Formizm a tendencje wczesnoawangardowe w sztuce Europy Środkowej. Zarys problematyki

Abstract

Formism and the Early Avant-Garde Tendencies in the Art of Central Europe. An Outline of the Problem

The article constitutes an attempt to define the place of formism within the context of the main trends and directions of the early Avant-Garde movement in Central Europe. In the first part of the article, the author presents the problems associated with the different understanding of the very concept of Central Europe which underwent considerable transformations in the course of the 20th c. under the influence of political events, such as the two world wars, the political transformation of 1989 and the changing ideological conceptions that accompanied them. Formism, which came into existence in the year 1917, is regarded as the first avant-garde movement in Roland. Yet, it arose as the last of the groups belonging to the early avant-garde on the territory of Central Europe that had been dominated before World War I by the Central Powers: the German Empire, and in particular by the multinational Austro-Hungary. The movement flourished in the first years of the interwar period, when new national states came into existence in the effect of the disintegration of the central powers as well as tsarist Russia. In the subsequent part of the article, the author comes to the conclusion that the element which links formism to other, similar movements in Central Europe is a synthesis of the avantgarde program and a specific traditionalism, manifesting itself, among others, in a search for elements of national style in old art (e.g. Gothic in German expressionism or Baroque in Bohemian cubism) as well as in folk art, treated as a kind of contemporary primitivism, in a similar way as African or Polynesian sculpture. The most characteristic formal feature of the contemporary Central European avant-garde which could be observed before World War I both in the Bohemian cubism, and in Hungarian, Austrian and German art, as well as in formism, was a tendency to combine French cubism with German expressionism; the latter tendency contributed to the creation of a phenomenon that could be referred to as cubo-expressionism.