Henryk Stażewski
Henryk Stażewski | |
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Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts | |
Style | geometric abstraction |
Movement | Polish Constructivism, Blok, Praesens, a.r. group |
Awards |
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Henryk Stażewski (pronounced: /stəʒɛfskiː/ STa-zhef-skee; 9 January 1894 – 10 June 1988) was a Polish painter, visual artist and writer. Stażewski has been described as the "father of the Polish avant-garde" and is considered a pivotal figure in the history of constructivism and geometric abstraction in Central and Eastern Europe.[1]: 297 [2][3] His career spanned seven decades and he was one of the few prominent Polish artists of the interwar period who remained active and gained further international recognition in the second half of the 20th century.[4]
Stażewski rose to prominence as a co-founder of
Following the cultural and political Thaw of 1956, Stażewski began working on abstract relief sculptures, a medium that preoccupied him in the following decades and became his most recognized body of work. First exhibited in 1959, Stażewski's reliefs deployed diverse media and embraced various non-figurative visual vocabularies inspired by his interwar investigations into geometric abstraction. During the 1960s, still working behind the Iron Curtain, Stażewski helped facilitate unofficial cultural exchanges with numerous Western artists. In 1966, he initiated a years-long collaboration with the non-commercial gallery space Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, which played a critical role in the development of the Polish post-war avant-garde. Working alongside Christian Boltanski, Tadeusz Kantor, Allan Kaprow, Edward Krasiński, Annette Messager and other contemporary artists who exhibited at Foksal throughout the 1980s, Stażewski continued to cultivate international artistic connections with the West during the late communist period in Poland.[5]
Stażewski's works are included in permanent collections of museums in Europe and the United States. For his contributions to Central and Eastern European culture, the artist was awarded the 1972 Herder Prize.
Early life and work
Education and early work
Henryk Stażewski was born in Warsaw on 9 January 1894, then part of the
Stażewski graduated from the academy in 1919, a year after Poland had
Polish Constructivism (1924-1930s)
The Vilnius exhibition in 1923, which included works by avant-garde artists from across Eastern Europe and Russia, is credited with introducing constructivist tendencies to Polish art.[7] Among the participating artists who would have a significant impact on Stażewski's approach to artistic production was Władysław Strzemiński, who had previously studied at two Constructivist collectives, INKhUK and Vkhutemas, in Moscow.[Note 1] While in Moscow, Strzemiński investigated various ways in which art could be harnessed to construct a new, socialist society in the aftermath of the Great War (later known as World War I), recognizing the role of an artist as that of an engineer as well as a scientist aiding in the process of social transformation.[8]
For Stażewski, the connection between art and science was crucial, and he argued that "a painting's systematic quality connected it to contemporary civilization in a unilateral action—from science and machines to works of art".[8]: 150 Through analyzing the constituent parts of their painting—that is, "space, faktura, line, and color"—the Constructivist artists were not completely beholden to the notions of intuition or talent, imbuing the process of art making with a sense of objectivity and collective labor.[8]: 147 In 1924, following the Vilnius exhibition, Stażewski, working with Strzemiński and Strzemiński's wife Katarzyna Kobro among other artists, co-founded Blok, or the Blok Group of Cubists Constructivists, and Suprematists (Grupa Kubistow, Konstruktywistow i Suprematystow Blok). Active until 1926, Blok became the first Polish Constructivist collective focused on gathering like-minded artists, designers, architects, and theorists to help improve the lives of ordinary citizens.[7][9]: 105
Inspired by
Abstract art is not something detached from the external world surrounding us; and yet it ceases to be descriptive and operates by purely artistic means (...) The only purpose of the new abstract fine arts is to express the laws governing things and existence.
— Henryk Stażewski, Concerning Abstract Art, Blok no 8-9, 1924
At Blok, Stażewski collaborated with
In March 1927, Stażewski was among several Polish artists hosting the Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich during his trip to Warsaw. A pioneer of abstraction, Malevich coined the term Suprematism to promote the supremacy of "non-objective art of 'pure feeling', unconcerned with representation of the visible world".[12] Stażewski helped organize Malevich's exhibition at Hotel Polonia Palace and invited the artist to visit his studio.[13] Malevich's theories of painting had served as a crucial point of reference for Russian Constructivists and avant-garde artists across Central and Eastern Europe; he is said to have made a lasting impact on Stażewski in particular, who examined some of the key ideas of the movement regarding the autonomy of art and the superiority of non-objective visual forms in relation to his own artistic practice during the late 1920s and the early 1930s.[13]
Relationships with European Avant-gardes
According to literary scholar Michał Wenderski, Stażewski "played an invaluable part by functioning as a sui generis liaison between Polish artists and the West" in the interwar period.[14] While working with Constructivist groups in Poland during the 1920s, Stażewski traveled frequently and participated in several international exhibitions, including the 1926 Paris Exhibition of Theatrical Art and the New York Machine Age Exposition in 1927.[15] He also developed and cultivated relationships with representatives of Western European avant-garde groups, including Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian of the Dutch De Stijl movement, as well as the French painter Albert Gleizes.[16] The influence of De Stijl can be found in Stażewski's work from around that time, including oil paintings titled Kompozycja (c. 1929–1930) and Kompozycja Fakturowa (Textural Composition) from 1931, which rely on interlocking vertical and horizontal shapes to form a geometrical grid.
In 1929, Stażewski became a member of the
By the second half of the 1930s, Stażewski returned to representational art while still exhibiting abstract paintings and graphic design in Poland and other European countries. He also supported himself financially through portrait
Post-war career
Stalinist Poland (1948–1956)
In 1945, shortly after the war ended, Stażewski moved to Warsaw and was hired as the head of the art studio at the
In 1947, as a result of
Soon, Stażewski turned to
While taking on various part-time projects for the government including retouching official portraits of party members at the
Reliefs (1956-1970s)
In 1955, Stażewski became a member of
Around 1956, Stażewski began exploring the
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White on White No. 25, 1963 in which the artist created a monochromatic textural composition used oil paint and wood, recalling Constructivist engagement with faktura (Buffalo AKG Art Museum)
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Untitled, 1966, aluminum, in 1964, Stażewski began making reliefs using copper and aluminum that highlighted the intrinsic visual properties of metal (private collection)
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Relief nr. 38, 1969 illustrates Stażewski's continued reliance on simple geometric shapes to formulate the visual vocabulary of his polychromatic reliefs (private collection)
In 1959, Stażewski exhibited the reliefs for the first time during a solo show at
Between 1960 and 1962, Stażewski held three exhibitions at the Crooked Circle Gallery in Warsaw. He continued to show his relief work, including a series called White Reliefs made in 1961.[6]: 132 In August 1961, several of these were included in Fifteen Polish Painters, a major exhibition of Polish contemporary art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, alongside works by Wojciech Fangor, Tadeusz Kantor and Jan Lebenstein, among others. Focused almost exclusively on non-representational art and organized by a major U.S. institution, the show championed abstraction as a symbolic manifestation of Poland's cultural and political freedom during the Cold War era.[33]
Also in 1961, art dealers Madeleine Chalette-Lejwa and Arthur Lejwa, the founders of Galerie Chalette in New York, featured Stażewski's work in a group exhibition, offering him an early exposure to the American market.[24]: 133 Examining Stażewski's writings from that period, art historian Marta Zboralska argues that the artist saw himself as an "active contributor to the enquiry into abstraction throughout the 1960s and beyond".[34]: 11 Distancing himself from the influences of Malevich and Mondrian, Stażewski stressed in an essay written in 1968 the impact of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, two Bauhaus artists whose engagement with color theory was influential in both Europe and the US.[34]: 12
By the mid-1960s, Stażewski had begun using aluminum and copper for his relief work, shunning painted material in favor of the intrinsic color properties of metal. According to art historians
In Poland, several of Stażewski's works, including a large-scale geometric metal sculpture modeled after one of his abstract reliefs, were included in the
Foksal Gallery
In 1966, Stażewski was one of the artists representing Poland at the XXXIII Venice Biennale, where his relief works received an honorable mention.[6] Throughout the 1960s, Stażewski collaborated regularly with contemporary galleries in and outside of Poland. Key among them was his long-standing collaboration with Foksal Gallery, which he co-founded in 1966, a non-commercial art space in Warsaw that would play a key role in the development of Polish post-war avant-garde.[5] Unlike traditional exhibition venues, Foksal revolved around robust collaboration between participating artists and was supposed to present displays that "problematized the artistic process itself" while keeping an "apparent distance from governmental endeavors to instrumentalize art", even though the gallery was publicly funded.[38]: 561
Participating in the artistic program of Foksal provided Stażewski with an opportunity to exhibit his work in a more experimental space. He also continued to facilitate connections with international artists.[39]: 59 Throughout the 1970s, he worked alongside Włodzimierz Borowski, Tadeusz Kantor, the American happening artist Allan Kaprow (exhibited at Foksal in 1976), the French conceptual and installation artists Christian Boltanski (1978) and Anette Messager (1978), and the American conceptualist Lawrence Weiner (1979), among others.[38][6]: 154–155
Outside of Foksal, he collaborated with the French conceptual artist and art theorist Daniel Buren, who re-designed the exhibition space of the Paris-based Galerie 16 in 1974 for Stażewski's show.[6]: 148 Stażewski and Buren would later work together on a project at Galerie 1–36, an experimental space active in Paris from 1972 to 1976.[40] He also developed a close artistic relationship with Edward Krasiński. He and Krasiński shared an apartment at Aleja Solidarnosci in Warsaw from 1970 until Stażewski's death in 1988. The space, which had served as a salon for Polish artists and intellectuals during the last three decades of communist rule in Poland, was later renamed the Instytut Awangardy (Avant-garde Institute) and opened to the public in 2007.[41]
Late career (1970s–1988)
Stażewski experimented with color and geometry in diverse visual and aesthetic registers throughout his career. In 1970, he participated in the art symposium Wrocław 70 where he showcased Infinite Vertical Composition (9 Rays of Light in the Sky), an artwork made of colorful beams of light projected onto the night sky that released color from its previous pictorial confines.[11] In 1972, the Dallas Museum of Art included Stażewski in Geometric Abstraction, 1916–1942, a survey show of geometric abstract art in the first four decades of the 20th century. In 1976, he was featured in Constructivism in Poland, 1923–1936: Blok, Praesens, a.r., an exhibition devoted to the history of Polish Constructivism organized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which traveled the same year to the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, and the Art Institute of Chicago. That year, he was awarded the Herder Prize for his contributions to the visual culture of Central and Eastern Europe.[6]
In the 1970s, Stażewski explored the visual properties of line. His paintings and drawings from that period show an investigation into the possibilities afforded by line, including the monochromatic grid.[24] Geometry remained a critical reference point for the artist and he considered it an "innate measure in the eye of every man, allowing him to grasp relations and proportions".[32] Over the next decade, Stażewski also continued to revitalize some of the visual forms present in his early tactile reliefs by moving back them onto a flat painterly surface. While his later compositions had become more intuitive, standing in contrast to the more scientifically determined compositional methods, the artist remained committed to examining the pictorial properties of color. Scholar Janina Ladnowska described Stażewski's planes of color as "flat, strong, homogeneous, clean, sometimes shining" and suggested that these polychromatic compositions made late in the artist's career cast doubt on the "rational" structures of his earlier work.[42]
During the late 1970s, Stażewski also became interested in creating environments, reimagining his paintings in three-dimensional spaces, informed by his interest in psychology.
Stażewski died in Warsaw on 10 June 1988, aged 94. His funeral was held on 17 June and he is interred at the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.[6]
Legacy
Owing to his multifaceted practice and a long-standing career, Stażewski has had an important influence on the history of Polish and European modern and contemporary art. He has been described as "the father of the Polish avant-garde",[1]: 297 "one of the classic figures in the history of Eastern European Constructivism",[2] an artist who "pioneered the classical avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s",[7] and "one of the most important" Polish artists to link the pre and post-war "Avant-garde tendencies".[46]: 253 Stażewski's work is said to have "paved the way for the revitalization of geometric art" and has served as a source of inspiration for the younger generation of Polish postwar artists.[47]: 205 Magdalena Abakanowicz, for instance, closely modeled her early textile works on Stażewski's reliefs and relied on the artist's use of "contrast as an organising principle".[48]: 35
In 1976, critic
In 2009, Daniel Buren, with whom Stażewski had collaborated during the 1970s, designed a temporary display space for several of Stażewski's reliefs at the Muzeum Sztuki, titled Daniel Buren / Hommage à Henryk Stazewski. Cabane éclatée avec tissu blanc et noir, travail situé, 1985–2009 and installed as an homage to the late artist.[51] In 2015, Stażewski's Colored Relief (1963) was featured in Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, a comprehensive survey exhibition organized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that examined parallels between art in Eastern Europe and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s.[52]
Collections
Stażewski's works are included in the permanent collections of museums in Europe and the United States, including the
Several of his geometric abstracts from the interwar period are on permanent display at the Neoplastic Room (Sala Neoplastyczna) at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. The design of the room was conceived by Władysław Strzemiński in 1948, inspired by interactions of primary colors typical of De Stijl movement, complemented by black, white and grey tones. The display was shut down in 1950 by the communist regime, until it was reconstructed based on surviving photographs.[53] The exhibition space was expanded in 2010 to include a wider range of interwar and contemporary art from the museum's collection.[54]
In November 2022, Stażewski's 1969 Relief No. 8 was sold for €1.03 million at Sotheby's in Milan, becoming one of the highest prices paid at auction for a 20th-century Polish work of art.[55][56]
Notes
- ^ While had never visited Russia, Stażewski was familiar with several key artists associated with the Russian avant-garde during the 1920s, including El Lissitzky, who had briefly stayed in Poland en route to Berlin in 1921. Lodder 2018, pp. 25–37
- ^ Between 1950 and 1952, he completed multiple figurative paintings to align himself with the demands of the state. Among Stażewski's surviving Socialist Realist works is an oil painting titled Na scalonych ziemiach (On the Recovered Territories) completed in 1950, in which a tractor driver is seen traversing the eponymous reclaimed land, and exhibited at the Second National Display of Plastic Arts at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in 1952. Ładnowska 1994a, p. 127
- ^ Some scholars indicate the year 1957 as the beginning of Stażewski's relief works, but recent research has shown he started applying the name "relief" and explored three-dimensionality in painting as early as 1956. Warszewska-Kołodziej 2012, p. 25
Citations
- ^ ISBN 978-1-86189-863-0.
- ^ ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 1 June 2023.
Mr. Stazewski is one of the classic figures in the history of Eastern European Constructivism
- ISBN 978-83-66696-43-3.
As an artist, Stażewski's reputation primarily lay in his pioneering role in the development of abstract act in the early 1920s.
- ^ Glisic, Iva (16 August 2023). "New approaches to art and life in the Polish People's Republic: Henryk Stażewski at Muzeum Sztuki". ARTMargins. Retrieved 26 November 2023.
Henryk Stażewski (1894-1988) had a long artistic run in two different versions of his home country: first as a pioneer of the avant-garde in the Polish Republic between 1918 and 1939 and then his later, but no less experimental career in the communist Polish People's Republic founded in the post-war world order after 1945.
- ^ a b c d Bartelik, Marek (September 1995). "Review of Henryk Stazewski at Muzeum Sztuki (MS1)". Artforum. 34 (1).
- ^ ISBN 83-901628-5-7.
- ^ a b c d e Kossowska, Irena (December 2001). "Henryk Stażewski". Culture.pl. Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Retrieved 28 December 2022.
- ^ ISBN 978-90-04-50555-1.
- ^ ISBN 978-94-6166-254-5.
- ISBN 9781884446054.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-578-99560-1.
- ^ Cramer, Charles; Grant, Kim (28 September 2019). "Suprematism, Part I: Kazimir Malevich". Smarthistory. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
- ^ ISBN 978-88-572-3735-0.
- ISSN 0464-1086.
- S2CID 164189073.
- ^ ISBN 978-88-572-3735-0.
- ^ "History of the Museum". Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi (www.msl.org.pl). Retrieved 16 January 2023.
- . Retrieved 31 December 2022.
- ^ a b Wróblewska, Magdalena (July 2010). "Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska". Culture.pl. Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
- ISBN 978-0-19-925340-1.
- ISBN 978-0-52-023125-2.
- ISBN 8386308257.
- ISBN 978-84-8026-550-8.
- ^ ISBN 978-88-572-3735-0.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-578-99560-1.
- ^ Gołębiowska, Barbara (26 November 2019). "Powojenny optymizm i "epidemia grypy" (1946–1954)". Mewa. M. Ewa Łunkiewicz (in Polish). Retrieved 30 December 2022.
- ^ "Uchwała Rady Państwa z dnia 11 lipca 1955 r. nr 0/1085a" (PDF). European Legislation Identifier (List of individuals who were given awards by the Polish People's Republic in 1955) (in Polish). 1955. Retrieved 18 January 2023.
- ^ a b "Stefan Gierowski i Galeria Krzywe Koło" (Museum website) (in Polish). Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
- .
- ISBN 978-3037640944.
- ^ Kulicz, K. (1965). "Ta sztuka chce wyrazac ruch i przestrzen—Henryk Stazewski. Rozmawiamy z lauretami Nagrod Ministra Kultury i Sztuki". Stolica (in Polish). No. 34. Warsaw. p. 4.
- ^ ISBN 83-89302-05-5.
- ISBN 978-90-485-1670-4.
- ^ ISSN 0003-9853.
- ISBN 978-0-50-077535-6.
- S2CID 213378194.
- ^ Stażewski, Henryk (1968) [1968]. "Wypowiedź Henryka Stażewskiego". Odra (magazine) (in Polish). No. 2. pp. 63–66.
- ^ ISBN 978-963-386-083-0.
- ISBN 9780367140854.
- ^ "Galerie 1–36 – Eustachy Kossakowski archive". muzeum.pl. Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
- ^ Haidu, Rachel (September 2007). "Edward Krasinski's Studio". Artforum. 46 (1).
- ISBN 83-901628-5-7.
- ISBN 978-83-66696-37-2.
- ISBN 978-83-66696-44-0.
- OCLC 810685744.
- ISBN 978-963-416-142-4.
- ISBN 978-9633860830.
- ISBN 978-1-84976-673-9.
- ^ Cramer, Hilton (7 February 1976). "Art: Constructivism in Poland". The New York Times. p. 16. Retrieved 18 October 2023.
- OCLC 22492858.
- ^ Partum, Berenika (8 March 2009). "Daniel Buren: Hommage à Henryk Stazewski, Cabane éclatée avec tissu blanc et noir, travail situé, 1985–2009: Musealisierung der Kritik?". www.artmagazine.cc. Retrieved 31 December 2022.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
- ISBN 978-83-232-3839-3.
- ^ Suchan, Jarosław. "Sala Neoplastyczna. Kompozycja otwarta". Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi (in Polish). Retrieved 2 January 2023.
- ^ Landoni, Davide (24 November 2022). "Sotheby's Milano. Morandi come nessuno mai, Boetti e Fontana tra i top lot dell'asta di casa". ArtsLife (in Italian). Retrieved 3 January 2023.
- ^ "Wróblewski, Opałka i Abakanowicz. 10 najdroższych prac polskich artystów". Onet Kultura (in Polish). 1 December 2021. Retrieved 29 December 2022.
Further reading
- Constructivism in Poland, 1923 to 1936 (exh. cat., ed. H. Gresty and J. Lewinson; Cambridge, Kettle's Yard; Łódź, Mus. A.; 1984)
- Mansbach, Steven. Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939 (Cambridge, 1999)
- Central European Avant-gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930 (exh. cat., ed. T. Benson; Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2002)
- Piotrowski, Piotr. In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London, 2009)
- Henryk Stażewski: Dzieła z lat 1923–1980 (exh. cat., ed. W. Smużny and J. Ładnowska; Toruń, Office A. Exh., 1980)
- Turowski, Andrzej. Konstruktywizm polski: Próba rekonstrukcji nurtu 1921–1934 (Wrocław, 1981)
- Kowalska, Bozena. Henryk Stażewski (Warsaw, 1985)
External links
- Henryk Stażewski at Culture.pl
- Henryk Stażewski in Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw