Why is Poland’s ruling party waging war on the arts?
Museum and gallery directors are being purged by ‘goosestepping’ politicians. Colin Freeman investigates
As director of Poland’s leading gallery for avant garde art, Jaroslaw Suchan has never been afraid to probe the tensions between old and new. In 15 years at the Lodz Museum of Art, he has won widespread acclaim for his exhibitions – most recently with Atlas of the Modern World, a “journey” from the Enlightenment to the 21st century. With “a multiplicity of ideas, visions, religions and traditions”, the exhibition argues, “there is no one modernity”.
Not everybody, though, seems to agree – in particular, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), whose hardline conservatives prefer modernity to have a rather more traditional feel. Last month, the PiS-controlled council in Lodz told Suchan, 55, that his contract would not be renewed. No reason was given, and it seems he has become a living exhibit of the very kind of culture clash his exhibition hoped to explore.
“The progressive culture certainly doesn’t fit the agenda of the ruling party, which is rather centred on traditional values and conservatively interpreted national history,” Suchan told The Sunday Telegraph in a carefully worded statement. “Institutions that fit in with such politics can count on support. Our museum isn’t seen as such.”
Others in the arts world have been less diplomatic, describing Suchan’s removal as the work of “goosestepping conservatives”. And, in their view, those goose-steps are not just echoing around the galleries of the Lodz Museum. Suchan is merely the latest in a purge of gallery and museum directors, all deemed too liberalleaning or, at least, not sufficiently patriotic and conservative.
More generally, the PiS is imposing its vision wherever it can – letting local councils declare themselves “LGBTfree zones”, forcing Poland’s national broadcaster to do patriotic cheerleading, and picking fights with what it sees as an overmighty, overreaching EU.
True, for many people in post-Brexit Britain – weary, perhaps, of our own statue-toppling culture warriors – the temptation might be to sympathise with this feisty counter-insurgency. Witness our own heated debates today over whether the BBC has a Left-wing bias, for example, or whether museums have “woke” agendas. It is fair to say, however, that the PiS is not just a Polish-speaking version of the Brexit Party. Indeed, its opponents in Brussels now feel that, by comparison, Nigel Farage and his ilk were progressive-minded moderates.
‘They are trying to control every art institution in the country’
Liberal Poles, meanwhile, say the PiS’s cultural onslaught reminds them of Communist-era brainwashing – the only difference being that state TV is now even stodgier than it was then.
“This party is trying to control every art institution in the country, plus state TV, with a plan of introducing this conservative, Catholic-oriented nationalist cultural doctrine,” says Piotr Rypson, a Polish art critic and former deputy director of Warsaw’s National Museum. “On TV now, what was once news and factual programming is often just propaganda. It’s somewhere between Fox TV and what we got during Communist times – only in those days, some of the cultural programmes were actually a bit more stimulating.”
So, who exactly are Poland’s Right-wing culture warriors? Ironically, they have sprung to power in a country that was once the poster boy for the EU’s vision of a borderless, harmonious Europe. Since Poland entered the European Union in 2004, millions of its citizens have roamed the Continent for work, integrating well and turning Poland into one of Europe’s most dynamic economies. But for every Pole working as a plumber in London or barista in Berlin, there were others who stayed at home – in particular the elderly, the ruraldwelling, and the devout, for whom the Catholic Church is still as influential today as it was in 1970s Ireland.
It is these voters that have kept the PiS in power since 2015, its agenda veering ever further from the liberal values that EU membership was supposed to cement.
The party has described gay rights as an “ideology worse than communism”, for example, letting town halls ban Pride marches. Abortions have been all but outlawed by the courts – themselves now packed with party appointees in violation of EU rules.
State TV, which previously had BBC-style independence, now runs reports showing plucky little Poland beset by foreign conspirators, be they gay lobbyists, global financiers or past invaders like Germany and Russia. With neighbouring Belarus trying recently to flood Poland with migrants, such messages strike a chord.
“The PiS have played skilfully on this notion of national identity dissolving,” admits Rypson. “It is true that in the 1990s identity was basically seen as a bad word in the EU, and I think Polish liberals took that too literally, forgetting that many Poles are very historically minded – and for good reason.”
The EU has hit back, handing out massive fines to Poland and withdrawing funding from LGBT-free town halls. But its scolding power is limited, not least because of the fear of “Polexit” if the EU pushes too hard.
Hence the continuing clear-out in the nation’s cultural institutions, in which Rypson says at least “a couple of dozen” senior heads have rolled, including posts in theatres, film and literary institutes. Among those brought in as replacements is Piotr Bernatowicz, appointed last year as director of Warsaw’s Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. His appointment has drawn protests, partly because he has acquired works like Jacek Adamas’s Tonfa (Baton), which portrays homosexuality as a lifestyle forced upon the public. It shows a neon police baton that phases through
the colours of a Pride-style rainbow.
Bernatowicz accuses the art world of being hypocritical, pointing out that it prides itself on being controversial, but often disapproves of anything that challenges its own ideologies.
“People expect artists, like politicians, to abide by the rules of political correctness,” he says. “Yet one of the main values of modern art [is] freedom, the freedom to experiment, the freedom to violate the habits and expectations of the audience.” To challenge this, he hosted a show in August called “Political Art” that was billed as a fightback against cancel-culture. It included works showing oppression of women in the Muslim world, and human rights abuses in Russia, but also exhibits by Dan Park, a Swedish art provocateur who has served jail time for hate crimes.
Critics say that Bernatowicz is platforming offensive agitprop under the defence of freedom of expression. He retorts that the art world made no such fuss over a play in Poland, The Curse, in which a woman performed fellatio on a sex toy attached to a statue of Pope John Paul II. He said to The New York Times that Catholics who objected to that were told to be “more tolerant and open to art.”
Yet Viktor Witkowski, a Polish artist now based in America, questions whether Poland even has the kind of aggressive cancel culture that Bernatowicz complains of. “The arguments he’s talking about might apply in the US, but not in Poland,” he says. He added: “What’s happening in Poland is unprecedented outside of a dictatorship, this creeping takeover from within. I just hope the government is miscalculating, and they will be confronted, eventually, with a broad refusal of their stance.”
Whether that will happen remains to be seen. With 43 per cent of the vote in 2019’s elections, PiS is well ahead of rivals. On the other hand, Poland is not immune to social changes, and with millions of young Poles having roamed west in the last two decades, attitudes on matters like gay rights, identity politics and the Church are likely to change. Thirty years after Poland toppled statues of Marx and Lenin, its new tussle with modernity may only just be starting.