Agnieszka Pindera at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź is leading a research project into Échange entre artistes 1931–1982, Pologne-USA, a remarkable expression of internationalism at the time of the rise of the Solidarity independent union in Poland (and its repression in late 1981). She asked me to write an essay on Henryk Stażewski, one of the initiators of the exchange of art works by Polish and American artists. My essay attempts to understand the changing associations of geometric abstraction in art over his long career from the 1920s to the 1980s. This is an extract.
… Employed as a lens through which to view his works of the 1970s—such as the three donated works—it is tempting to see the 1926 statement as a kind of declaration of unchanging values. (And perhaps Stażewski was complicit in encouraging this interpretation, when he wrote out this statement—by hand—and distributed it in numerous copies in the 1970s). Some anachronism might also be detected in the repetitions in his own work: after all, he had created all-white monochromes in the early 1930s in a rippled “Unist” manner and again in the 1970s as flat canvases. But time had not stood still. And the meanings that might be attached to overarching concepts like abstraction, universalism and modernity had, of course, shifted too. Moreover, throughout his career, Stażewski demonstrated a capacity to change his mind.
Although he designed typographic layouts for publications and interiors well into the 1930s, Stażewski’s Constructivist thinking of the mid 1920s was soon modified. Like Strzemiński and Kobro, he came to reject the narrow functionalism that saw art as a kind of laboratory for ideas that might be applied by designers and architects. This is well known, and many historians have traced the formation of the a.r. group in 1929 back to a rift with architects.[1] What has been less remarked is that this idea returned during the turbulent period of the “Thaw”. Abstract art had been effectively prohibited during the Stalin years and to remove the stigma of elitism that had been attached to it, Stażewski (along with Julian Przyboś, his ally from his a.r. days[2]) revived the pre-war idea that it could work as an experiment with form or perception that might find application in the project of socialist modernization. Interviewed in the popular Stolica magazine in 1956 at the height of the reform movement in Poland, Stażewski said
In my opinion, abstract art is the way to reflect modernity. Civilization and advancing technology are changing the external world around us. Artists try to see these changes and express them in their art. This can be achieved by simplifying the plastic form, a certain geometrizing of shapes, and using the simplest, strongest colors.[3]
The revival of pre-war ideas, the “alibi of use” can be understood as a tactical claim during the Thaw years.
For Stażewski the “alibi of use” also offered a connection with a new generation of artists and designers who were interested in the restoration of human feeling and thought after the brutal effects of Stalinism. Exhibition design in the late 1950s and 60s became what Stanisław Zamecznik called “a laboratory of experiments”[4] and Stażewski worked with young designers to create environments that would stimulate the senses and encourage gallery visitors to treat viewing as a kinaesthetic experience. The largely monochrome reliefs featured in his 1959 show at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw, for instance, were mounted on free-standing podiums with concave profiles designed by Zamecznik, each lit dramatically. The high-water mark of Stażewski’s interest in experiments of this kind came in 1965 when he was invited to show at Zachęta—National Gallery of Art. This was an opportunity to demonstrate the contemporaneity of his art. In one of the large and theatrically-lit rooms of the Warsaw gallery, massive monochrome “drums” projecting from the walls dominated the viewer. In other rooms, the polished copper and aluminium surfaces of his new reliefs caught the light. In the catalog, Stażewski claimed his work to be an update of the theories of Unism advanced by his avant-garde ally, Strzemiński, in the 1930s:
The Unist image eliminated any illusion of depth and clearly suggested that it was completely and consciously flat. If it were possible to reintroduce a three-dimensional space, this could only be through the dimensional properties offered by a relief. The relief provides completely new effects, such as shadows formed by lighting changes. This introduces the volatile picture principle, enhanced by the viewer’s movement … One can speak of the relative kineticism of this kind of art. The next phase of kineticism will be a fully moving picture.[5]
Stażewski’s feeling for Strzemiński’s ideas was real and sincere, but one suspects that the appeal of their post-war renewal was, at least in part, attached to his friend’s tragic fate. Both Strzemiński and Kobro died prematurely in the early 1950s after their health failed. They were viewed by many of their contemporaries as victims of the irrational and brutal regime that took command of Polish life in 1949. Looking East, Piotr Piotrowski observed that “Malevich or Rodchenko, whose artistic achievements are unquestionable, were recognized (not always and not in all cases quite correctly) as the victims of Stalinism, which endowed neo-constructivism with the aura of resistance against the official art associated with the communist regime that contributed to the fall of the avant-garde in Russia.”[6] The same was likely true in Poland as well.
The popular and the critical responses to the 1965 exhibition were both highly enthusiastic, and Stażewski’s reputation as a contemporary artist was, it seems, sealed. However, one writer, Andrzej Osęka, published a vituperative review under the title “Gra w Nic” (A Game of Nothing) in Kultura, accusing the artist of pandering to bourgeois taste (no doubt an attack on socmodernist product design and architecture too): “In his reliefs, Stażewski does not create ‘new forms for industry, and architecture’ at all (as once was the ambition of the avant-garde). On the contrary, he exploits forms which have permanently entered the arsenal of signs of modernity known to all. We encounter geometric shapes, angular and rounded like the bodies of present-day cars, the keys of present-day typewriters and calculating machines.”[7]Osęka declared Stażewski redundant, overly attached to a passé conception; his lofty avant-garde ideas overtaken by chrome-plated kitsch.
What Stażewski felt about Osęka’s attack is hard to know. But what is clear is that he changed his mind about the Constructivist dream of uniting art with life in the years that followed. In a Q&A published in the catalogue accompanying his 1969 Foksal Gallery show, he made this plain:
QUESTION: What do you think about the so-called integration of arts, or about the cooperation of the painter with the architect, designer, etc.?
ANSWER: I don’t believe in such integration.
QUESTION: But several decades ago you used to express an opposite opinion in what you wrote in BLOK and PRAESENS?
ANSWER: Later experience made me change my mind.
QUESTION: What do you think about the role of an artist and a critic in society?
ANSWER: Art is not an object of bucolic contemplation. An avant-garde artist challenges the audience and fights against its habits. In this fight it is the artist who must perish.
A creative critic is similarly involved and his attitude towards reality is like that of the artist; they share the same fate and they must both perish.[8]
This was an unequivocal statement … or so it seems. Yet, his position was to shift again, a few years later, when he returned again to the matter of design. In 1976, he produced a series of square-format color studies which he presented as the floors and walls of a room in which someone with a nervous disorder might find solace. No longer framed by the Constructivist ambition of the 1920s to transform the world, these designs were informed, as Marta Zboralska has shown, by his readings of psychology and perhaps even his late-1960s encounters with hippies, for whom psychedelic drugs offered entry into the interior spaces of the mind.[9]
As almost every interview or profile written in the 1970s stressed, Stażewski had been an important figure the avant-garde networks that connected Europe after the conclusion of the First World War. Interviewers mined his memories for his encounters with the heroes of the avant-garde who were now passing into myth: he recalled Mondrian, for instance, “loving to dance despite being a loner,” while offering insightful analyses of the rhythm of his compositions.[10] Stażewski, in turn, became wrapped in legend, a status that he approached playfully. He developed an oblique and sometimes willfully absurd relationship to his own past in the form of anecdotes and what he called “aphorisms” he copied out by hand in multiple versions and distributed, again by hand, to friends and acquaintances in the 1970s. In these short texts—written in characteristically blocky lettering in Polish, English and French—he reproduced many of his pre-war statements and essays, as well as more recent manifesto-like announcements, acting as reminders, perhaps, of his status as not only an artist but also a theorist. Like an unreliable narrator, he also penned brief stories of his life which were, perhaps, autofictions: seemingly trivial stories of visiting a café with Edzio (Edward Krasiński) or second-hand tales from the past of Mewa (Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz Rogoyska) and many others. One suspects that these may have been his way of deferring the tidy historicization that his interlocuters sought.
An “auratic” figure, Stażewski was sanctified as an “original” at the time when the question of who or what constituted the authentic avant-garde was a matter of concern, at least to artists and critics. The seeds of this question had been planted when the meaning of the initial letters in the name of the a.r. group were interpreted differently by different members of the 1929 alliance—with Przyboś and Brzękowski claiming it to stand for “artyści rewolucyjni” (revolutionary artists) and Strzemiński “awangarda rzeczywista” (real avant-garde). While the meaning of revolutionary was surely clear to the socialist artists who used the term, what real meant was never clearly articulated. The same question was asked frequently in the 1960s. For instance, at the 1965 Międzynarodowe Spotkania Artystów, Naukowców i Teoretyków Sztuki (International Meeting of Artists, Scientists and Critics), a plenair organized inOsieki, a village on the Baltic Coast, figures from different artistic circles from across the country gathered to make art and share ideas. A questionnaire was distributed amongst the participating critics inviting them to identify those artists that they regarded to be the most avant-garde. Zbigniew Gostomski, an emerging “star” whose spare monochrome reliefs and wall-mounted sculptures explored the perceptual effects of color and form, received the most votes, followed closely by Stażewski, and Władysław Hasior, a latter-day surrealist, and Edward Krasiński, a sculptor whose linear forms seemed to be impossible feats of repose and balance.[11] While the results of the poll are recorded (literally, on neat voting cards), how the concept of avant-gardism was understood by the Osieki critics is less clear. What did it mean to be a radical artist in the People’s Republic? How should art respond to the patronage of the socialist state? What remained of the social and political ambitions of the “revolutionary” avant-garde of the 1920s, now that it was history?[12] These questions became all the more pressing in the years that followed when Conceptual Art, with its interest in the organization of knowledge, became an animated field of artistic practice. Equally important was the spread of new infrastructure of semi-independent galleries led by artists. Some, like Foksal Gallery established in Warsaw in 1966, benefited from their official status in the form of gallery space and exhibition budgets. The two combined in a controversial manner when in 1975, Borowski, the director of Foksal Gallery, accused a new wave of conceptual artists then emerging of forming a “pseudo-avant-garde” engaged in the superficial, mass production of art works that were easily assimilated by a pseudo-liberal regime.[13]
The status of the avant-garde was being tested elsewhere in the world at the time. Famously, Peter Bürger argued in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) that the avant-garde vision of eliminating the distance between art and life had been achieved, not by its own efforts but by the wholesale commodification of life in the West. As a result, modernist artists held onto the illusion of the autonomy of their art from the market to the extent that they were blind to its imbrication with capitalism. The logical outcome of this state of affairs was, he suggested, the need to open up that distance again:
In late capitalist society, intentions of the historical avant-garde are being realized but the result has been a disvalue. Given the experience of the false sublation of autonomy, one will need to ask whether a sublation of the autonomy status can be desirable at all, whether the distance between art and the praxis of life is not requisite for that free space within which alternatives to what exists become conceivable.[14]
In his words, Bürger sought to distinguish ”historic avant-garde movements from all those neoavant-gardiste attempts that are characteristic for Western Europe and the United States during the fifties and sixties.”[15] But of course, the historic avant-garde could become neo.Writing about Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, for instance, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh also associated “Cold War Constructivism” with depoliticization. Seeking to ingratiate themselves into America in the 1940s after beginning their careers in Russia in the 1910s, the artists—rescripted the history of Constructivism not only to accentuate their own roles, but also “to erase its commitment to mass audiences and ignore its utilitarian dimensions; and finally, to reorient it toward European and American concepts of artistic autonomy and modernism … the avant-garde tradition had to be reinstituted in such a way that it would supply the radical aesthetic goods without the political strings originally attached to the Dadaists’ and the Constructivists’ work …”.[16]Should we see Stażewski’s trajectory in similar terms—from a radical artist to a depoliticized neo-constructivist ready for the market? Was the Polish understanding of artistic autonomy the same as the American one?
In the Polish People’s Republic, the effects of capitalism on art were oblique. Private galleries did not exist and most artists earned a living from official commissions, competitions and sales to museums—as well as support from the Artists’ Union. The art market was a distant and poorly understood phenomenon, at least for most artists. Stażewski, one suspects, had a far better understanding than most of his peers, as an artist whose work was sold by commercial galleries in the West with export licenses arranged by the foreign trade office of DESA Dzieła Sztuki i Antyki, the official organization that managed sales of art and antiques. Stażewski status as an ”authentic” added considerably to the market value of his work abroad (something Denise Réné recognized in him and others of his generation including the veteran Hungarian Constructivist, Lajos Kassák[17]). It seems likely that sales abroad made Stażewski far wealthier than most of his compatriots (not least because his financial support for other artists and writers has been recorded[18]). Yet, he professed disdain for the art market. The catalog of the 1982 exchange project features two of his “aphorisms” that he had written and distributed by hand a few years earlier. One reads
L’art d’aujourd’hui est de la PROSTITUTION.
L’artiste qui vend beaucoup de tableaux est une prostituée.
II faut donner l’art gratuitement.
L’Etat doit financer la pension de l’artiste et assurer l’achat des matériaux nécessaires à sa création.
Acheter même un pinceau en or, si cela est nécessaire au peintre.
With its absurd image of a golden brush, this 1978 text appeared to object to the conditions governing art production in the capitalist West, and it is striking that it was reprinted in the 1982 exchangecatalog. It may well have been selected to reinforce the argument that Anka Ptaszkowska made in its introduction, namely the need to “eliminate money from the game” of making and showing art.[19]
Other texts written by Stażewski at the same time, seemed to decry state power, perhaps marking his growing frustration with the sharply declining conditions of life in the Polish People’s Republic. In one of his handwritten texts, probably authored in 1979, he listed the “Institutions that must be destroyed”:
THE STATE
The division of humanity into states is the cause of wars, chauvinism, and hatred toward neighbors
POWER
An instrument of violence under the guise of order
THE LAW
Training citizens to kill people professionally
THE MILITARY
It has a sense of honor—unwilling to stain its uniform with anything except human blood
CIVILIZATION
Its aim is to make life easier and more comfortable for humans by exploiting nature— yet it poisons and destroys both humans and nature
He also coined a pithy slogan which he copied out on blank postcards, again for hand-to-hand distribution:“Anarchism is constant revolution.”This was a proposition which should be taken seriously despite Stażewski’s reluctance to be pinned down (as well as the fact that there is little evidence of his direct engagement with the anarchist movement in Poland which, though suppressed in the People’s Republic, had been an influential voice on the radical left before 1939[20]). Perhaps he was committed less to the theory of the abolition of institutions or to anarcho-syndicalism than to what Ptaszkowska called the “lived anarchism” of Poland in the twentieth century in which people self-organized precisely because the state was too corrupt or too incompetent to manage the world.[21] It points to his disdain for the government and his belief in the capacity of artists to organize, cooperate, publish and create. These were lessons from having lived a long life, and a model for the exchange project ….
[1] See Andrzej Turowski, Konstruktywizm polski: próba rekonstrukcji nurtu 1921-1934 (Wrocław: Ossolineum) 1981; Andrzej Płauszewski, a.r. mit urzeczywistniony, dzieje i kolekcja (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Łódzkie, 1989).
[2] See, for instance, Julian Przyboś’s essay “Nowatorstwo Strzeminskiego” in the catalog for the Katarzyna Kobro Wladyslaw Strzemiński exhibition (Łódź / Warsaw: Centralne Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych, ZPAP, 1957), 10-11.
[3] “W pracownia Henryka Staziewskiego” in Stolica 7 (February 12 1956): 10.
[4] Stanisław Zamecznik , “Sztuka przestrzeni” in Projekt 2 (February 1961): 28.
[5] Stażewski, Wystawy Prac Henryka Stażewskiego (Warsaw: CBWA Zachęta, 1965) np.
[6] Piotr Piotrowski, ”Post-War Central Europe: Art, History, and Geography” in Krasnogruda, 8 (1998) available at https://www.pogranicze.sejny.pl/artykuly/krasnogruda-nr-8-piotr-piotrowski-post-war-central-europe-art-history-and-geography/ – accessed October 2023.
[7] Andrzej Osęka, ”Gra o Nic” (1966) reproduced in Andrzej Osęka Poddanie Arsenału. O plastyce polskiej 1955-1970 (Warsaw: Arkady, 1971), 194.
[8] From an interview published in the exhibition catalogue, Henryk Stażewski (Warsaw: Galeria Foksal, 1969) np.
[9] Marta Zboralska, ”Living Color: Henryk Stażewski’s Interior Models” in Art Journal (Fall 2021): 38-55.
[10] ”Emocje abstrakcji – Z Henrykiem Stażewskim rozmawia Zbigniew Taranienko” in Sztuka 7 (1980): 23.
[11] Marika Kuźmicz, “Topografia porozumienia,” in Ludmiła Popiel. Jerzy Federowicz (Warsaw: Arton Foundation, 2019), 26–27.
[12] Perhaps the first sign of this interest was Rewolucyjne tradycje awangardy polskiej, anexhibition curated by Jan Bogucki at Współczesna Gallery, Warsaw, in 1966.
[13] Wiesław Borowski, “Pseudoawangarda,” in Kultura, 12 (1975): 11–12.
[14] Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde (Manchester: MUP, 1984), 54.
[15] Ibid, 109.
[16] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Cold War Constructivism,” in Serge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-1964 (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1990), 90.
[17] Edit Sasvári, “A mi kultúránk nem lehet más itthon, mint külföldön” in Művészettörténeti Értesítő 59, 1 (2010): 61–70.
[18] Ptaszkowska records Stażewski’s financial support for Krzysztof Niemczyk in Traktat o życiu Krzysztofa Niemczyka na użytek młodych pokoleń (Warsaw: Ha! Art, 2007), 301.
[19] Ptaszkowska, 14.
[20] In one of his hand-written anecdotes, Stażewski describes a conversation between his brother and three Jewish anarchists before the Second World War. This 1984 text is reproduced in Małgorzata Jurkiewicz, Joanna Mytkowska and Wiesław Borowski, eds., Henryk Stażewski: ekonomia, myślenia i postrzegania, (Warsaw: Fundacja Galerii Foksal / Galeria Foksal, 2005), 324.
[21] Ptaszkowska, 15.
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