Kurzątkowski’s didactic work yields to a similar division – into pre-war paper sculpture and post-war furniture. Paper sculpture had been used in teaching, but it was only in the Warsaw School of Fine Arts where a studio came about that recognized paper as the primary material for design and sculpture experiments. Jan Kurzątkowski was meant to assist Professor Wojciech Jastrzębowski from 1928 on, but in reality, he ran the classes himself according to the professor’s program. He described the studio’s goal, significance, and innovative concept in the following manner:
This new subject, in some sense an ABC’s of form – the first attempt at a methodical building of form – dealt with issues in the visual arts on an elementary level, and therefore an abstract level, and served as a foundation for just about all disciplines. This new orientation in some sense reversed the traditional method of studying nature […].(4)
Materials that were cheap, relatively easy to use in manufacture, and required no special equipment provided the basis for sculpting courses – for teaching form, space, surface, and also expression. Today the use of paper techniques in academies seems entirely natural – but in those days, it was pioneering work.
From 1948-1969 Kurzątkowski worked with students at the Warsaw Interior Design Department, where he emphasized construction and materials. This was the legacy of Ład ideas, which spoke of the importance of materials. Thus became the craftsman-like work method, which was meant to lead to the tangible knowledge of the structural properties of the material, and to keep the designer in constant contact with the object, its scale, mass, and details. This approach was favorable to experimentation, which became the trademark of the workshop and the innovative designs of the man who ran it. The link between the furniture and the interior was also vital. Kurzątkowski saw furniture in applied situations, not as exhibits or ‘laboratory subjects’. Teresa Kruszewska recalled:
The professor’s corrections served to remind us that the object of interior architecture and its subsequent interior decor is and remains the human being. No other designer of his generation was capable of quite so masterfully defining space by the measure of the person.(5)
Jan Kurzątkowski (1899–1975), a teacher and a designer of furniture, paper sculptures, glass products, and interiors studied at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1922–1928), and was also a co-founder of the Ład Artists’ Cooperative. In 1928 he began running shapes and surfaces composition courses at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw and at the City School of Decorative Arts and Painting. He was a pioneer and promoter of paper sculpture as a design (in toys and decor) and didactic technique. After the war he taught at the Visual Arts Academy (1946–1948) and at the Academy of Fine Arts (1950–1969), where, from 1961–1969 he ran the Interior Design Wing, and from 1957–1958, he served as dean of the Interior Design Department. His most important awards were the gold and silver medals at the Art and Technology in Modern Life Exhibition in Paris (1937), 1st prize (1952) and 2nd prize (1957) at the Polish Exhibitions of Interior Design and Decorative Art in Warsaw, and 1st prize at the Applied Arts Exhibition for the 15th anniversary of the People’s Republic in Warsaw (1963).
Author: Sylwia Giżka
Text originally published in Out of the Ordinary. Polish Designers of the 20th Century, edited by Czesława Frejlich and published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Warsaw, 2011) in cooperation with the Karakter publishing house. Translation by Søren Gauger, edited for the purposes of Culture.pl by Agnieszka Le Nart. For more information on the book, see: www.karakter.pl
Notes:
(1) J. Kurzątkowski, Plastyk – pedagog – społecznik, [in:] collective work, Wspomnienia o Wojciechu Jastrzębowskim, “Przegląd Artystyczny” 1964, no. 5, p. 3.
(2) A. Wojciechowski, O współpracy plastyków z przemysłem, “Przegląd Artystyczny” 1954, no. 1, pp. 18–21.
(3) J. Kurzątkowski, op. cit., p. 3.
(4) J. Kurzątkowski, see above.
(5) Cf: E. Plutyńska, O Profesorze Wojciechu Jastrzębowskim, [in:] collective work, Wspomnienia o Wojciechu Jastrzębowskim, “Przegląd Artystyczny” 1964, no. 5, p. 5