IN THE SHADOW OF THE OFFICIAL DISCOURSE: TOWARDS A REVISION OF THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF THE POLISH IDIOM OF CUBISM

This paper presents the lesser-known aspects of Cubism in Poland in the field of both aesthetic practice and theory, staying in the shadow of the mainstream documented in a tendentious way in the canonical art history. This way it contributes to the revision of the narrow view of the artistic processes and to the remapping of the traces of cultural exchange and transformation of aesthetic and ideological patterns in a horizontal perspective between the “European margins”. As an echo of these simplifications, the national and as a consequence also the international historiography of art mostly omits the Cubist tendencies, not only in the oeuvre of Polish artistic formations apart from Cracow, but also in the aesthetic practice of the representatives of groups, which later became well known as constructivist ones, such as Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński or Henryk Berlewi. On the other hand, it has been often forgotten, that in the local context, due to the relatively late adaptation of Cubism into artistic praxis, it is nearly not documented in the pure form. Instead of that, one can speak about the primarily non-antagonist coexistence of the two hybrids of the “new art” – the Cubo-Expressionist and the Futuro-Dadaist one.