Journal ARS 47 (2014) 2

Lidia GŁUCHOWSKA

In the Shadow of the Official Discourse: Towards a Revision of the History and Theory of the Polish Idiom of Cubism

(Summary)

As a grounded overview of the Cubist tendencies in Polish art has not been written yet the unjustified dominating opinion in the international art historiography is that Poland was practically “untouched by Cubism”. On the other hand, in international publications the direct influences of French Cubism on the development of this style in other countries are mostly overestimated, due to the high status of the Parisian milieu and the traditional Francophile affinities in several artistic circles “out of the centre”. In fact, other traditions also contributed to the establishment of local idioms of this new international visual language. The transmission of Cubism to the “peripheries” partly resulted via other channels then the personal contacts or experiences of Central, Central-East, Southern or Northern European artists, who visited Paris around 1909 or slightly later. Apart from these immediate impulses there were several others: done through the knowledge of private collections, e.g., in Prague or Moscow or through reproductions and reviews published in art magazines, among them also the German Die Aktion and Der Sturm. In the Polish (and as a consequence also in the international) art history the dominating role, as far as Cubism is concerned, is given to the Cracow group Formiści. The national art historiography has created an impression that the Cubist tendencies in the oeuvre of its members went back to their personal inspirations taken from French and Italian art and art theory, in opposition to other groups of the early modernism and avant-garde such as Bunt (Revolt) and Young Yiddish. The latter ones due to the simplified descriptions were mostly, unjustifiably, perceived as influenced mostly by the German, politically radical and artistically “chaotic” Expressionist. The impact of other international styles of the “new art” on their artistic production, among them Cubism, in the general national art historiographical narratives is still overlooked and neglected. Similarly, in the general overviews of the artistic life of the first 3 decades of the 20th century, it is not pronounced enough, that the transfer of the Cubist aesthetics and theory resulted more seldom in a vertical manner – from the Parisian centre to the periphery (in Poland’s case that means also to the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Prussian provinces, as until 1918 it did not exist as an independent state), but much more often via horizontal contacts: several iconographical and manifested insights about Cubism reached the Polish territories, e.g. via Moscow, Prague, Berlin or Munich. As an echo of these simplifications, the national and as a consequence also the international historiography of art mostly omits the Cubist tendencies, not only in the oeuvre of Polish artistic formations apart from Cracow, but also in the aesthetic practice of the representatives of groups, which later became well known as constructivist ones, such as Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński or Henryk Berlewi. On the other hand, it has been often forgotten, that in the local context, due to the relatively late adaptation of Cubism into artistic praxis, it is nearly not documented in the pure form. Instead of that one can speak about the primarily non-antagonist coexistence of the two hybrids of the “new art” – the Cubo-Expressionist and the Futuro-Dadaist one. Two great mystifications of both the radical and traditional wing of the Polish art historiography of the interwar period influenced the reception of Cubism and other modern tendencies after the World War II. First of all, the Constructivists looking for local roots of modernity, privileged Formists as protagonists of the rational, “new form”, and extracted their formal experiments from the emotional understanding of the national ideology and art. This one was at the beginning paradoxically quite close to the neo-romantic and metaphysical tendencies of this period, which has been depicted in the primary name of the group Polish Expressionists, used between 1917 and 1919. The latter exclusion of the expressionist associations from the new name of this group had both formal and national reasons. Parisian “classicism” was given more admiration than the “German” expression. The latter aesthetics was neglected both because of the earlier Austro-Hungarian and Prussian occupation of the Polish territories, but also because of the revolutionary orientation of artistic milieus in the neighbouring countries in the period of re-establishing the independent “new state” of Poland. In consequence, the second mystification of the Polish art history was a product of its official cultural politics. Formists had nobilized the ancestors of the Polish national style in the spirit of folklorist art deco, while the role of other groups with the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and universalist orientation, such as Bunt and Young Yiddish, had been marginalized and they were robbed of the honour of being recognized as forerunners of modernity in Poland. At the same time and for the same reasons, the impact of the representatives of École de Paris on the Polish artistic life has been widely commented in the art historiographical scholarly studies of the last 20 years, while the overviews or case studies of the influences coming from other centres, are still practically missing. Forgotten aspects of the Polish and international art history which still call for closer research from an international and horizontal perspective belong, among others, Polish-Czech Cubo-Expressionist relations established by the members of Bunt, above all Kubicki and Zamoyski, via Berlin and Munich or the inter-influences within the Central-European cultural triangle of Vienna-Prague-Cracow. The latter, easily recognizable in the visual language of architecture and applied arts by comparison of e.g such phenomena as the Polish national style (art deco), Czech Cubism and the production of the Wiener Werkstätte, is still underestimated, while the advantage in the stylistic analysis is still given to the horizontal relations to the Parisian “centre”. As a consequence also the studies on the role of this Austro-Hungarian-Empire network in the introduction and circulation of the Proto-Cubist and Proto-Constructivist tendencies in Europe still belongs to the desiderata of the European, post-national and universal art history. This paper presents the lesser-known aspects of Cubism in Poland in the field of both aesthetic practice and theory, staying in the shadow of the mainstream documented in a tendentious way in the canonical art history. This way it contributes to the revision of the narrow view of the artistic processes and to the remapping of the traces of cultural exchange and transformation of aesthetic and ideological patterns in a horizontal perspective between the “European margins”.