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Just After the War Just After The JUSTJUST AFTERAFTER THETHE WARWAR Zachęta — National ISBN 978-83-64714-55-9 Gallery of Art Just After the War edited by Joanna Kordjak and Agnieszka Szewczyk Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2018 CONTENTS Waldemar Baraniewski Ruins, Blood, and (Non)Memory 44 Joanna Kordjak, Agnieszka Szewczyk Dorota Jarecka Just After the War 5 The Sun and Other Graves. On Leon Marek Suzin’s Warsaw Monument Wojciech Włodarczyk to Jews Fighting in the Second Five Years 20 World War 48 Eryk Krasucki Katarzyna Uchowicz ‘Mild Revolution’. A Fuzzy Cultural Experimenting. Sculpture Studio Programme of the First Post-war at the Warsaw Reconstruction Years 27 Bureau’s Department of Architecture and Engineering 52 Agnieszka Szewczyk The Wrocław Congress 31 Maria Sołtys American Architects on Tour 64 Julia Leopold The Central Bureau of Artistic Grzegorz Rytel Exhibitions 32 Glass Houses in Koło, Warsaw 65 Magdalena Komornicka Anna Frąckiewicz Warsaw Accuses Exhibition Furniture for Small at the National Museum in Apartments 70 Warsaw 33 Anna Frąckiewicz Marta Leśniakowska How to Make Something Out Confronting an Image of Ruins of Nothing 71 Spectrality and Melancholy 34 Anna Frąckiewicz Monika Micewicz The Beauty of Everyday Dancing in the Ruins 39 Things 75 Anna Manicka Marcin Lewicki Bronisław Wojciech Linke’s Faculty of Spatial Arts 76 Screaming Stones 41 Dorota Jarecka Joanna Kordjak To Those Who Fought Electra at the Polish Army for Realism 77 Theatre in Łódź 42 Luiza Nader Joanna Kordjak Neurorealism. Władysław Boy with a Statue 43 Strzemiński’s Afterimages 83 Piotr Słodkowski Wojciech Świdziński The Exhibition of Modern Visual The Reception of Western Cinema Artists (1947) vis-a-vis the Exhibition in Post-war Poland 115 of Modern Art (1948/1949). Revisioning Modernity 87 Maciej Szymanowicz Discovering the Territories Agata Pietrasik Mieczysław Orłowicz’s Antagonism in the Field of Art. Photographic Tours around The Work of the Club of Young Artists the Regained Lands 119 and Scientists (1947–1949) 92 Maciej Szymanowicz Agnieszka Szewczyk The Poznań Photographic Nurt 96 Community in the Years 1945–1949 124 Piotr Słodkowski Two Paintings by Marek Joanna Kordjak Włodarski 97 The Western Institute 125 Joanna Kordjak Agnieszka Szewczyk Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Regained Territories First Exhibition 98 Exhibition 136 Krzysztof Pijarski Agnieszka Szewczyk Cut-View of the Week. Jewish Pavilion 137 ‘Documents’ Between Propaganda and Wojciech Włodarczyk Working-Through 99 Jan Cybis at the Regained Territories Exhibition 138 Piotr Rypson Mieczysław Berman. Author of Agnieszka Szewczyk a Communist Idiolect 103 Xawery Dunikowski’s Monument at Góra Eryk Krasucki Świętej Anny 139 Czytelnik Publishing Cooperative. A Cultural Phenomenon, Epilogue 114 1944–1948 109 Monika Micewicz The Woman after the War 113 Magdalena Komornicka Warsaw Cinemas 114 Joanna Kordjak, Agnieszka Szewczyk Just After the War Don’t believe what they write about Poland — there’s a lot of hysteria and un- healthy anxiety in that, utterly unnecessary. In any case, the reconstruction slo- gan is not just a slogan. There are ruins here, including moral ones. Well — it was a war. And here in its worst form. No, I haven’t changed at all. But I wish to be honest. I told you why I came back. I’ll say it once again: I believe it was the right thing to do. You need to see this country to believe in it. Tadeusz Borowski, 19461 The period covered by the exhibition and the accompanying publication is defined by dates of socio-political history which is the main point of reference here. These rigid temporal boundaries, marked by political events — beginning with the PKWN Manifes- to (PKWN — Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego [Polish Committee of National Liberation’s]) and the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising a few days later in 1944, and ending with the party unification congress and the centralisation of power in 1948 — do not overlap precisely with the dynamics of cultural phenomena, but provide a time frame allowing to take a closer look at the specificity of the period’s art. Rather than attempting to prove a particular point, the exhibition seeks to answer the question of how artists found themselves in the context of a new, dynamically changing socio-political reality and an atmosphere of, on the one hand, ‘reconstruc- tion euphoria’ and hope, but, on the other hand, a ‘great trepidation’ as described by Marcin Zaremba.2 What function was art supposed to play in that context ? How was art influenced by Poland’s new geography, mass repatriations, and the migration of artistic communities? How did it negotiate its place and language? What was the sit- uation in which young artists made their debuts? Did the war and the year 1945 really constitute a turning point when everything began anew — a ‘zero moment’?3 However, neither the exhibition nor the book pretend to offer an exhaustive synthesis; we be- lieve that it is too early for that at the current state of research.4 Our goal has been to define a horizon rather than create a tight narrative. To tell about this unique time and its phenomena through the histories of selected artists — both those debuting ‘right after the war’ (such as Andrzej Wróblewski, Jadwiga Maziarska or Marian Bo- gusz) and those from the generation of their ‘fathers’, who had emerged before the 1 Tadeusz Borowski’s letter to Maria Rundo, 12 July 1946, in Niedyskrecje pocztowe. Korespondencja Tadeusza Borowskiego, ed. Tadeusz Drewnowski, Warsaw: Prószyński i S-ka, 2001, p. 148. 2 Marcin Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga. Polska 1944–1947, Kraków: Znak, 2012. 3 Cf. Repartir à zero. Comme si la peinture n’avait jamais existé (1945–49), exh. cat., ed. Éric de Chassey, Sylvie Ramond, Paris: Musée des Beaux-arts de Lyon, 2008. 4 There is still a dearth of monographic studies on such important subjects as the Warsaw Reconstruc- tion Bureau, the Club of Young Artists and Scientists, the Production Aesthetics Supervision Bureau, the Regained Territories Exhibition, of monographs of numerous artists and architects, and especially of studies of the political archives. 5 war (Mieczy sław Berman, Marek Włodarski, Władysław Strzemiński, Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski, Jan Bułhak). To portray the period through the histories of selected works and projects, sometimes forgotten (e.g. Leon Suzin’s Memorial to Jews Fighting in in the Second World War) and sometimes so ‘well known’ that, paradoxically, they have been marginalised in the contemporary art-historical discourse (e.g. Bronisław Linke). Such a structure provided for certain revaluations, to mention but the highlighting of the 1947 Exhibition of Modern Visual Artists in Warsaw ‘at the expense’ of the highly mythologised 1st Exhibition of Modern Art in Kraków in 1948.5 Revising the hitherto Kraków-centric narrative about the 1940s 6, the exhibition directs attention to, among other things, the practices of the Club of Young Artists and Scientists and its driving spirit, the painter and stage designer Marian Bogusz. The Club’s significance consist- ed, for example, in its new way of thinking about (the presentation of) modernity. What mattered here was pluralism — referring to various contemporary attitudes as well as, importantly, various genealogies of modernity, including the genealogies of Polish sur- realism. Its reception took place in the 1940s not only via Paris (Jerzy Kujawski, Tade- usz Kantor) or Prague (Zbigniew Dłubak, Marian Bogusz), but also through the pre-war work of Marek Włodarski (Henryk Streng) and the Lviv-based artist collective Artes. Working on the exhibition, we were aware that the dynamics of the selected phe- nomena do not always match the turning points defined by political events. The sourc- es of the artistic choices and attitudes significant for the late 1940s date back to pre- war times, something that we note on several occasions. We present the monumental painting of Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski, that in an unchanged form revives after the war in a new reality, or the historicising painting of Antoni Michalak, a disciple of Ta- deusz Pruszkowski. The idea of the avant-garde working-class housing scheme found its perfect embodiment in Helena and Szymon Syrkus’ experimental Koło II housing estate in Warsaw’s Wola district; the Ład collective’s concept of ‘beautiful furniture for everyone’, in turn, materialised, in an everyday reality defined by ruins and ‘loot markets’, as a utopia realised under the aegis of the Production Aesthetics Supervision Bureau created by Wanda Telakowska. Naturally, not only specific artistic proposals but also the postulates of ‘solidarity be- tween intellectuals and the working masses’, raised again after the war, had their roots in the pre-war reality. In this context, let us mention the Congress of Cultural Workers in the Defence of Peace in Lviv in May 1936, attended by many would-be prominent cultural activists and artists (e.g. Karol Kuryluk, Wanda Wasilewska or Władysław Bro- niewski)7, which culminated in the participants’ cheering ‘Let us meet in red Warsaw!’. 5 Cf. Piotr Słodkowski, The Exhibition of Modern Visual Artists (1947) vis-a-vis the Exhibition of Modern Art (1948/1949). Revisioning Modernity, pp. 87–91. 6 Ultimately established by the exhibition and catalogue: I Wystawa Sztuki Nowoczesnej. Pięćdziesiąt lat później, ed. Józef Chrobak, Marek Świca, Kraków: Fundacja Nowosielskich, Starmach Gallery, 1999. 7 Significantly, the Congress’s organiser, the Communist Party of Poland, fearing unexpected reactions from the Polish avant-garde (French Surrealists had refused to participate in the First International Congress in the Defence of Culture in Paris in 1935), turned down applications from the majority of artists from Kraków and Lviv. In most likelihood, only Jonasz Stern and Andrzej Pronaszko took part. 6 The most telling declaration of this kind of postulates shortly after the war was Jerzy Borejsza’s essay/manifesto ‘Rewolucja łagodna’ [A mild revolution].8 Borejsza, a communist and a visionary, expressed in it a sense, quite common for Polish intellec- tuals at the time, regardless of their political sympathies, that the elitist cultural-pol- icy model needed to be replaced with an egalitarian one.
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