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Delayed Discovery or Willful Forgetting? The Reception of Polish Classical Modernism in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Abstract

Polish modern art was collected by leading figures within America's cultural vanguard. Most prized the art's stylistic innovation; they were likely unaware of the ideological charge that animated modernism's makers. By the end of the 1930s, numerous exhibitions of Polish art had been mounted in the United States; however, few concentrated on strikingly innovative works, preferring instead traditional themes, genres, and styles. Nonetheless, Poland's modernist efforts garnered popular success at the New York World's Fair of 1939. The modern art from other central and eastern European nations was actively promoted by its makers, who had immigrated to the United States. Poland's modern art did not benefit from a similar presence, its modernists having mostly elected to remain in their native land. The paucity of Polish artists in 1930s America compromised their chance to exercise an influential role just as the United States was consolidating an international canon of modern art.

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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2012

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References

Portions of this text were delivered as a keynote address at the conference “Rebels, Martyrs and the Others: Rethinking Polish Modernism,” School of Art History, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, London, June 2009.

The reception history for the United Kingdom, and in particular for France and Germany, departs significantly from that of the United States. The frequent presence of Polish artists in Paris and, especially, Berlin, as well as the strong support offered to Polish modernists by the publishers of “advanced“journals (Der Sturm, Die Aktion, among them), plus the intense transnational exchange of periodicals, catalogues, and “artists’ books” between Polish modernists and their brethren throughout all of Europe (but with only a very few American counterparts, such as Broom) may account for the broad, continuous, and authentic appreciation of Polish modernist art and aesthetic theory throughout Europe.

1. For a brief account of the formation of private American collections of Polish art (primarily nonmodernist), see Czeslaw Czapliński, “Polish Art Collections in America,“ http://www.PolishArtWorld.com (last accessed 6 June 2012). Most every collector was of Polish extraction, and the plurality began collecting only in or after the 1980s. The most prominent among them was Wojciech Fibak, who amassed a large number of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century Polish painters of several schools, conservative and modern. See also Władyslaw Wantuła, “Some Remarks on Collecting Polish Paintings in the States,” in Tom Podl and Christopher D. Kamyszew, eds., A Discovering Eye: Polish Painting in the Collection of Tom Podl (Chicago, 1993), 15-18; and especially Anna Król and Artur Tanikowski, eds., Colors of Identity: Polish Art from the Collection of Tom Podl (Kraków, 2001), which emphasizes the creative role played by Paris in the formation of twentieth-century Polish art.

2. In addition to the numerous studies of Polish classical modern art listed in the extensive bibliography in Polish and western languages in S. A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890-1939 (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 360-67, see also the number of innovative studies that have appeared over the last decade in Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts. For instance, Anna Brzyski, “Between the Nation and the World: Nationalism and the Emergence of Polish Modern Art,” Centropa, 1 no. 3 (September 2001); and Irena Kossowska, “Parisian Stimuli: Traditionalism and Aestheticism in Polish Art of the 1920s,” Centropa 6, no. 2 (May 2006). See also the essays in Arnold Bartetzky, Marina Dmitrieva, and Stefan Troebst, eds., Neue Staatenneue Bilder? Visuelle Kultur im Dienst staatlicher Selbstdarstellung in Zentral- und Osteuropa seit 1918 (Cologne, 2005).

3. Although the bibliography for the instrumental role played by Hungarian artists in the development of modern art in America is substantial, the best overview remains that provided in Oliver Botar, “Selected Bibliography,” in S. A. Mansbach, Standing in the Tempest: Painters ofthe Hungarian Avant-Garde, 1908-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 213-27. Austrian modern art and design enjoyed a privileged place in the United States from the early years of the twentieth century. By 1922 the New York market was perceived as sufficiendy strong to persuade the Wiener Werkstätte to open a store on Fifth Avenue through which to promote and sell its products to an American market.

4. The International Exhibition of Modern Art sponsored by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors was held in the 69th Infantry Regimental Armory in New York between 15 February and 15 March 1913. The exhibition presented approximately 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and works of decorative art by roughly 300 mostly European artists. Following its run in Manhattan, the exposition traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago (24 March-16 April 1913), where space limitations persuaded the organizers to reduce the number of displayed objects to 634, thereby eliminating most of the American art. The third and final venue was Boston's Copley Society of Art from 28 April to 19 May 1913.

5. Although statistics vary regarding Chicago's Polish population between 1910 and 1920, most agree that the number was at least 300,000 in the greater metropolitan area, including the steel-making cities of northwestern Indiana, which had attracted great numbers of immigrants from the Russian and Austrian partitions.

6. The Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago contains major monuments of international modern art, including paintings by the Americans James McNeill Whistler (such as the portrait of the collector, Arrangement in Flesh Color and Brown, 1894), Winslow Homer (Coast of Maine, 1893), and Arthur Dove; the Germans Franz Marc (The Bewitched Mill, 1913) and Gabriele Münter; the Portuguese Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (Leap of the Rabbit, 1911); the French artists André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Auguste Herbin, and André Dunoyer de Segonzac; and sculpture by Auguste Rodin. See Art Institute of Chicago, The Arthur Jerome Eddy Collection of Modern Paintings and Sculpture (Chicago, 1931). For the collector's attitudes toward the spiritual satisfaction in art, see Arthur Jerome Eddy, Delight and the Soul of Art: Five Lectures (Philadelphia, 1902); for his appreciation of Whistler, see Eddy, Arthur Jerome, Recollections and Impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler (Philadelphia, 1903).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Eddy, Arthur Jerome, Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Chicago, 1914).Google Scholar

7. For a discussion of the controversy engendered by the display of the Eddy Collection at the Art Institute during its initial exhibition there in early 1922, and the consequent pressure within and upon the Institute to reject modern art, see Brettell, Richard R. and Price, Sue Ann, “From the Armory Show to the Century of Progress: The Art Institute Assimilates Modernism,” in Price, Sue Ann, ed., The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940 (Chicago, 1990), 209-25.Google Scholar See also Germer, Stefan, “Traditions and Trends: Taste Patterns in Chicago Collecting,” in Price, , ed., The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde, 181-86.Google Scholar

8. See Roethel, Hans K. and Benjamin, Jean K., “A New Light on Kandinsky's First Abstract Painting,” Burlington Magazine, 119 no. 896 (November 1977): 772-73.Google Scholar

9. According to Irena Kossowska (personal communication, May 2009), Shepherd may have had a pendant, Pasterka (Shepherdess), dated 1911. The second canvas is known only from a photo (now at the National Museum in Warsaw). That canvas was purchased by Aleksander Koch, the publisher of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration. See The John Quinn Collection of Paintings, Water Colors, Drawings and Sculpture (Huntington, N.Y., 1926), which lists in several volumes the contents of Quinn's art collection (but not his equally impressive holdings in rare manuscripts, autographs, and paper ephemera) following his death in 1925. Zak's In Summer, cat. #234 in the Armory Show, was illustrated in the 1926 catalogue, but it was apparendy not on offer when more than 800 works, the bulk of his enormous art collection, were sold at action in 1927. See the sales catalogues for The John Quinn Collection: Paintings and Sculptures of the Moderns (New York, 1927).

10. For a comprehensive study of the Société Anonyme, see Herbert, Robert L., Apter, Eleanor S., and Kenney, Elise K., The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, 1984).Google Scholar See also Gross, Jennifer R., ed., The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America (New Haven, 2006).Google Scholar

11. Dedicatory page, Katherine S. Dreier, Modern Art (New York, 1926).

12. Dreier, Modern Art, 66-67. The exhibition was held at the Brooklyn Museum (November-December 1926) before moving to the Anderson Galleries in Manhattan, the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, and the Art Gallery of Toronto. For an analysis of the exhibition, see Bohan, Ruth L., The Société Anonyme's Brooklyn Exhibition: Katherine Dreier and Modernism in America (Ann Arbor, 1982).Google Scholar

13. Dreier, Modern Art, 67.

14. For an image of the advertisement, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/pantufla/2651264325/ (last accessed 6June 2012).

15. E. B. White, “Machine Age,” New Yorker, 21 May 1927, 16.

16. For a brief discussion in English of Hiller's activities and contributions to Polish art, see Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, 130-34. The standard Polish study is Karol Hiller, 1891-1939: Nowe widzenie: malarstwo, heliografika, sysunek, grafika (Łódż, 2002), concept and exhibition catalogue by Zenobia Karnicka and Zmarla Janina Ładnowska, edited by MarČin Bauer and Jacek Ojrzyński.

17. Zwornik (Keystone) was a loose association of Kraków artists, founded in 1928, which advanced colorism and revived native folk imagery among the modernists. For an English-language study of Nowa Generacja, see Myroslava M. Mudrak, The New Generation and Artistic Modernism in the Ukraine (Ann Arbor, 1986).

18. Cybis also displayed work at the Finch College Museum of Art in New York (1966) and in the Exhibition of Polish Landscape mounted in Chicago and Washington in 1969-70. Work by the stylistically conservative painter Szymon Mondzain (1890-1979) was to be seen at a one-man exhibition in Chicago in 1920.

19. Leon Chwistek, introduction to the catalogue III Wystawy Formistów w 1919 roku (Kraków, 1919), 8.

20. See Irena Kossowska, “Zygmunt (Sigmund) Menkes,” in “Profiles” (2001), at http://www.culture.pl/web/english/resources-visual-arts-full-page/-/eo_event_asset_publisher/eAN5/content/zygmunt-sigmund-menkes (last accessed 6 June 2012).

21. Żarnower's husband, Mieczysław Szczuka (born 1898), was her partner in art and politics, and co-founder, with her, of the leftist-leaning Blok group and eponymous periodical through which abstraction was vigorously advanced. His untimely death in 1927 was an emotional blow from which she never fully recovered. Her depression deepened during her exilic years in New York, and it likely led to her suicide in 1950. Andrzej Turowski makes the case for suicide (Budowniczowie świata: Z dziejoẃ radykalnego modermizmu w sztuce polskiej [Kraków, 2000], 218), while Ryszard Stanislawski claims that Zarnower perished in a fire that consumed her New York apartment. Król herself provides a third alternative explanation for the artist's death: shock from receiving a letter from the brother whom she thought long dead. See Król, Monika, “Collaboration and Compromise: Women Artists in Polish-German Avant-Garde Circles, 1910-1930,” in Benson, Timothy O., ed., Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 354.Google Scholar

22. For a list of Polish émigré artists, see the appendix of central European émigré scholars (to the United States) in S. A. Mansbach, “The Artifice of Modern(ist) Art History,” in Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 109-13.

A review of the Hoover Institute's substantial Polonia holdings, especially its collections of Polish posters and its archives of various Polish-American Arts and Cultural foundations, reveals the important role modern and, more often, traditional art played in both the interwar and immediate World War II decades. Herbert Hoover's keen interest in Poland through the various aid missions he directed prompted the Hoover Institute's prolonged collection activity in Polonia. See also Gunkel, Ann Hetzel, “Ethnic Aesthetics: Considering Polish-American Art,” Polish-American Studies 64, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 524 Google Scholar, for a consideration of the interplay between tradition and modernism, although the author's focus is on two contemporary figures. In the present context, the art bibliographical holdings of the Polish Museum of America (in Chicago) merit consultation. I thank Teresa Sromek, assistant archivist and librarian there, for her assistance.

23. On page 12 of the Official Catalogue of the Polish Pavilion at the World's Fair in New York (Warsaw, 1939), Kowarski and his colleagues are identified as the designers, most likely of the building itself. The interior designs for the fifteen exhibition subsections (along with the restaurant) were entrusted to various interior architects or designers, as acknowledged in the official catalogue. The Polish Pavilion in New York reprised the success, but not the flamboyant expressionist style, of Poland's pavilion at the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris, designed by the Society of Polish Applied Arts, which was awarded the exposition's gold medal for architectural design.

24. Of particular note in this regard are the first three essays in the opening chapter of the pavilion's catalogue. Under the expansive heading, “The Past and the Future of Poland,“ Jan Parandowsky (“Polish Culture“), Roman Dyboski (“Poland Old and New“), and Jerzy Ponikiewski (“The Geopolitical Situation of Poland in Europe“) authored essays that celebrated Poland's uniqueness and its rightful place in world history and contemporary political affairs. Each scholar endeavored to make a convinČing case to an American (and English-reading) public for Poland's legitimacy and the need to safeguard its status in the face of foreign threats. By contrast, the essays in the second chapter, “Art,” are less politically tendentious, though individually (“The Art of Poland before the Partitions,” “Modern Polish Art,” “Polish Music,” and “The Theatre in Poland“) and collectively they affirm the European (as opposed to the Asiatic, pace Russian) nature of Polish culture.

25. Anticipating by just a few months the New York World's Fair was San Francisco's competing Golden Gate International Exposition (1939 and 1940). This west coast fair celebrated the city's two newly built bridges (the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge). The San Francisco fair hosted a highly touted Division of Contemporary Art exhibition (18 February to 29 October 1939) at which several east central European nations were represented. Czechoslovakia sent fifteen paintings; Hungary shipped seven paintings (and four bronze sculptures), all by modernists, several of whom were politically out of favor with Admiral Miklós Horfhy's fascist regime; Italy was represented by thirty-eight artists, including the modernists Carlo Carrà, Giorgio De Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, and Ardengo Soffici. Significantly, Poland was not present at all, though it was likely invited to send paintings of a modern character. Nazi Germany's participation was not welcome; nonetheless, the section devoted to “Contemporary European Art in American Collections” presented canvases by Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Otto Dix, Carl Hofer, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, and others whom Adolf Hider had deemed “degenerate” in the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibitions that traveled through the Reich.

26. See Varnelis, Kazys, “We Cannot Not Know History': Philip Johnson's Politics and Cynical Survival,” Journal of Architectural Education 49, no. 1 (September 1995): 92104 Google Scholar: “Again Johnson singled out the Jews in classically antisemitic terms, this time comparing them with a disease upon the European race… While he had disparaged Poland and its large Jewish population, Johnson painted Germany in a starkly better light.” See also Varnelis's selected bibliography, which lists nine of Johnson's most notorious published political writings, including “Poland's Choice between War and Bolshevism Is a ‘Deal’ with Germany,“ Social Justice, 11 September 1939, 4, which appeared during Germany's invasion of Poland.

27. By contrast, the inaugural exhibition at the new Museum of Non-Objective Art (today's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Art of Tomorrow, thematized for art the universality that inspired The World of Tomorrow concept of the 1939 World's Fair. As (Baroness) Hilla Rebay, the chief motivator of and advisor to Solomon Guggenheim regarding his collecting and exhibiting activities, wrote in the catalogue's essay, “The Value of Non-Objectivity“: “The theme center of the New York World's Fair owes its inspiration to the creation of Rudolf Bauer, ‘The Holy One,’ painted in 1936, exhibited and published in the United States of America” and serving as the frontispiece to the Guggenheim Foundation's 1939 catalogue. See Rebay, Hilla, “The Value of Non-Objectivity,” in the catalogue for the inaugural exhibition Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings (New York, 1937)Google Scholar, n.p. It is significant to note here the names and numbers of works by “non-objective“ artists from central and eastern Europe then in the Guggenheim Foundation's collection: Kandinskii (#239-#342, from 1912-36), László Moholy-Nagy (#353-#358, from 1927-30, Jindřich Štyrský (#401 and #402, 1927), and Toyen (#403, 1927). For our purposes, it is important to recognize that Bauer, Rebay's most admired artist, represented in the collection by 215 works (from 1915-39) and illustrated with 22 full-page color images, was born (1889) in Lindenwald (Wąwelno, northeast of Bydgoszcz [Bromberg]), which HillaRebay considered to be Poland. Also listed, but most likely not exhibited, were David Burliuk, Marc Chagall, and Emil Filla.

28. It merits mention here diat Hungarian, “Russian” (encapsulating Ukrainian, Belorussian, and other constituent republics of the USSR), and, to a lesser degree, Yugoslavian, Czech, and Romanian classical modernism was integrated, admittedly irregularly, into American institutional collections, although usually displayed in “specialized” settings, as for example the Czech art in the “Bohemian” (Webster) branch of the New York Public Library on East 70th Street. See Davis, Robert H. and Kasinec, Edward, “From Shelf to Spotlight: Rediscovering Modernist Books from Eastern Europe at the New York Public Library,” in Mansbach, S. A., Graphic Modernism: From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935 (New York, 2007), esp. 5962.Google Scholar

29. Barr's conceptualization of abstraction differed essentially from that advanced by Rebay and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. For the organizers of the Museum of Non-Objective Art, abstraction was the spiritual culmination of modern aesthetic expression. As a result, Rebay and the Guggenheim Foundation were especially open to all forms of modernist art from east central and eastern Europe that might be understood as possessing a spiritual content. See Rebay, “The Value of Non-Objectivity,” esp. 4 and 9.

30. For a more comprehensive study of these issues, particularly of the ways in which MoMA assisted in institutionalizing the canonical story of modern art, see Mansbach, “The Artifice of Modern(ist) Art History,” 96-121.

31. For additional reasons why the political dimensions of the Bauhaus may have been consciously ignored by MoMA and Walter Gropius, and those following their lead, see Karen Michaels, “Transfer and Transformation: The German Period in American Art History,” in Stephanie Barron, ed., Exiles + Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles, 1997), 304-16.

32. Excerpted from Irving Sandler, “Introduction,” to Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (New York, 1986), 86. Barr was clearly aware of the potential dangers his attitudes carried. Referring to the historical tendentiousness of Gropius with whom he collaborated closely on the 1938 exhibition, Bauhaus, 1919-1928, Barr felt obliged to reprimand the architect for willfully excising historically verifiable material essential to the understanding of the Bauhaus. According to Anthony Alofsin, Barr complained bitterly of Gropius's endeavor “to impede an objective assessment of the Bauhaus“ and, on the mendaciousness of the exhibition's catalogue, writing: “The book [on the Bauhaus under Gropius's directorship] is not complete even within its field calling eventually for a more definitive and dispassionate study. I must ask you to replace these omissions in the interest of the Museum's scholarly integrity.” Excerpted from a letter from Barr to Gropius dated 24 June 1955, Houghton ms. HL, Harvard, as cited in Anthony Alofsin, The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (New York, 2002), 163 and 86.

33. See Mansbach, S. A., “Another History of Modern Art,” in Lindner, Lia and Fuhrmeister, Christian eds., Transformationen der Moderneum 1900—Künstleraus Ungarn, Rumänien und Bulgarien in München (Munich, forthcoming), 325-31.Google Scholar

34. For an examination of the character, content, and effect of the art history survey book, especially the seminally influential texts by E[rnst]. H. Gombrich (The Story of Art [New York, 1950]), and H[orst]. W. (with Dora Jane) Janson, The Story of Painting: From Cave Painting to Modern Times (New York, 1952) and History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day, 1st ed. [New York, 1962]), see S. A. Mansbach, “Menzel's Popular Reception in the English-Speaking World,” in Thomas Gaehtgens, Claude Keisch, and Peter-Klaus Schuster, eds., Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, vol. 1 (special supplement to 1999) (Berlin, 2002), 325-21.

35. For a listing of German, Austrian, Hungarian, and other central European academic or museum-based art specialists who elected, or were forced to seek, refuge in the English-speaking nations of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, see the appendix to Mansbach, “The Artifice of Modern(ist) Art History,“ 109-13.

36. See Gombrich, Story of Art, 420; Janson, History of Art, 544.

37. Among recent critical assessments of Bauhaus policies and practices, see Weltge, Sigrid Wortmann, Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; and Baumhoff, Anja, The Gendered World of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic's Premier Art Institute, 1919-1932 (Frankfurt am Main, 2001).Google Scholar

38. In volumes he published during his Bauhaus years and after, most emphatically in Malerei, Fotografie, Film (1925) and Von Material zur Architektur (1929) (eventually published in English as The New Vision, 1932), Moholy-Nagy argued that the viewfinder could train all of us to see more profoundly, thereby revolutionizing our relationships with society and the material world at large.

39. See, for example, Władislaw Strzemiński, Kompozycja przestrzeni: Obliczenia rytmu czasoprzestrzennego, most likely composed collaboratively with Katarzyna Kobro in 1929 and published in 1931 in Łódż as volume 2 in the projected library series of the a.r. Group. Also see Mieczysław Szczuka, “Próba wyjaśnienia nieporozumień ze stosunku publiczności do Nowej Sztuki,” Blok, 1924, no. 2; and editors, “Co to jest konstruktywizm,” Blok, 1924, nos. 6-7.

40. Between 1 June and 1 July 1945—that is, immediately following the surrender of Nazi Germany—the Detroit Institute of Arts mounted Polish Paintings: A Loan Exhibition. The exhibition, organized under the auspices of The Friends of Polish Art, might be understood as a celebration of Poland's liberation from German occupation and an attestation of the survival of Polish (visual) culture in spite of the Nazi attempt to eradicate it. As far as I can tell from the accompanying exhibition catalogue, there were no explicitly modernist canvases displayed.

41. See Schwartzer, Mitchell, “Origins of the Art History Survey Text,” Art Journal 54, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 2429 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mansbach, “Another History of Modern Art.” For an appreciation of how the history of art can and has been practiced, with an intimation for its presentation in textbooks, see the iconic study by Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” which served as the introduction to the émigré scholar's still widely read Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), 1-25, esp. 16-17.

42. Here, one should likely except the social historians, who almost alone consistendy advocated the decisive role of politics, social stratification, and means of production for a proper comprehension of the meanings and purposes of art. Yet Klingender, Antal, and even Hauser were far less concerned with the development of modern art than they were engaged with early periods, especially with eighteenth-century culture and its attachment to (mostly British) industrialization.

43. For an incisive English-language account of the avant-garde in eastern Europe between the end of World War II and the conclusion of the Cold War, see Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, trans. Anna Brzyski (London, 2009), the translation of Awangarda zv cieniu Jalty: Sztuka Europy Środkowowschodniej w latach 1945-1989 (Poznań, 2005).

44. Here, one might cite as representative Andrzej Olszewki's English-language text, An Outline of Polish Twentieth Century Art and Architecture (Warsaw, 1989), or Lajos Németh's English-language translation from the original Hungarian, Modern Hungarian Art (Budapest, 1968). It was primarily through exhibitions that a western public had a firsthand encounter with the original achievements from east central Europe. Among the dozens of exhibitions, some rather small in scale, the following might be mentioned: Galerie Denise René, Précurseurs de l'art abstrait en Pologne: Kazimierz Malewicz, Katarzyna Kobro, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Henryk Berleuri, Henryk Stazewski (Paris, 1957); Hubertus Gaßner, ed., Wechselwirkungen: Ungarische avant-garde in der Weimarer Republik (Marburg, 1986); Osteuropäischer Avanlgarde (Bochum, 1988); Mansbach, Standing in the Tempest; and Ryszard Stanisławski and Christoph Brockhaus, eds., Europa, Europa: Dasjahrhundert der Avanlgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Bonn, 1994).

45. The first significant English-language text to pay attention to the multitalented modernist figure Tadeusz Kantor, for instance, was the catalogue Tadeusz Kantor:Emballages, 1960-76, which was published in London by the Whitechapel Gallery in September 1976. See also Olszewski, An Outline of Polish Twentieth Century Art and Architecture.

46. For example, Brettell, Richard R., Modern Art, 1851-1929: Capitalism and Representation (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Howard, Jeremy, East European Art, 1650-1950 (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar; Clegg, Elizabeth, Art, Design and Architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1920 (New Haven, 2006)Google Scholar; as well as Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe.

47. Dreier, “Introduction,” Modern Art, unpaginated.