Henryk Stażewski

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Henryk Stażewski (pronounced: 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. 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. Stażewski rose to prominence as a co-founder of Blok, Praesens, and a.r. group, three interwar artist collectives which spearheaded the development of Polish Constructivist art. During the 1920s and 1930s, he became acquainted with and influenced by prominent European avant-garde artists, including the Soviet Suprematist painters Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, the Dutch de Stijl artists Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, as well as the French Cubist painter and later founder of the Abstraction-Création collective Albert Gleizes, among others. As a member of the a.r. group, Stażewski was also one of the key artists—alongside Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro—involved in the formation of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in 1931, the first museum in Europe dedicated…Citește mai mult

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Education and early work Henryk Stażewski was born in Warsaw on 9 January 1894, then part of the Kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous state under the political control of the Russian Empire. He was one of the four children of Leonard Rafał Stażewski, the owner of a small foundry on Wspólna Street in central Warsaw, and Michalina (née Skibicka). He enrolled at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1913, where he studied under the prominent portraitist and illustrator Stanisław Lentz. A surviving series of figurative watercolor paintings from 1915—including nudes, portraits, and landscapes—reveals the influence of Impressionist art in Stażewski's early work. Stażewski graduated from the academy in 1919, a year after Poland had regained its independence. In 1921, he participated in Wystawa Formistów (The Formist Exhibition) at the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A Polish avant-garde artistic and literary group that drew on Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism, the Formists opposed naturalism in painting and sought to incorporate influences from other Western avant-garde movements. Later in 1921, Stażewski showed his work—together with several early compositions by a fellow Polish painter Mieczysław Szczuka—at the Polish Artists' Club in Warsaw. In 1922, Stażewski was included in the…Citește mai mult

Henryk Stażewski a adăugat o fotografie

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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. 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. 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. 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". 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. Blok Group of Cubists, Constructivists, and Suprematists (1924-1926) In…Citește mai mult

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Kazimir Malevich's Exhibition in Warsaw (1927) 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". 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. Stażewski helped organize Malevich's exhibition at Hotel Polonia and invited the artist to visit his studio. In Warsaw, Malevich faced criticism from some contemporary artists, including Mieczysław Szczuka, who argued that Suprematism, as understood by Malevich, was no longer relevant for Polish utilitarianism-oriented avant-garde and that the artist was "a Romantic who loves painterly means for their own sake". Nonetheless, Malevich 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. In 1962, Stażewski would paint a reproduction of Malevich's Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying from…Citește mai mult

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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. 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. 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. 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 Cercle et Carré and in 1931 joined Abstraction-Création, two Paris-based groups gathering international abstract painters. Also in 1931, as member of the a.r. group, Stażewski co-organized the International Collection of Modern Art in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Spearheaded by Strzemiński, the collection opened on 15 February 1931 with…Citește mai mult

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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 Military Geographical Institute. He took an apartment on Piękna Street with the artists Jan Rogoyski and Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska, a space that would become a nexus of Warsaw avant-garde artists and intellectuals in the following years. During the early post-war era, he returned to painting and experimented with various modernist styles, including biomorphic abstraction—which evokes forms and shapes found in nature—and semi-figurative compositions inspired by Surrealism (evident, for instance, in the 1947 painting titled Escape). In 1947, as a result of rigged legislative elections, the hardline Stalinist Bolesław Bierut became President of Poland. Following the Unification Congress of the Polish Workers' Party and Polish Socialist Party in December 1948, Poland was turned into a satellite state of the Soviet Union. Earlier that year, Stażewski had co-designed decorative glass panels for the large-scale Wystawa Ziem Odzyskanych (Exhibition of Recovered Territories)—a sweeping display celebrating the Polish post-war annexation of parts of Germany—which had become a centerpiece of the early Stalinist propaganda and was held in the city of Wrocław between July and October 1948. Although fired…Citește mai mult

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Reliefs (1956–1970s) In 1955, Stażewski became a member of Klub Krzywego Koła (Crooked Circle Club) in Warsaw, an independent cultural initiative for avant-garde artists, writers, and intellectuals. In 1956, Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev delivered his "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" speech, which disavowed Stalinism and ushered in the political thaw. That year Stażewski joined the newly opened gallery space of the Crooked Circle Club where Jerzy Nowosielski, Alina Szapocznikow, Urszula Broll, Stefan Gierowski and other contemporary painters would also exhibit their work. Around 1956, Stażewski began exploring the relief form as his medium. Using a variety of unorthodox materials including plywood, plexiglass, cardboard, Masonite board and copper, the artist deployed non-representational forms to construct three-dimensional reliefs on a horizontal pictorial surface. Stażewski's reliefs broke away from the traditional pictorial flatness and underscored the artist's interest in the tactile qualities of used materials, forging a new theoretical space with which to articulate color. Moreover, the artist's emphasis on tactility and materiality recalls the Russian Constructivist engagement with faktura, an intention to accentuate the work's physical qualities as a way to challenge traditional illusionism in painting. In 1959, Stażewski exhibited the reliefs for the first time during a solo…Citește mai mult

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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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Outside of Foksal, he collaborated with the French conceptual artist and art…Citește mai mult

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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. 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. 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. Geometry remained a critical reference…Citește mai mult

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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", "one of the classic figures in the history of Eastern European Constructivism", an artist who "pioneered the classical avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s", and "one of the most important" Polish artists to link the pre and post-war "Avant-garde tendencies". 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. 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". In 1976, critic Hilton Kramer, referring to Stażewski's early constructivist work in his review of "Constructivism in Poland 1923‐1936" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, wrote: "In the vein of geometrical painting that seeks to maximize the optical effects of shifting grids and alternating textures, Henryk Stażewski's extraordinary composition of 1930‐31 in black, white and grays likewise sums up an ambition that has…Citește mai mult

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Collections Stażewski's works are included in the permanent collections of museums in Europe and the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly known as Albright–Knox Art Gallery), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Zachęta, the National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London. 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. The exhibition space was expanded in 2010 to include a wider range of interwar and contemporary art from the museum's collection. In November 2022, Stażewski's 1969 Relief No. 8 was sold for €1.03 million at Sotheby's in Milan,…Citește mai mult

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Henryk Stażewski at Culture.pl Henryk Stażewski in Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw