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POLISH
ART 1955-1985. THE
EXHIBITION.
INTRODUCTION
| "As
a concept of cultural history, Eastern Europe is Russia with
its quite specific history anchored in the Byzantine world.
Bohemia, Poland, like Austria, have never been part of Eastern
Europe. From the very beginning they have taken part in the
great adventure of Western civilization with its Gothic, its
Renaissance, its Reformation–a movement which has its
cradle precisely in this region. It was here, in Central Europe,
that modern culture found its greatest impulses: psychoanalysis,
structuralism, dodecaphony, Bartok's music, Kafka's and Musil's
new aesthetics of the novel. The postwar annexation of Central
Europe (or at least its major part) by Russian civilization
caused Western culture to lose its vital center of gravity."
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| Milan
Kundera |
This is the
first of several presentations dedicated to Central European art
planned by the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum. The exhibition introduces
to the California public about 60 works created in Poland between
1955 and 1985, many of which have never been exhibited here. Among
them are several works by world-renowned Polish artists such as
Magdalena Abakanowicz, Wojciech Fangor, Tadeusz Kantor and Henryk
Stazewski. The exhibition does not offer an entirely comprehensive
picture of the Polish art scene from 1955 to 1985, but it gives
a good representation, particularly of painting, from its two most
experimental and intriguing decades–the 1960s and 1970s. Prepared
mainly for an audience not familiar with the history of Polish and
Central European art, the exhibition also presents some
helpful background information about the preceding period, 1955-1960
as well as the early 1980s, essential to understanding the unique
reality of the art and artists in Poland during the time of the
Communist regime. Unfortunately, because only Southern California
collections are used to provide this presentation, many important
artists such as Jan Berdyszak, Maria Jarema, Roman Opalka, Erna
Rosenstain, Jerzy Rosolowicz, Jerzy Tchorzewski and Tadeusz Wroblewski,
among others, are not included. Fortunately, however, the two largest
collections of Polish art of the second half of the 20th century
have their homes in Southern California and belong to the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and to Hanna Dowoyna Sylwestrowicz
and Bohdan W. Oppenheim
in Santa Monica. (The Catalog)
The devastating
division of Europe into the western and eastern parts after World
War II spelled the end to a big part of Central European civilization.
The cultural congruence once uniting the western and central parts
remained only as a residual phenomenon, limited to numerically insignificant
groups of artists, intellectuals and idealistic dissidents. Unlike
in other countries of the so-called Eastern Block, the habitual
and frequently nationalistic resistance to oppression in Poland
had forced the Communist bureaucracy to enact an artificial reality
of limited and carefully controlled communication with the West.
Thanks to this unique situation, starting from the mid-1950s some
Polish artists had been able to re-establish some links with the
Western art world. Unfortunately, because of political and economic
restrictions, Polish artists were usually not included in important
international exhibitions, and only a very few of them had major
individual shows in Western European or American museums.
In the early 1980s, when the mass media chronicled the inevitable
decay of the Soviet Union, this pattern of the West's indifference
to Polish art was temporarily interrupted by a relatively short
period of curious interest, openness and excitement. A series of
exhibitions introduced Polish art to the public in Western Europe
and North America. The eventual fall of Communism in the late 1980s,
which reinstated free-market forces in the unprepared societies
of Central Europe, brought Polish artists and cultural institutions
back to a situation they thought would never return. At the turn
of the decades, the artists who remained in Poland during the unstable
1980s, had to face the bleak reality of survival in a revived political
and economic culture that had never developed an effective system
of either public or private support for the arts. In this new, complex
situation, many artistic careers took rather turbulent courses;
many were interrupted at least for some time until the artists were
able to adapt to the new reality. Some of
the old-time stars vanished abruptly, while many new ones brilliantly
took off.
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