1 2 edited by Joanna Kordjak Zachęta – National GalleryGallery ofof ArtArt Warsaw 20192018 3 3 CONTENTS 6 The Future Will Be Different 64 Room with a View. Joanna Kordjak Barbara Brukalska & Nina Jankowska, Ltd. 14 A Teaspoon from a New World Marta Leśniakowska Anna Szczepańska 76 The Home at the Child’s Service 24 ‘The Child — Already Joanna Kordjak, Katarzyna a Resident, a Citizen, Uchowicz and Already a Person.’ Between Practice and Utopia 86 Animals in Glass Houses Marta Ciesielska Ewa Klekot 36 Our Home: a Pedagogical 98 ‘Garden Community’. Machine Green Warsaw of the Interwar Zuzanna Sękowska Period Ewa Toniak 44 Let’s Swim! Water Sports in the Interwar Period 108 The Cooperative Spirit on the Example of Selected on the Road. The Legend of Architectural Designs the Vagabond Inn and Polish Anna Syska Working-Class Tourism Przemysław Strożek 54 Architecture Is Always Political. Collective Facilities at the 118 The Black Wings of START Warsaw Housing Cooperative’s in the Would-Be History Interwar Housing Estates of Prewar Polish Cinema Agata Twardoch Monika Talarczyk 4 134 Montages of Modernity. 203 Caveman, Bridge Player, Adaptations of Film and Sea Dog? Interwar Photography Aesthetics Reflections on the One- in (Polish) Interwar Modernism Hundred-Percent Man Piotr Słodkowski Anna Wotlińska 144 Socially Useful Fears 213 Afterword Iwona Kurz Hanna Wróblewska Zofia Dubowska 156 The Factory and the Street in the Elemental Space 215 Authors of Scenic Repetition Dorota Sajewska 221 The exhibition The Future Will Be Different. Visions 166 Theatre as a Political Practice. and Practices of Social On the People’s Theatre Modernisation after 1918 of Jędrzej Cierniak Zofia Dworakowska 180 Boyshevism: Sounds Familiar? Agnieszka Kościańska 190 ‘Stylish Modernists’ from Galicia. Film Actresses of the Interwar Era in Photographs and Daily Life Małgorzata Radkiewicz 5 The Future Will Be Different Joanna Kordjak Recent publications on social history and the history of literature and visual culture (press, film, theatre), written using contemporary research tools and from the per- spective of the modern ‘other’ — mainly women or industrial workers — have shed new light on the interwar period. They have thus inscribed themselves in the process of revising the perception, maintained throughout the decades of People’s Poland and distorted by its propaganda machine, of that particular era (which was idealised and mythologised like no other as if in spite of the propaganda)1, making its image less and less obvious. From today’s point of view, the historical record of the two interwar decades seems highly mixed. On the one hand, it is a time when Poland is more open, dynamic, and pro-European than ever; on the other hand, literature (such as Czesław Miłosz’s An Excursion Through the Twenties and Thirties) offers a picture of society deeply stratified and divided into classes and ethnic groups. Asking about the identity and present condition of our society (issues such as gender equality), it is worth looking at the period that followed the revival of inde- pendent Polish statehood (comparable to the post-1989 transformation period)2 — in the context of both the dangers and the extremely inspiring, yet forgotten or underap- preciated, potential of the era. Writing about the phenomenal rise of women’s litera- ture during the interwar period, Agata Araszkiewicz emphasises the epoch’s creative dynamics: Many previously repressed and marginalised ideas erupt with new strength, and culture is eager to make up for the lost time, to ‘catch up’ with the con- temporary . What the epoch says about itself is something that didn’t always have the chance to maturate in time and wasn’t always consciously acknowl- edged, yet often saw far into the future. Focused until now on preserving (forbidden) Polishness, literature and art gain a new sphere of freedom. The emancipatory discourse, usually connected with pro-independence political work, can finally assume a more civilian, individualistic form.3 1 Under communism, the ‘beautiful 20s and 30s’ functioned as a popular myth of a lost paradise, and for intellectuals as an alternative to the realities of the authoritarian state. 2 Agata Araszkiewicz, Zapomniana rewolucja. Rozkwit kobiecego pisania w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2014, p. 11. 3 Ibid. 7 Courtyard, Cluster 4, Warsaw Housing Cooperative (WSM) housing estate, Żoliborz, Warsaw 1930s, WSM Hall of History 8 Joanna Kordjak The exhibition The Future Will Be Different. Visions and Practices of Social Mod- ernisation after 19184 aims to inscribe itself in the above outlined context of research interest in socio-cultural changes after 1918. Its narratives are defined by modernising social ideas emerging in Poland after World War I or being implemented by institutions and organisations that themselves had emerged in the wake of Poland’s rebirth as an in- dependent nation state. While those ideas form part of a broader process of socio-cultural change in post-WWI Europe, the situation of a country that was both rebuilding its state- hood after being absent for over a century from the political map of the world and trying to forge a common national identity in an ethnically diverse society that until recently lived in three different empires, a society afflicted by widespread poverty and underdevelopment, presented a particularly fertile ground for them to emerge and flourish. The new conceptions of the organisation of social life referenced by the exhibi- tion sought to address the needs of previously marginalised groups, such as women, children, workers, or ethnic minorities. It is worth stressing that the re-establishment of political independence was accompanied by significant progress in the process of the emancipation of Polish women, including early enactment of women’s suffrage (1918), though of course, despite the legislative reforms, the question of whether Pol- ish women had been fully emancipated remained open. Particularly important here are the Positivism-rooted ideas of the democratisation of access to culture, emancipation (of marginalised, disenfranchised, underrepresented social groups) mutual aid and self- organisation. Drawing up an image of the Second Polish Republic as seen in large part through the history of the ‘weak’ and their emancipation taps into the already mentioned process of the period’s demythologisation, but it also makes it possible to highlight its valuable social ideas that remain as topical and valid today as ever. Their prewar origins are not widely known because the communist authorities of People’s Poland often exploited those ideas (such as women’s rights or cooperativism) for their own purposes, distort- ing their original meaning. Aimed at designing a modern society (starting with the social education of children), the more or less utopian visions of modernisation emerged in the context of the crisis caused by the reassertion of independence and the ensuing need to integrate a country divided by the partitions, to reduce sharp economic disparities across regions and industries. They were also a response to acute social issues such as rampant unemployment, housing deficit, or a large number of orphaned and/or home- less children. Presenting the various aspects of the modernist project of the ‘new world’ and ‘new man’, we are aware of its inner contradictions and the resulting tensions as well as the complex and dynamic nature of the changes taking place during the two interwar 4 The first part of the title is a reference to a fragment of an essay about the cooperative movement: ‘Worries, problems, exorbitant prices, commercial exploitation — this is what fills day after day. But we live on in the hope that the future will be different . .’, Zofia Daszyńska-Golińska, ‘Przez kooperatywy do przyszłego ustroju’ (1921), in Spółdzielczość jako organizacja gospodarcza w II RP. Wybór pism, ed. Filip Karol Leszczyński, Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2017, p. 42. 9 The Future Will Be Different decades. Neither socio-political nor cultural processes can be confined within the time brackets of the two wars, and the two decades stretching between them are a gulf apart. If, simplifying things, we describe the 1920s as a time of modernist utopias in the spirit of ‘glass houses’, underpinned by the slogan of building a new world, then the 1930s appear marked by an intensifying sense of ‘catastrophism’, by forebodings of failure and destruction.5 Differences between the two decades can also be noticed in socio-political life, including in the context of the ideas of interest to us here; whereas the 1920s see an unprecedented rise of the cooperative movement, driven not only by progressive legislation but also, importantly, by grassroots initiatives, the following decade is characterised by growing authoritarianism, a nationalisation drive (includ- ing in the cooperative sector), and stiffening political conflict. The turning point, which coincided with the turn of the decades, was determined by the economic, social, and political situation in the world (the Great Depression of 1929–1933 and its political consequences) and in Poland (the May 1926 coup and a sharp political turn to the right). This set the context for increasingly heated debates on the social role of the artist and for a clash of different perceptions of art’s social impact and commitment. Against a background so outlined, the exhibition presents carefully selected examples of the idea of social modernisation as embodied in such fields of visual cul- ture as architecture, design, theatre, press, or photography. The most crucial medium, however, and one widely represented in the exhibition-accompanying publication, is film, the true ‘modernity machine’, whether artistic, experimental, documentary, or popular. Like no other medium, film reflected the dynamics and change vectors of the era, and the force and scale of its social impact was unparalleled. With its techniques of montage and concurrence — the ‘simultaneity of multiple phenomena’, so fascinat- ing for artists at the time — film infiltrated various disciplines of art, revolutionising its language.