Na ratunek ostatniej polskiej przedwojennej awangardzie. Leon Chwistek i I Grupa Krakowska

Abstract

Saving the Last Polish Pre-War Avant-Garde. Leon Chwistek and the Krakow Group

Chwistek was so impressed by the works of the artists from the 1st Krakow Group that he was prepared to acknowledge the young painters as the successors to the Formists. This was not meant to be a formal analogy to the work of the latter, but a recognition of a similar manifestation of a new current in art. The artist joyfully welcomed this new young generation, with its conspicuous rebelliousness and enormous flurry of creativity. He admired their uninhibited willingness to try anything bringing new energy and to create a new order, not only in the artistic sense. Chwistek's publicly and enthusiastically expressed assessment, which assumed that parting with the Academy was something natural, even useful, defined at the outset the position of the then-forming Krakow Group and their early artistic experimentation. Drawing on a dialectical understanding of history, these artists adopted the Marxist view that "art is created under the influence of the life conditions of man, who within the framework of the historical evolution of form attempts to directly meet the artistic needs of society". The members of the Group saw in their role in contemporary society and as modern artists a link with the class that was fighting for social advancement, the proletariat, but chose not to call their art proletarian as this would only become possible after the proletariat had taken power. They instead called themselves artists of the struggle, revolutionary artists, as "revolutionary art, following the line of the dialectical development of the form, moves its artistic focus beyond the dead letter of traditional values, preparing the way for proletarian art".