Contemporary Polish Painting [antikvár]

"Contemporary Polish Painting" is the third illustrated work on this subject published to date by Arkady, and it is by far the most extensive. The first book entitled "Contemporary Polish Painters", which appeared in 1957, contained 28 colour reproductions. The second, published in 1967 under the same title, featured 31 plates. The present work, by comparison, contains a total of 63 reproductions. The present book also differs from its predecessors in approach. In the first work of this type each of the artists featured expressed his views about himself as well as about painting, its role and purpose. The second contained biographical notes about the artists whose works had been reproduced on its pages. The present book, by contrast, is not limited to basic biographical data, but in addition attempts to present in a necessarily condensed form characterizations of the individual artists and in many cases detailed information on those of their paintings contained in the work. This approach was selected in the hope that together these 63 sketches would provide the reader with some insight into the essence of contemporary Polish painting since 1945. The task of the introduction is to provide a brief discussion of the history of this period in Polish painting. Perhaps this is much too ambitious a task. Although 63 colour reproductions may appear to be an impressive number, they may well turn out to be inadequate to convey a complete picture of three decades of Polish painting. For it should be said at once that this has been an extremely rich and variegated period, both as regards general problems and individual phenomena. Limitations of various kinds have thus been unavoidable and require explanation and justification right at the outset. First of all, it should be stated that all the reproductions contained in this book come from the collections of the National Museum in Warsaw. There are, of course, museums which more fully represent certain aspects of Polish art after 1945. The tódz Art Muzeum, for example, boasts a more extensive collection of avant-garde works, especially as regards paintings by the tódz artistic community, headed by Wtadystaw Strzemmski, just as certain Cracow artists are perhaps better represented in the National Museum in Cracow and works by painters from the Baltic coast are undoubtedly found in greater abundance in the National Museum in Gdansk. The National Museums at Poznan and Wroclaw also boast a number of unique works in their collections. Nevertheless, the collection of the Warsaw National Museum is sufficiently broad as to permit a selection of works which provide a general survey of contemporary Polish painting. The very fact of selection also limited the concept of painting, which has been greatly expanded in recent times. It was decided to present only easel-mounted paintings in the conventional sense of the term. Current trends towards integrating such disciplines as painting, sculpture, graphic art and artistic weaving have only been hinted at in this book through the presentation of several reliefs by Henryk Stazewski, Aleksander Kobzdej and Zbigniew Gostom-ski. But it proved impossible even superficially to treat monumental painting and other artisitic undertakings connected with architecture and town planning. Nor does the book include such artistic developments as "environments" or "happenings" which are frequently, albeit not always correctly associated with painting, chiefly because most of their initiators have been painters. Also lacking are examples of conceptual art which would require separate methods of documentation and reproduction. The assumptions underlying the present book, though somewhat narrower, are by no means trivial. The choice of only 63 from amongst Poland's numerous painters and the presentation of only one work by each were intended to provide a cross-section of the great variety of trends and tendencies with which artistic ateliers have reverberated over the past 30 years. (It might be added that making this selection has been no easy matter!) Moreover, it was decided to portary these paintings amid the controversies and tensions which had surrounded them. The listing of names in alphabetical order places paintings of diametrically opposed character side by side, thereby accentuating their controversial nature. For it is worth emphasising that the history of contemporary Polish painting, as of all Polish art, was not marked by harmonious development; insteads it was a process which unfolded in the fire of ceaseless, often tense and impassioned discussion. In the course of that struggle, waged in the main through exhibitions, diverse tendencies would come to the fore, only to be supplanted in turn by others. They have all been more or less documented or at least mentioned in this book. But documentation was not the principal objective. Instead, the reproductions have been selected so as to reveal how a specifically Polish brand of painting emerged from the welter of diverse tendencies and opposing attitudes, bearing witness in its own way to Poland's national culture. With only space enough to accommodate 63 artists, the book has not been able to portray in