IN the SHADOW of YALTA Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989

IN THE SHADOW OF YALTA Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 Piotr Piotrowski In the Shadow of Yalta In the Shadow of Yalta The Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 Piotr Piotrowski Translated by Anna Brzyski REAKTION BOOKS Dedication? Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published in Poznan´, Poland, by REBIS Publishing House Ltd in 2005. [ERSTE foundation logo and credit to be supplied] English language translation first published 2009 English language translation by Anna Brzyski Copyright © Reaktion Books 2009 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in/by British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data isbn Introduction This book is concerned with the art of ‘East-Central’ Europe, part of a larger geo-political formation, namely the ‘Eastern Bloc’ or ‘Eastern Europe’. The art produced in this larger area is usually referred to as ‘East European’ in the English-speaking world. I will follow that Western usage, except where I need to be more narrowly precise. So where exactly is ‘East-Central’ Europe? The term describes the territory located between the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. It is the part of Europe that, due to the agreement signed between the Western powers and the Soviet Union at Yalta, found itself within the latter’s sphere of influence. The Soviet Union itself, as one of the cosignatories, did not have to contend with ‘the shadow of Yalta’. That is why the art of the former ussr has not been considered in this book. Of course, besides the political factors – such as state sovereignty and a tradition of Communism that was longer by several decades – that created in Russia a system of cultural and artistic references that are completely different and impossible to compare with that of the East European countries, there are also pragmatic reasons for excluding Russian art from the present analysis. A great deal has been already written about it; there have been a number of studies, monographs and books on the subject. It is therefore a fairly well covered terrain. In contrast, East- Central Europe, understood as a region (rather than as an amalgam of the constituent countries) has remained relatively unexplored. This is especially true with respect to the art produced in the region after 1945. By contrast, the earlier period has been a subject of several important studies such as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s book Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800, Krisztina Passuth’s study of the avant-garde between 1907 and 1927, Les avant-gardes de l’Europe Centrale, or Steven Mansbach’s Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1890–1939.1 There are also several studies and anthologies with narrower scope for which the 7 culture of the region in the post-World War ii period provides a focus. Andrzej Turowski’s collection of essays, Existe-t-il un art de l’Europe de l’Est?, is a good example of the genre.2 In 2002 Mária Oriškova’s study, The Double Voice of Art History (Dvojh - lasné deijiny umenia), was published in Bratislava.3 The book presents an argument for the breakdown of art history as a discipline, its division into ‘the history of the Western and Eastern art’, or of the centre and the periphery. After discussing ‘Western perspective’, characterized, above all, by the lack of knowledge about ‘the East’, and ‘the Eastern perspective’, defined as an insider viewpoint on the art produced in the region and dealt with from the point of view of the local methodological paradigms committed to the distinction between the ‘official’ and the ‘unofficial’ artistic cultures, the author attempts to disrupt this art historic dichotomy. However, she does not engage in a com - parative analysis of the two halves of art history, but rather represents the art of Eastern Europe as an autonomous and dynamic historic formation. Moreover, the material covered by Oriškova is considerably limited in its geographic and historic purview. She examines only Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak, or rather, Czechoslovak, art, and generally focuses on the neo- avant-garde prac tice. She also tends to prioritize Czechoslovak art in both invoked examples and references to secondary literature. Because the experience of Czecho slovakia functions in Oriškova’s book as the model for the interpretation of art of the entire region, including Poland and Hungary, her analysis necessarily produces a distorted image of the artistic practice in the region. Nevertheless, the book makes a valuable contribution to the literature, since next to the more or less disconnected exhibitions and exhibition catalogues that will be dis cussed in the next chapter, it is one of the first modest but nonetheless significant attempts at a cohesive formulation of the artistic experiences in this part of Europe. In the same year, 2002, Primary Documents, a useful source of materials was published in English,4 and a few years later the famous East Art Map edited by the irwin group from Slovenia appeared.5 After this book was originally completed in Poland, many studies dealing with particular countries have also been published. Let me mention only two of them: Impossible Histories, where the second part is devoted to the post-World War ii art in Yugoslavia,6 and the multi-volume publication on modern Czech art, Deˇjiny cˇeského výtvarného umeˇni.7 East-Central Europe is not the old Eastern Europe, although the latter is partly contained within its borders. Looking at the region from a strictly geographic perspective, East-Central Europe covers the eastern portion of the former Central Europe. Although it does not include Austria, it encompasses 8 the eastern part of Germany. Without a doubt, Central European traditions played a key role in shaping the identity of the region, especially in those countries whose territories belonged to the Habsburg empire before World War i. One could generalize that East-Central Europe describes the territory that from the mid-1940s to 1989 fell under the more or less strict control of the Soviet Union under the authority of the Yalta agreement. However, its borders also contain the eastern parts of Southern Europe, or the Balkan countries such as Bulgaria or Yugo slavia, despite the fact that the leader of the lattercountry broke ‘friendly’ relations with the Soviet Union in 1948. It also includes Romania, a country whose dictator began in the 1970s to assert his political independence from Big Brother, a fact that did not, however, create a more liberal political climate in that country. To define the geographic and historic range of the book more precisely, I will consider art produced in Czecho - slovakia, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Poland, Romania and Hungary, or the countries of the so-called people’s democracy. I will make limited forays into Bulgaria and will entirely omit Albania as well as the Soviet Union. Ostensibly, the subject of the book is the history of modern art, here referred to colloquially as the avant-garde. I realize that the use of this term in the title of the study is rather unusual insofar as the book charts not only the history of what is generally, especially in Anglo-linguistic literature, referred to as Modernism, but also of the neo-avant-garde and its 1980s mutations. Because of this focus, the geographic coverage of my analysis is admittedly uneven. I have spent more time on the art of those countries where the post- war experience of modern art was richer and more dynamic, less on those where it did not play a significant role. This is the main reason for excluding Albania and for giving only scant attention to Bulgaria. The book is not intended to function as an all-inclusive monograph on the modern art of East-Central Europe. Nor does it seek to provide a comprehensive synthesis. Neither does it present a survey of the art produced in each country of the region. Instead, it offers a selective, comparative analysis of significant art historic and artistic problems. Individual issues, trends, attitudes and forms of expression are brought together and compared within appropriate time frames, creating a map of the region and an outline of its historic and geographic dynamics. Diachronic dimension is therefore esta- blished through several synchronic samples. The art itself, considered through such a synchronic lens, does not appear as an autonomous field but as a practice enmeshed in politics. Moreover, the frames provided by history are not politically identical. The Communist systems of the different countries had very different, sometimes even contrary, character and intensity. There were times when liberalization in one country occurred simultaneously with the 9 tightening of political controls in another. This meant that, depending on the location and political context, the same type of art could have radically different meaning and significance in different countries of the region. After introductory remarks on the art geography, this book will offer an analysis of Surrealism in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, the countries located at the heart of East-Central Europe. This section focuses on a very short period from the end of World War ii to the introduction of tight cultural controls under Stalinism in the final years of the 1940s. The book turns next to the analysis of the post-Stalinist ‘thaw’. During this period, Modernist art appeared in the context of a system that was still totalitarian, but that was also subjected (to a greater or lesser extent) to a melting erosion.

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