“I think Poland was the freest country of the East bloc,” says Aneta Prasal, one of the four curators of “In Between: Art From Poland, 1945-2000,” which opens Saturday at the Chicago Cultural Center and is billed as America’s first comprehensive survey of Polish art created since World War II. “Hundreds of Hungarian intellectuals would visit Warsaw or Krakow during the 70s and 80s. When we went to Hungary, we were surprised to find Hungarian artists who had learned Polish just to travel there and read Polish art magazines.”
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In the Soviet Union avant-gardists were murdered by Stalin’s thugs, and in other Soviet bloc nations artists were prevented from working at all. But art in communist Poland was comparatively free. During the Stalinist years abstractionists lost teaching jobs and sometimes went hungry, yet acclaimed theater director Tadeusz Kantor was organizing shows of avant-garde art as early as the late 40s in Krakow–though by 1959 curators had to live with a regulation that limited abstract art to 15 percent of an exhibit. While the “official” art was often socialist realist, it was less prominent than in the rest of the Soviet bloc, and many artists exhibited in private shows publicized by word of mouth.
There’s little socialist realism in the present show; Prasal says the curators excluded such work due to its “lack of artistic value,” though some artists successfully straddled the avant-garde and government-sanctioned worlds. Andrzej Wroblewski, for example, couldn’t show works such as his grotesque World War II-inspired Child With the Dead Mother (1949) in public, yet he also did socialist realist work. “You had this clash of avant-garde utopians with the communist utopians,” says Gorczynski. “It was tragedy.”
