July 15, 2024. Documenta Institute / Museum Fredericianum, Kassel (DE).
Public lecture delivered within the series “Global Modernities?” Full series program here.
ABSTRACT: A radical transformation of the visual arts took place around 1955 in the People’s Republic of Poland. Monumental, realist compositions glorifying the new Communist men and women of the Stalinist era were swiftly replaced with experimental, modernist abstractions—not unlike those seen in the salons of Paris and New York. This aesthetic shift provided Polish art of the 1960 with unparalleled presence in the West: from MoMA to Dokumenta.
Offering a combination of a sociological and an art historical reading, this talk will explore the specificity of modern art made in Poland under Communism—by many measures, the most liberal art scene of the former Soviet bloc—to understand the relationship between the state-socialist art system and the modernist style it ultimately promoted. Surveying the changing aesthetics of Communist Modernity, the talk will discuss the paradoxical continuity of major paradigms—such as universalism and heroism—across the shifting formal languages of realism and abstraction, thus demonstrating the persistence of socialist realist dogmas and their impact on the shape of postwar modernist art in Poland. It will also address how the subsequent historiography equated communist art solely with socialist realism in order to redeem other art made under Communism after 1956. Ultimately, the talk will present socialist realism not as nemesis, but an intrinsic part of Eastern European modernism.
Magdalena Moskalewicz 