After exhibiting the avant-garde of Vitebsk, on 24 October (until 14 January), the Centre Pompidou will open an exhibition titled Une avant-garde polonaise - Katarzyna Kobro et Wladyslaw Strzemiński. It is the chance to discover key art historical figures, founders of both the a.r. group and of the collection that, in 1930, would become the nucleus of the modern art museum in Łódź, Poland. The exhibition also aims to give a better understanding of a city and a culture. The two artists died in the early 1950s, and both continue to inspire contemporary Polish artists. Now with twin locations—MS1 in the palace of a wealthy industrialist and MS2 in an enormous renovated factory—the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź is one of Eastern Europe’s most fascinating museums. The exhibition focuses on the two founders in connection with some of their contemporaries in the Polish museum’s collection (Arp, Hélion, Hiller, Léger and Schwitters), but it cannot replace visiting Łódź to discover the artists of the 1970s, its cinema school and beautiful architecture.
This article must begin with a pronunciation lesson. In Polish the city of Łódź is pronounced ‘woudsch’. From Warsaw, the new regional train takes you there in just over an hour. Arriving in a hyper-contemporary station in the middle of a wasteland, it only takes a few minutes to reach the city centre, a long, semi-pedestrian street called Piotrkowska. There it is easy to get an idea of the city’s past grandeur, born of the Industrial Revolution, and to reach the current buildings of the Muzeum Sztuki. Andrzej Wajda’s film The Land of Great
Promise (1975), based on the book of the same name by Wladyslaw Reymont (published in 1899), portrays the folly of the textile manufacturers who, in the 19th century, created the city of Łódź’s countenance. A playground for self-made men from the earliest days of capitalism, where there were no laws that mattered, apart from getting rich quick. While industries have long since closed their doors, this frenzy is still evident in the city’s incredible architecture.
A CRITIQUE OF FUNCTIONALISM
The charm of Łódź rests in its urban structure: factories sit directly beside sublime villas built by their owners, accompanied by workers’ housing and, occasionally, green spaces.(1) This principle is repeated on a quadrilateral plan, creating an extraordinary urban vista made up of now-abandoned areas, factories that appear like fortified castles, transformed into luxury hotels, perfectly renovated flamboyant palaces, and industrial wastelands to fire the imaginations of more than one art centre director. And even though the streets are rectilinear, as industry and functionalism required, there is nothing boring about walking along a boulevard; urban situations unfold one after another, without ever resembling each other. As in many other industrial cities in Europe, in the last few years people have left the city, but it nevertheless retains a certain splendour and the atmosphere of Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is based on the collection that Wladyslaw Strzemiński (1898–1951) and Katarzyna Kobro (1893–1952) left to the Muzeum Sztuki. When Strzemiński arrived in Łódź in the late 1920s, he had lived in Moscow, Vitebsk, Minsk, Vilnius and Smolensk, and many artists he had met in those cities had given him works. On 15 February 1931 he opened the international collection of modern art in the history museum in Łódź, which he followed with a donation that would be the foundation of the present Muzeum Sztuki. But this exhibition is also part of the museum’s DNA: showing the avant-garde with an artistic approach to curatorial questions. Strzemiński was simultaneously painter, educator, designer, graphic designer and theorist.(2) His work began with cubism, then moved to unism (the style he invented and theorized) and finished in a very personal abstraction, made of surfaces of soft colours and line that could be human silhouettes or contours on a survey map.(3) Kobro, on the other hand, devoted herself to sculp-
ture, with works related directly to space and architecture. At the end of her life she returned to a kind of figuration (making small statues of nude women as she did in the 1920s; a reproduction of one can be found on her tomb in the Orthodox cemetery of Łódź). While Malevich’s architectons are heavy with a certain mannerism, Kobro’s spatial compositions are delicate, light and of a sublime minimalism, freely playing with notions of surface and space. They investigate the basic tools of architecture and can be used for construction. Thus a maquette of her Spatial
Composition no. 8 (1932) was made prior to the construction of a nursery school. Never completed, this project demonstrates that Kobro’s spatial research, by no longer being abstracted, was intended to change the very conception of architecture. Ana Orlikowska (born in 1979 in Łódź) reproduces such functional interplay in her own
Spatial Compositions. In this series of sculptures, which borrow their title from Kobro’s work, the artist collected depictions of the cellar used by a paedophile, in which he hid and abused his victims. She then made small architectural abstractions in metal painted white that rival those of Kobro (and are even reminiscent of Absalon’s works [4]). An ironic take on the history of art, she also makes clear the media’s sensationalism: none of the three compositions in her series are similar, demonstrating that the images published in the press are anything but reliable police reports. But with their secret doors and singular purpose, these works are also a critique of functionalism and a response to the debates associated with abstraction and figuration, representation and interpretation, art and architecture.
AN EXHIBITION NOT A HANG
Around 1946 Strzemiński carried out studies for printed fabrics, with some connection to the city of Łódź and its textile industry. The major industrial families differed enormously, according to the goods they manufactured and depending on their relation to culture.(5) Thus, it was natural that the manufacturers, aware of the meaning of words used as pat
terns, decoration or colour, thought of Strzemiński. Unfortunately, only a few beautiful sketches on paper remain of this endeavour and, as is often the case with the project of modernity, we can only dream that it truly took shape. Functionalism would become utilitarian here, a little like the skateboard ramp Hakobo built in 2007 in MS1’s inner courtyard. For its construction the Łódź artist/graphic designer chose the colours of the museum’s famous Neoplastic Room, then invited the city’s skaters to add to it. Again, this is an ironic gesture towards an icon of modernity, demonstrating the grasp contemporary Polish artists have of art history without becoming victims of it. Though the skateboard ramp is now dismantled, the Neoplastic Room, designed by Strzemiński in 1948, is still in MS1, at number 36 Więckowskiego Street. Going up the gloomy staircase to the second floor, you then cross a few rooms to find a perfect reconstruction of the room (the original was destroyed between 1950 and 1960, the dark years of Stalinist Realism).This space brings together Katarzyna Kobro’s sculptures with paintings by Strzemiński, Georges Vantongerloo, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Henryk Stażewski, Jean Hélion and Vilmos Huszár, in a layout designed by Strzemiński himself. It is part of the intellectual legacy of this couple, who lived together from 1918 to 1947. The beauty of this mise en scène clearly recalls the research on space undertaken by Theo van Doesburg and El Lissitzky in the 1920s. You could visit it, then, as a late avatar, but knowing that the two main protagonists would die in the following three years, it should be admired as a testament and an act of resistance in a Poland that was gradually succumbing to Socialist Realism. But while the Café de l’Aubette (1926–1928) and the Maison Schröder (1924) come together unexpectedly, MS1’s Neoplastic Room offers a scenography for paintings produced during the inter-war years, hung on red or blue walls. It is a staging that is meant to recall the era in which the works were produced. The gesture is obviously curatorial: Strzemiński created an exhibition and not simply a hang. The room would disappear for a while and then be reborn; today it is reason enough to visit Łódź. Things changed with the deaths of Strzemiński and Kobro but during the Iron Curtain years the city would remain a place of the avantgarde and of experimentation.
AN URBAN PORTRAIT
Between 1978 and 1999, Józef Robakowski filmed the passers-by of Łódź from his 9thfloor window of a building on Mickiewicz Street. Nothing very strange: the daily life of people in the street. But on top of the images he adds his own audio comments.(6) His wife is being followed by the secret police; a neighbour who gets by doing odd jobs plays football with the local kids; another, a car rally champion, skids his car in the snow. The urban decor shifts over time and after 1989 the traditional May Day parade changes direction. The black-and-white video From My
Window is obviously a fiction, a cinematic exercise that teaches us not to believe in the images and the commentary accompanying them. Remember that the Łódź film school, founded in 1948—the same year Strzemiński opened the Neoplastic Room—is not just known for the directors who studied there and enjoyed international careers (Wajda, Kieślowski, Polanski, Skolimowski), but also as a laboratory for research and experimentation in video art. So in a certain way it took over the creative lead from the Strzemiński era in the second part of the 20th century. For his diploma film, Krzysztof Kieślowski
showed an amusing urban portrait, almost seventeen minutes long, Z miasta Lodzi. We see textile workers doing their exercises in factories, variety singers taunting the crowd, a hawker who tests the resistance of passersby to an electrical current. Contrary to the promised land, the workers don’t die: they protest and listen to music. But, in the end, as in Robakowski’s work, the film’s main character is the city of Łódź, a place rich in small stories, touching and individual, sadly carried away in the flow of history. The 1970s were also when Ewa Partum created her first works in public space. On the wasteland of Place Wolności she installed some dozen prohibition signs under the title
The Legality of Space (1971). The pictograms included: ‘No honking horns’, ‘No dogs’, ‘No tractors’, while slogans in Polish proclaimed: ‘Eating and drinking is forbidden’, ‘Do not feed the animals’, ‘It is forbidden to allow’. The public space features an endless series of prohibitions that clearly echo the famous ‘It is forbidden to forbid’ and the work becomes a commentary on society and urban behaviour. Barely three years after May 68, this work shows, above all, the difficulty of living in the Eastern bloc: a territory governed by the most absurd prohibitions possible.
MS2 Since 2008 the Muzeum Sztuki has a second site, MS2, in Manufaktura, a wonderful industrial centre transformed into a shopping and leisure complex. It gave the institution the opportunity to exhibit its vast collection over 3,600 m2. There are at least three hundred works by Joseph Beuys ( Polentransport, 1981) and Roman Opalka’s first Detail, dating from 1965, as well as works by Wojciech Fangor, Günther Uecker, Sam Francis, François Morellet, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Karol Hiller, Monica Bonvicini, Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, Tadeusz Kantor, Ali Kazma, Fernand Léger, Alain Jacquet, Konrad Smolenski, Alina Szapocznikow and Wacław Szpakowski. MS2 shows that the museum didn’t stop after Strzemiński, but continued living, during the most difficult years of Polish history. Ryszard Stanisławsk, its second director, from 1966 to 1992, ever respectful of the museum’s ethics, exhibited artists and attitudes that can be seen as a creative continuation of avant-garde ideas. Currently directed by Jaroslaw Suchan, curator of the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou with Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, with some twelve curators, it now holds exhibitions far from the spectacular venues that govern contemporary art.Thus, on the one hand, they continue studying the history of the various avantgardes, on the other, they produce exhibitions that come close to the ideal of the Neoplastic Room, projects in which the curator proposes more than simple historical re- search, a personal reading, an intellectual position and an inventive hook.(7)Titled Atlas
of Modernity, the collection’s current presentation combines, in thematic chapters (‘Norms and standards’, ‘Experiments’, ‘Progress’, etc.) works from all genres and all periods in order to create a social discourse that goes beyond art history.
AT THE CENTRE POMPIDOU Visiting the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou will thus be a chance to discover a fundamental part of the artistic history of Łódź. Wadja’s last film, finished just before his death in 2016, takes place in Łódź, home to the famous film academy where he studied in the early 1950s. It is a biography of Strzemiński. Titled in French, Les Fleurs
bleues, its Polish title is taken from a book by the artist, Powidoki ( After Image in English). The film, particularly touching, shows a man who fights against a political system he initially supported but that has become a terrible state machine, unable to accept individualism. In this character we recognize that of Mateusz Birkut in the film Man of
Marble (1976) and probably Wajda himself. The Neoplastic Room at MS1 even makes an appearance in an especially dramatic scene. But there is an atmosphere that perfectly defines Łódź: melancholy. The melan- choly of large industrial cities in decline, the melancholy of the disappearance of the avant-garde, and the melancholy of Poland are here united while waiting to see the 21st century unfurl.
(1)The textile industry, even if it is incredibly polluting, can develop in relatively small spaces, often presenting itself as a city-centre activity (unlike coal). Cities such as Roubaix, Tourcoing, Manchester and Wuppertal are perfect examples of this morphology. (2) In his most famous work, ‘A theory of seeing’, which is unfortunately not yet published in English.
(3) In his book Władysław Strzemiński - Zawsze w Awangardzie. Rekonstrukcja nieznanej biografii 1893
1917, Iwona Luba evokes Strzemiński’s military service, particularly his use of survey maps. (4) In the works Cellules and Propositions d’habitations by Absalon (1964–1993), white, pure, geometric forms. (5) When the Bauhaus settled in Dessau in 1924, it was not only to escape the political situation in Weimar but also to get closer to the Junkers factory, which, at the time worked metal and aluminium for aircraft. See
Bauhaus, Junkers, Sozialdemokratie de Walter Scheif
fele, Éditions Form+Zweck 2003. (6) John Smith used the same principle in his film
The Girl Chewing Gum, 1976. (7) See: https://vimeo.com/197377733. (8) At the invitation of Daniel Muzyczuk, I was given the opportunity to organize an exhibition there in 2017, simply titled &, whose principle was to repeat, in ten different rooms, the same selection of abstract and figurative artists, but with different works in each space.
Thibaut de Ruyter is an architect and independent curator.