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Part I · Moving People
inine. Miailhe’s involvement with the female bodies and spaces she drew, Taslitzky’s transference of the revolutionary ideal to women in Women of Oran—with the “unnatural” trope of the woman warrior—anticipated an imminent rupture, a tear of the veil. An anxiety around femininity desta- bilized the communist rhetoric of militancy. And, inevitably, the artists’ structural position could override the signs of solidarity: “Everywhere fear in their eyes and their gestures . . . simply because the stranger who paints them is like those who have hurt them in his clothes and language.” 932 As Delacroix himself quickly understood, realism transgressed the Islamic pro- hibition against graven images. 933 Thus the regime of representation—whether romantic or “socialist” real- ism—was the regime of the conqueror: a situation played out in the USSR it- self as socialist realism was imposed upon Islamic peoples. 934 It was a regime deployed by the USSR as propaganda in its satellite nations, who were them- selves familiar with the French Beaux-Arts tradition; who could read the pic- tures within the “correct” Manichaean framework—as socialist realism was conceived to be read. Algérie 1952 was sent to tour Eastern Europe: Miailhe’s Young Agricultural Workers and Taslitzky’s Père algérien were donated to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bucharest, on the first stop of the Eastern European tour. She traveled to the official opening there, Taslitzky to Budapest, both to the inauguration in Prague. France’s mission civilisatrice was referred to with scorn in the context of Algérie 1952: the works showed “all that serves to belie those ready-made phrases about the ‘civilizing mission.’” 935 The rights of man enshrined by the French Revolution and its aftermath, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centu- ry intellectual heritage, were part of France’s “educational” mission. Yet, as Rita Maran has declared: 932 “Partout l’effroi dans leurs yeux et dans leurs gestes . . . tout simplement parce que l’inconnu qui les peint res- semble par son costume et son langage aux gens qui leur ont fait mal.” Étienne Fajon in L’Humanité, 30 De- cember 1952. 933 See André Joubin, ed., Correspondance générale d’Eugène Delacroix (Paris: Plon, 1935), vol. 1, 175 and 184 (letters of 8 February and 2 April 1832). “Leurs préjugés sont très grands contre le bel art de la peinture . . . l’habit et la figure de chrétien sont en antipathie à ces gens-ci, au point qu’il faut toujours être escorté de sol- dats.” 934 See Aliya Abakayeva de Tiesenhausen, “Socialist Realist Orientalism? Depictions of Soviet Central Asia, 1934–1954” (PhD diss., University of London, 2010). 935 . “Quelques aspects d’une exposition. Algérie 52,” corrected page proofs, no source. Taslitzky archives. Object of the “civilizing mission,” the colonized was never yet a subject with full rights; structurally, the colonized was never fully “man.” . . . The colo- nized could not reach adulthood under colonialism, despite the fact that to make him into “man” was a key legitimating doctrine of colonialism. 936 The Algerian war, an apotheosis of tripartite tensions, civil, religious, and political, would witness France’s violation of its declaration of human rights of 1789, specific articles of the Charter of the United Nations (1945), the Uni- versal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and the Geneva Convention of 1949. With Algérie 1952, a dying—if paroxys- mal—orientalism coincided with France’s dying colonialism. The war would shortly explode as we know it, with its violence, its repressed psychoses, its ret- rospective melancholy, its tragic reenactments. 937 936 Rita Maran, Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French–Algerian War (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1989), 5. 937 Taslitzky’s Women of Oran was exhibited with works by Mireille Miailhe in Les Artistes internationaux et la Révolution d’Algérie for the opening of the Musée National d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Algiers, in spring 2008. Mireille Miailhe was present. Thanks to the late Mireille Miailhe and Boris Taslitzky, to Ev- elyne Taslitzky, Florence Miailhe and Isabelle Rollin-Royer, to Anissa Bouyaed for her exhibitions and to Adrien Sina who accompanied me to Vitry and took photographs on 16 September 2009. I would be grate- ful for help from colleagues in tracing large-scale paintings from Algérie 1952. 436 437 Part I · Moving People T he expansion of socialist realism in post-1945 Central and Eastern Eu- rope came as a result of the Yalta division of the Old Continent and the im- plementation of new cultural policy in the communist states, closely linked to political demands imposed by the Soviet Union. Among the principal fac- tors behind this process was a belief in the universalism of socialist realist ide- ology, its pictorial form and worldwide application. As the successive art cen- ters in Soviet-occupied Europe converted to the new artistic faith, socialist realism seemed to have acquired a status of new, global, painterly style, rele- vant and understood regardless of geography, local cultures, and historic tra- ditions. Among the particular genres used to strengthen the message were the representations of non-European cultures and nations, engaged in the inde- pendence wars against colonial powers or proverbial American imperialism. The new genres did not occupy the most prominent place in Polish art of the 1950s, but their presence accompanied by anticolonial discourse was clearly visible. 938 Above all, in order to find relevance among Poles, the new 938 E.g. “Third World” wars of independence were listed among the major topics for artists in the catalog of Third National Exhibition of Art (OWP) in Warsaw 1952–53, flagship enterprise organized in the Zachęta Andrzej Szczerski 33 Global Socialist Realism: The Representation of Non-European Cultures in Polish Art of the 1950s 438 439 2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene… Part I · Moving People discourse had to be “nationalized.” In the immediate postwar years, the com- munist regime often referred to nationalist rhetoric as a source of its legitimi- zation; hence, it did not come as a surprise that the struggles of Third World subjects were identified with the recent Polish fight against Nazi Germany. At the same time, the colonial wars were compared with the fight against the political elites of the pre-1939 Second Republic of Poland. The rhetoric used to describe the fight of black Africans in Kenya against the “Anglo-Saxon col- onists” did not differ much from the descriptions of the post-1945 emancipa- tion of Polish peasants and workers from their dependence on a despised Pol- ish landowner or capitalist. 939 In a larger perspective, the colonial fight for independence could also refer to Polish nineteenth-century uprisings against the partitioning powers and hence make the colonial subject appear as the re- incarnation of the Polish insurgent. Returning to the roots of national cultures as the source of the art re- vival—seen as a symbol of political and cultural liberation after the colo- nial era—became a cliché regularly employed in the discussion of “Third World” countries. Not surprisingly, it coincided with contemporary dis- cussion within Poland about how to produce a socialist realist work of art that could be “national in form and socialist in content” and hence accept- able for local cultural tradition. At the same time, the preservation of na- tional peculiarities sustained the Soviet imperial myth of internationalism, based on a brotherhood of independent nations joined in their struggle for a shared communist future, in stark contrast to American-inspired cosmo- politanism, presented as subjugation to US political influence and cultur- al values. Such rhetoric accompanied series of exhibitions of non-Europe- an art organized through the 1950s in major Polish cities, predominantly in the capital city of Warsaw. In most cases, these exhibitions were careful- ly controlled, large-scale enterprises, organized by state agendas, and often sent directly from Moscow rather than from the artists’ countries of origin. To name a few, in January 1950 Mexican prints were shown at the Warsaw Gallery in Warsaw by the state and official artists’ union in order to promote socialist realism. See Stanisław Teisseyre, untitled introduction, catalog of the Third National Exhibition of Art (Warszawa, 1952), 12. 939 See, e.g., the description of the alleged atrocities of Vietnamese landowners against their own people, which a native Vietnamese describes to his Polish friends as reality, which for them might appear to be “a bygone epoch known only from history books.” Wojciech Żukrowski, Dom bez ścian (Warszawa: 1954), 8–13. National Museum and welcomed as the carriers of national spirit and ideas of political liberation; in May 1951 the same museum presented historic and contemporary Chinese art, which thanks to Mao became the weapon in the struggle for communism, showing a predilection toward realism and hence supporting the belief in socialist realism as the style of the progres- sive world. 940 The exhibition of Chinese applied art at the Zachęta Nation- al Gallery in Warsaw in October 1955 was praised for including products based on traditional Chinese patterns and criticized for showing objects in- spired by European tradition. 941 The same discourse applied to the debates concerning architecture, including an extensive article by Mexican archi- tectural critic Ignacio Marquez Rodiles, written especially for the influen- tial journal Architektura, who emphasized the correlation between the pro- cess of liberation from colonial dependence, which started in 1821, and the emergence of national form in Mexican art and architecture. According to Rodiles, contemporary architecture, dominated by old colonial styles and functionalism “alien to the interest of Mexican people,” still lagged behind well-known mural paintings produced since the 1920s, composed of pro- gressive content and national form. Yet the architecture was on its way to a desired synthesis of visual arts, sculpture, and architecture, which could ed- ucate people and express their national independence. 942 The foreign exhibitions could also be a pretext for debates concerning the Polish art scene, as if the newly discovered Third World art centers could provide the long-awaited answers needed at home. The process illustrated the paradoxical orientalization of non-European cultures, which suddenly became the “authentic” and “noble savages,” ready to give lessons to coun- tries much more advanced in communism-building. 943 The paradox lay precisely in the discrepancy between the apparent respect for the younger brothers and sisters and their actual framing in the requirements of current 940 Ignacy Witz, “Grafika meksykańska w Muzeum Narodowym,” Przegląd Artystyczny 1–2 (1950): 38–41, and editorial, “Stara i nowa sztuka chińska,” Przegląd Artystyczny 4 (1951): 65–70. 941 Editorial, “Wystawa rzemiosła artystycznego Chińskiej Republiki Ludowej w Zachęcie,” Architektura 1 (1955): 28. 942 Ignacio Marquez Rodiles, “Problemy współczesnej architektury meksykańskiej,” Architektura 7 (1955): 210–13. 943 On the paradoxes of Saidian orientalization discourse in Central Europe, see Andrzej Szczerski, “Colo- nial/Post-Colonial Central Europe—History vs. Geography,” in Anxiety of Influence: Bachelors, Brides and Family Romance, ed. Adam Budak (Bern: Stadtgalerie, 2004), 64–72. 440 441 2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene… Part I · Moving People politics. As an example, one may note the reception of the exhibition of his- toric and contemporary Indian art, which in October 1953 went to Warsaw and Krakow, after the great success it had enjoyed in Moscow. The popular press emphasized the greatness of the show and the preeminence of the na- tional traditions in contemporary works, not to mention the political ratio- nale behind the show, which strengthened the political and economic ties between Poland and India. In turn, the principal art journal Przegląd Ar- tystyczny (The arts review), controlled by the official artists’ union ZPAP (Związek Polskich Artystów Plastyków), published an extensive review by Jerzy Zanoziński, who tried to reject the accusations of formalism against contemporary Indian art explaining that, in India, form was not an end in itself but served “to express profound meanings.” 944 Zanoziński carefully balanced his words to justify several deformations in Indian works in order not to question its progressive character and distinguish it sharply from dec- adent bourgeois formalism. Such interpretation of Indian or any other non-European art clearly exem- plified the attitude of communist art critics toward the “authentic” other cul- tures. Their otherness needed to be domesticated through adaptation to the master narrative produced by the Soviet type of socialist realism, if not the form then the content. Even the not strictly socialist realist Indian artist Pal- sikara, active in the 1940s, represented in Zanoziński words the “dramatic ex- pression of the will of Indian people to break free from colonial oppression.” 945 The same argument had also been employed in architectural criticism, e.g., when in September 1954 the principal journal Architektura commented on the visit of an international group of architects to Warsaw. Foreign guests praised the preservation of folk national features in Polish contemporary ar- chitecture, as summarized by critic Arnold Majorek: The role of the indigenous, folkloristic trend in our culture being devel- oped so well in a People’s Democracy was particularly cherished by the representatives of the nations liberated in the aftermath of World War II from the various forms of colonial and semicolonial dependence, who are 944 Jerzy Zanoziński, “Wystawa sztuki hinduskiej,” Przegląd Artystyczny 6 (1953): 28–40. 945 Ibid., 39. building their own, independent statehoods based on their national cultural values. 946 The most authoritative voice in support of the importance of national cul- tures within the internationalist Communist Bloc was that of the influential art historian and art critic, director of the Institute of Art at the Polish Acade- my of Science, Juliusz Starzyński. He expressed his credo, when writing about the 1954 Venice Biennale for Przegląd Artystyczny. According to Starzyński, Polish socialist realist painting was just part of a larger international strug- gle for new culture and new realist painting, whose protagonists were to be found among progressive nations in Europe but also in Asia, America, and Africa. The new socialist realist painting style preserved uniqueness of na- tional form in contrast to cosmopolitanism, directed against national tradi- tion, exposing it to influences of foreign, usually hostile ideology. 947 The internationalist/nationalist agenda largely influenced the representa- tion of non-European cultures as well, enforcing artists to negotiate between exoticism of content and identifiable national form. Such tensions had been particularly poignant during the Korean War, one of the most popular “co- lonial” subjects in socialist realist painting of the early 1950s. Apart from the regular letters of protest against American atrocities and words of support for Korean brothers and sisters published in art journals, e.g., in the name of artists’ union ZPAP, soon a large number of works dedicated to the Korean War entered official exhibitions and publications. The most famous and em- blematic for the decade was a painting by Wojciech Fangor known as Ko- rean Mother (Matka Koreanka), which was awarded a second prize at the official Second National Exhibition of Art in Warsaw in 1951. 948 Fangor’s painting was largely based on the visual tradition of nineteenth-century re- alist painting with political overtones, based on clear, almost caricature-like visual codes. At the same time, it could also evoke references to Polish paint- ing and drawing of the 1860s, showing the tragedy of the January Uprising 946 Arnold Majorek, “Międzynarodowe spotkanie architektów,” Architektura 9 (1954): 228–30. The interna- tional group of architects included delegates from Korea, India, and China, among other countries. 947 Juliusz Starzyński, “Internacjonalizm czy kosmopolityzm? (kilka uwag z powodu XXVII Biennale w Wenecji),” Przegląd Artystyczny 5–6 (1954): 16–18. 948 See the catalog of II Ogólnopolska Wystawa Plastyki (Warsaw: CBWA Zachęta, 1951). 442 443 2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene… Part I · Moving People of 1863–64 against Russia, in particular to popular works by Artur Grottger, such as his cycle War (1866–67). The obviousness of the foreground figures— innocent war victims—where the fallen mother’s gesture resembled crucifix- ion and the child stood for helpless abandonment in the face of death, ex- emplified the fundamental feature of socialist realist image that Wojciech Włodarczyk called its “paralysis.” As the ideological meaning of the works needed to be undisputable, artists had to refrain from any visual experiments and ambiguities, which could lead them into the abyss of formalism. 949 But Fangor decided to strengthen the appeal of his work, referring to a tradition- al concept in Polish irredentist iconography, that of the “Polish Mother,” not only the symbol of motherhood, but also a tacit hero in the nineteenth-cen- tury fight for Polish independence. The “Polish Mother,” although rarely seen in the battlefield, acted as the crucial participant in the military uprisings, providing shelter for insurgents, but also being capable of sacrificing her life for the benefit of her children. 950 Fangor conspicuously incorporated the Ko- rean War into the national visual tradition, and it was only thanks to the fa- cial features of both victims that the image was identified with contempo- rary war in the distant Far East. At the same Second National Exhibition of Art, the Korean War was largely seen through the heroic deeds of women, as in Jan Kober’s drawing Korea with a dignified lonely mother and two crying children, and Konstanty Lech’s plaster cast of a sculpture of a Chinese wom- an warrior entitled In Defense of Korean Sisters. 951 For Polish artists, the Korean War provided an opportunity to portray communist revolutions beyond Europe and test the visual requirements of socialist realism. This did not occur in painting and sculpture only; Korean War posters and cartoons, designed by leading artists such as Jan Lenica, To- masz Gleb, or Wojciech Fangor, enjoyed large circulation and were univer- sally praised for the clarity of their message, based on realist tradition and contemporary political caricatures. Another genre of Korean paintings dealt with the support and care offered to Korean émigrés who found temporary shelter in Poland. Stanisław Wójcik, in his widely praised work Korean Chil- 949 Wojciech Włodarczyk, Socrealizm: sztuka polska w latach 1950–54 (Kraków, 1991). 950 Agnieszka Zawadowska, Maria Janion, Monika Grodzka, and Katarzyna Czeczot, Polka. Medium, cień, wyobrażenie (Warszaw, 2005). 951 See II Ogólnopolska Wystawa Plastyki. dren in Kindergarten (1954), showed the youngest generation of Korean peo- ple indulging in an idyllic scene of play in a Polish nursery. Wójcik’s paint- ing not only proved that Poland helped Korean children to overcome war traumas, but also suggested that they learned on the banks of Vistula River how to rebuild their own country and create a prosperous, communist future. Their favorite game in kindergarten, rendered carefully by Wójcik, involved building blocks and their own architectural constructions. 952 This romanticized portrayal of the Korean War and the sentimental care offered to its survivors in Poland were not intended to give justice to the Ko- rean nation or to voice any genuine protest against the war crimes, but rath- er to influence the Polish public. In this context, communist Poland looked like a prosperous place of refuge for survivors of imperialist tyrannies; thanks to the brotherhood with the Soviet Union, Poland avoided imperialist war with US allies in Europe and peacefully began to build a happy future. Given the unstable internal situation in the 1950s associated with the Stalinist ter- ror, military resistance, and postwar shortages in the economy, this could not be further from truth. Yet this discrepancy was not only covered up by pro- paganda; non-European affairs were in fact used to redirect attention from local conflicts to distant wars of global importance. Most importantly, the success of communist power in Korea acted as the ultimate proof of the un- stoppable progress of communism around the world and the futility of any resistance at home. The use of non-European subjects as propaganda tools aimed at the public in Poland can be exemplified by a series of study tours organized by the state agencies for chosen artists, who traveled to “Third World” countries in order to report on the progress of their fight against colonial powers and achieve- ments in communism-building. Such visits, usually given larger-than-life sta- tus, were publicized in the media and recognized by official art institutions, which presented their artistic effects in exhibitions and publications. Three such visits deserve attention, as they centered on the same ideologically sen- sitive territory, i.e., China and Vietnam, and their outcome might be ranked among the most valuable artistic achievements of Polish art in the 1950s. 952 This somehow paternalist attitude toward new members of the Communist Bloc could occasionally include China, as testified by a painting of Ludwik Maciąg, Chinese Zoo Technicians in a State Horse-Breeding Farm in Kwidzyń (1954), showing Polish horse-breeders teaching Chinese colleagues the skills of their profession. |
