The Exhibition-Organising Activity of the Committee for Cultural Cooperation with Foreign Countries (1950–1956) Based on the Example of Selected Exhibitions at the Zachęta Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions

Abstract

The documentation of the Committee for Cultural Cooperation with Foreign Countries, which was an offi cial agency active in the years 1950–1956, is currently deposited at the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw and constitutes an invaluable source for any Polish scholar interested in the history of exhibitions. It contains large amounts of interesting data which make it possible to ascertain the character of Polish exhibitionorganising activity in the fi rst half of the 1950s. In the six years of its existence the Committee organised ca. one hundred exhibitions. The essay concerns exhibitions hosted in the main building of the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions, i.e. the Zachęta. Foreign exhibitions prepared by the Committee were intended to justify the state’s cultural strategy based on promoting the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, which programmatically referred to 19th-century Realism and its historical traditions. Exhibitions of art produced in the countries of the Eastern bloc presented the local version of Social Realism plus 19th-century painting that could be described as “Critical Realism”. Bringing to Poland exhibitions of folk art from the “brotherly” countries of the Eastern bloc was an important element of the Committee’s policy, as in the years 1949–1956 attempts were made to use folk art in the process of remodelling the country in the Socialist spirit. The Committee for Cultural Cooperation with Foreign Countries was established in 1950 in order to centralise, expand and politicise artistic exchange. On the whole, however, the idea to centralise all of the cultural exchange with foreign countries turned out to be a utopia. In 1955, just as the so-called thaw was beginning, the Ministry of Culture and Art offered the proposal to decentralise the exchange and to dissolve the Committee.