, all depend on the solution to this fundamental question. It defines the type of sculpture and all responses to secondary problems.” I shall not try here to summarize the extremely complex typology of sculpture proposed by the theoreticians of Unism from antiquity onward (Egyptian sculpture: a volume-sculpture, which does not raise the issue of exterior space; Gothic sculpture, which reaches a union with that portion of exterior space contained within the limits of architecture; Baroque sculpture, at last, which reaches a union with that portion of exterior space contained within this “limiting bound- ary”). More important here is Strzemiński and Kobro’s insistence upon “union with space.” The issue is to avoid what Rosalind Krauss has called “the logic of the monument”—a commemorative logic that “distinguishes sculpture from the ongoing phenomena of daily life” and plunges the viewer “into a state of passive contemplation which cuts him off from the concerns of everyday life.”11 Why would anyone want to avoid this logic, which has for centuries demonstrated its effectiveness? Because it denies that sculpture inhabits the same space as the viewer, that is, the space of our experience in the world. Thus: “Unist sculpture does not make sculptures. It sculpts space, condensing it within the limits of its sculptural zone. The Unist sculpture, aiming for an organic unity between sculpture and space, posits that sculptural form is not an end in itself, but only the expres- sion of spatial relationships.”

11. Strzemiński, “Sztuka nowoczesna w Polsce” (1934), translated in French as “L’art moderne en Pologne” in L’espace uniste, op. cit., p. 149. For Krauss’s analysis of the “logic of the monument,” see “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1978), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 279–80. 8 OCTOBER

Space is, according to Kobro and Strzemiński, homogeneous and infinite, in a state of constant equilibrium (an equilibrium that is neither dynamic, based on movement, nor static, based on weight—that is, on a type of movement). As a result, every dynamic form will subtract itself from space and reintroduce the logic of the monument. Moreover, every figure is necessarily dynamic because it

is opposed, as center and foreign body, to the homogeneity of surrounding 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 space: “Sculpture should not be a foreign body in space or a center that seizes an unjustified dominion over the rest of space. In order to integrate sculpture with space, its construction has to agree with the fundamental laws of space.” With the exception of her six earliest sculptures, which clearly derived from Suprematism and Russian Constructivism, all of Kobro’s Unist work is composed of open planes, orthogonal or curved; the intersection of these planes is supposed, according to the theory, to render space visible (“Because space is not directly graspable and in itself is almost imperceptible, we make it palpable and plastic by breaking up its continuity and dividing it, partially clos- ing some of it off”). These planes, whose division and articulation were determined according to a constant proportional system (the same one used by 12 Strzemiński for most of his “architectonic” paintings) , were conceived as mate- rializations of the axes of the space of our experience: “The lines of space find their extension in the lines of the sculpture.” But if Kobro had stopped here, nothing would have distinguished her work from Constructivism in general, except for a rigor of mathematical specification (which has allowed the reconstruction of several lost works).13 The real inventiveness of her work lies in the two methods she employed to prevent her sculptures’ being perceived as fig- ures in space—two methods based on an extreme syntactic disjunctiveness.

12. By the time Composing Space/Calculating Space-Time Rhythms was published, Strzemiński had finished his series of “architectonic compositions” (1926–29). All obey the principle of the deductive structure, according to which the internal divisions of the canvas are determined by its format (dimensions, properties). But while the earlier paintings of their series have different dimensions, most later works have the same size (96 x 60 cm), which is determined by an a priori choice of a standard proportion (8:5). The internal divisions of the canvas are still determined by its real dimensions, but those dimensions are determined by an arbitrary decision. Strzemiński further under- mined his materialist, anti–a priori logic by claiming that this standard proportion (8:5) is based on that of man. The example he gives is that of a man whose total height is 1.75 cm and whose waist height is 1.09 cm (see Strzemiński, “a.r. 2” [1932], in L’espace uniste, op. cit., p. 131). Several diagrams of Composing Space/Calculating Space-Time Rhythms are provided as evidence that the 8:5 proportion applies similarly to Kobro’s sculptures and to Strzemiński’s interior design in architecture (see ills. 39, 43, and 44). 13. According to Janusz Zagrodzki, the 8:5 proportion (as well as all the dimensions of Kobro’s sculptures after 1925) is based on the Fibonacci series. See Zagrodzki, “Reconstruction of Katarzyna Kobro’s Sculptures,” in Constructivism in Poland (Essen, Folkwang Museum, and Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, 1973), pp. 55–56. Kobro and Strzemiński Revisited 9

The first is the use of polychromy to destroy the “optical unity,” which would separate the sculpture from space; contrary to Unist painting, Unist sculpture must include the harshest contrasts possible (hence the use of prima- ry colors, in order to avoid the constitution of chromatic harmonies that would read as separate unities). Contrasting with the formal arrangement of the sculp-

ture, the disposition of colors causes it to explode in three dimensions: Not 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 only are two sides of a single plane painted different colors, but each color is also distributed noncontiguously in the three dimensions of depth, width, and height. Here is how Strzemiński and Kobro describe the function of polychromy in Unist sculpture: We don’t connect colors that lie side by side but those whose hue is identical. We don’t see individual forms, which are broken apart by color, but instead see some specific color, dispersed in different loca- tions within the sculpture, separated by other colors, and placed on mutually perpendicular planes positioned in the three directions. . . . Each color defines constantly shifting spatial forms that intersect one another. The spatial forms created by a specific color mutually intersect, creating a series of transitions that ties them with each other and with internal space. . . . What we have, therefore, is a system of spatial forms created by color. This system is analogous to the one created by the forms themselves but these two systems do not correspond to each other. . . . Therefore Unist sculpture can be seen as composed of a great variety of spatial divisions, each independent of the other, which mutually intersect and create an innumerable multiplicity of different connections between sculpture and space. The arrangement of forms is composed of condensations that concretize space and pas- sageways that create a unified spatial phenomenon and connect sculpture with space. True, Kobro made few polychrome sculptures (if the number of surviving works is any indication). But the reason this system of optical disjunction is so effective in her work—in, for example, Space Composition 4 (1929), one of her masterpieces and in my opinion one of the most extraordinary works of twentieth-century sculpture—is that it was grafted onto another disjunctive principle used to greatest advantage in her white sculptures such as Space Composition 5 (1929–30), another highly successful work. This second method (to which the coloristic syntax is “analogous,” as is stated in the quotation just made) takes into account, perhaps for the first time explicitly in the history of sculpture, the duration of aesthetic experience: In Unist theory, sculpture, unlike painting, is an art that mobilizes time:14 14. How to abolish time or even the illusion of time in painting (and thus any contrast, any dual- ism, any dynamism) was a leitmotif of Strzemińksi’s theoretical preoccupations. 10 OCTOBER

The spatiotemporality of an artwork is related to the way it changes. Spatiotemporality consists of spatial changes that take place over time. These changes are caused by the third dimension, namely, depth. Hidden at first, depth reveals itself through the effects it produces, changing the appearance of the work of art, changing the

appearance of each form. Depth causes changes because of the 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 motion of the viewer around the work of art. Wanting to stage the “transformation of depth into breadth,” to render visible that invisible object that is depth (“Depth is obscure: As long as we look at it without moving from one place, it is a hidden dimension”), to solicit the specta- tor’s movement, Kobro made sculptures in which no elevation can be inferred from any other. As we circulate around her best sculptures, what was negative (empty) becomes positive (full), what was line becomes plane, what was straight becomes curved, what was wide becomes narrow. An entire stream-of-consciousness novel would be necessary to describe the transformations that occur as we circulate around the two works mentioned above. And while her theory partici- pates in the ideology of transparency, Kobro’s sculptural practice undermines that ideology, as David Smith would later do in using the same disjunctive lan- guage.15 Rather than presupposing the existence of a generative core or spine, the rationality of which would be immediately intelligible (an image of our clear consciousness, to refer to Rosalind Krauss’s analysis of Constructivism), these sculptures have the opacity of material objects, whose space they cohabit (the base has been eliminated).16 But unlike objects whose meanings are discovered through use, Kobro’s sculptures treat our experience in the world in an abstract manner—without finality. Although we can apprehend them physically (measur- ing their variability as we move around them), neither the naked eye nor intel- lection is sufficient to comprehend them. The philosophical foundation of Unism was phenomenology, albeit implicitly, as it will later be for Minimalism, this time explicitly: “The form of existence produces the form of consciousness.”17

15. On Smith’s disjunctive syntax, see Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), pp. 147–73. 16. It should be said that Krauss’s analysis was based on the assumption, common at the time of her writing, that Naum Gabo’s work was the best representative of Constructivist sculptural practice. For a criticism of this position (and the lack of consideration it implies of Rodchenko’s work), see Benjamin Buchloh, “Cold War Constructivism” (1986), reprinted in Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (MIT Press, 2015), pp. 375–408.

17. Strzemiński, “B=2, to read” (1924), in Constructivism in Poland, op. cit., p. 81. Kobro and Strzemiński Revisited 11

*** Despite the radicalness of their works, however, despite the unprecedented intelligence of their theory, Strzemiński and Kobro clung to one principle that pulled their work back into the orbit of metaphysics at the very moment they believed they had escaped from it. This is the principle of unity, which underpins their “law of organicity” and the essentialism of modernism as a whole. Strzemiński 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 and Kobro were fully aware of the difficulties involved in breaking with a secular tradition (“We are still thinking Baroque,” they would say); they believed they could do so by deconstructing, through their elaborate strategy, the arbitrariness of composition. Yet because they never abandoned the ancient concept of the unity of the work of art (which goes back at least to Vitruvius), and although they never used it in a traditional way, their work represents one of the subtlest consoli- dations of that tradition.