Art as an Agent of Modernization: Władysław Strzemiński’s Double Politics of Social Change, the Museum, and Artistic Culture

Tomasz Załuski

doi:10.36854/widok/2018.20.332

Abstract

The article focuses on the artistic and organisational practices of Polish constructivist artist Władysław Strzemiński, especially on his expanded idea of art as an agent of cultural and social modernisation. The author shows how in Strzemiński's case the modernisation imperative translated into what can be called “double politics”. Strzemiński's successful attempt at creating the International Collection of Modern Art, which later became the basis of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź as a museum of the avant-garde, is briefly situated in this context. The point is to show what role the collection, deposited in a municipal museum in Łódź and made accessible to the general public, was to play in the artist's overall modernisation politics. In the second part of the article, the author reflects on the possibility of repurposing and updating the idea of the “Museum of Artistic Culture” as an institution capable of providing a relevant and responsible answer to the avant-garde's ethos and heritage of modernisation. It is done with reference to the project entitled The Effectivity of Art, organised by himself on the invitation from the Muzeum Sztuki in the years 2012-2014. It is one of the projects through which the institution has been trying to work with and re-work this modernisation heritage of the avant-garde in the sphere of contemporary artistic and activist practices.

Highlights

Even nowadays, the avant-garde is described and defined in the terms indicated in the epigraph above, quoting a letter from Władysław Strzemiński to Julian Przyboś: namely, in terms of the necessity and ability to create new circumstances for radical artistic and socio-political ideas to get culturally enrooted, socially legitimized, and politically implemented
For example, in the famous opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”[3] the avant-garde has
I will show how, in his case, a modernization imperative translated into what I call a “double politics”. It is in this context that I will briefly situate his successful attempt at creating the International Collection of Modern Art, which later became the basis for the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, as a museum of the avant-garde

Summary

Introduction

Even nowadays, the avant-garde is described and defined in the terms indicated in the epigraph above, quoting a letter from Władysław Strzemiński to Julian Przyboś: namely, in terms of the necessity and ability to create new circumstances for radical artistic and socio-political ideas to get culturally enrooted, socially legitimized, and politically implemented. As early as the end of the 1920s, a time which constituted a turning point in many respects – economic, sociopolitical, cultural and artistic – Strzemiński saw in retrospect that modern art had managed in Poland to gain neither social legitimacy, nor the necessary symbolic and material means of action.

Results

Conclusion