The Makers of Success

Abstract

The community grouped around the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw played a pivotal role in the new perception of fiber art around the world. This discipline of art grew in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. The first generation of post-war students, which included Magdalena Abakanowicz, Wojciech Sadley, Jolanta Owidzka, Maria Chojnacka, and Barbara Levittoux-Świderska, and which had the support of excellent educators, enjoyed spectacular international success, thereby changing the attitudes to fiber art.Two great professors of ASP, Mieczysław Szymański and Eleonora Plutyńska, who were instrumental to the international success of Polish fiber art in the first half of the 20th century, were ASP graduates. They each represented a different personality and a different approach to textiles, and each focused on the development of different skills in students. While their workshops followed different curricula, the combination of their different artistic and teaching attitudes laid the foundation of the subsequent success.As chance would have it, these two prominent and yet so different artistic personalities crossed paths at the Academy in a difficult and yet seminal era. Two charismatic figures, drawing upon wisdom encapsulated in tradition, enriched with ideas of their contemporary period, transmitted their passion and a new vision of a previously moribund discipline to dozens of students. The merger of the two different approaches to reviving fiber art combined with the enthusiasm and creativity of a young generation of students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw made the new vision of artistic textiles inspiring to artists around the world. Thanks to a broad spectrum of discovered possibilities, the medium shed its merely utilitarian function and joined the liberated arts.