The History of Polish Artistic Heritage Abroad

le_salon_de_la_comtesse_potocka_-_1887.jpg, default, Jean Béraud, 'Salon of Countess Potocka', 1887, photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet

#photography & visual arts

Since the early Middle Ages, Polish art has evolved at the crossroads of European cultures, shaped by the meeting point of eastern and western Christianity. This borderland position gave rise to a distinct artistic identity, one that flourished particularly vividly between the 16th and 18th centuries, when Poland attracted painters, architects, and craftsmen from across Europe.

Yet while foreign artists arrived in great numbers, Polish creators themselves rarely travelled beyond the country’s borders. That changed dramatically in the 19th century. Following the loss of independence, Polish artists began leaving the country in growing numbers – not only as political exiles, but also in search of artistic freedom, education, and new possibilities abroad. Their journeys transformed the character of modern Polish culture, turning it into something shaped as much by displacement and migration as by place itself.

Polish creators’ worldwide artistic activity didn’t cease after 1918, when the country regained independence, but intensified after World War Two due to the inflow of consecutive waves of Polish immigrants to various countries around the world. Since then, up to this day, Poland’s rightful place among the cultures of the world has been marked by hundreds of buildings, monuments, gravestones, stained glass windows and mosaics, as well as paintings made by Polish artists on all continents.

Polish artists & patrons around the world

Grób Cypriana Godebskiego w Montmorency pod Paryżem. Fotografia z albumu "Na obcej ziemi. Groby polskie na cmentarzach paryskich i w Montmorency" Hanny Zaworonko-Olejniczak, fot. materiały promocyjne wydawnictwa TRES — The grave of Cyprian Godebski in Montmorency near Paris. Photograph from the album 'On Foreign Land: Polish Graves in Parisian Cemeteries and in Montmorency' by Hanna Zaworonko-Olejniczak, photo: press materials of TRES Foundation

Poles’ presence around the world is proved by numerous instances of polonica (all kinds of historic traces of Polishness outside Poland), including those not made by Polish artists but funded, for instance, by great Polish houses. A lot of these historical relics are of great artistic value. What’s more, some of them date back to the times of Poland’s greatness: two exquisite Baroque gravestones, for instance, made by eminent Italian sculptors, are tied to the family of Jan III Sobieski. The 19th century saw the emergence of the enormous Potocki family palace in Paris, the most exquisite eclectic Parisian residence of the period, located in an exclusive district nearby the Arc de Triomphe. Other French mansions of great Polish magnates astonish with their lavishness, not only in Paris but also, for instance, in Biarritz (a mansion belonging to the Sapieha family), Rambouillet (the Potocki and Branicki families) and Montresor (the Branicki and Rey families).

An impressive palace in Vienna was the property of the Czartoryskis and Lanckorońskis. Faniteum, a girls’ hospice, was only one of the several charities established by the Viennese earl Karol Lanckoroński, a great collector and art scholar. A few Berlin buildings belonging to another eminent collector and politician, Atanazy Raczyński, including a museum-palace, were designed by the most acclaimed Prussian architects of the first half of the 19th century. A hospice in the famous ‘capital of sculptors’, Carrara, was funded by a well-known Polish artist, Cyprian Godebski.

The (few) treasures of times past

Before the beginning of the 19th century, works of Polish architects, painters and sculptors could only occasionally be encountered outside the country. The earliest examples of Polish artistic presence beyond Polish borders include the Italian artworks by Sebastian Majewski. The comparatively not very artistic region of Abruzze was where the Masovian painter, initially a guildsman in Kraków, gained a lot of recognition at the beginning of the 17th century. His artwork adorned plenty of local churches; the numerous paintings and frescoes got damaged over time and, as a result, only a small part of Majewski’s work has been preserved. Not far from the capital of the region, Teramo, in the Santa Maria di Propezzano church, a series of Majewski’s frescoes have survived up until this day.

His key work, however, is a large series of paintings in the vestry of the Teramo cathedral (1622-1623). They fill in an enormous altar and depict scenes from the life and miracles performed by a local saint, Berard. Among the harsh landscape of the region, in the raw interior of the Romanesque cathedral, this one artistic jewel shines through. It might seem archaic against the background of Italian artworks of the period; after all, its peculiar charm is a result of a reshaping of traditional Gothic polyptychs and Polish 16th-century painting, hence the affinity between the works of Majewski and those located, for instance, in the faraway Częstochowa.

Thumbnail — Szymon Czechowicz, 'Autoportret', 1775, fot. Pałac w Rakiszkach/ https://pl.wikipedia.org

Plenty of modern Polish artists were educated at foreign academies, especially in Rome, and therefore they were able to stay up-to-date on all the newest trends. Some of them left their works behind – for instance, the papal architect Jan Benedykt Renard who, at the beginning of the 18th century, received three awards in competitions organised by Rome’s Academia, and who in 1712 rebuilt the facade of the Rome hospice and the Polish church San Stanislao in the late Roman Baroque style. Inside the church, we can find, for instance, artwork by Szymon Czechowicz (1689-1775), who was also educated in Rome and created paintings for a few local churches. His best piece in San Stanislao church seems to be the portrait of St. Jadwiga (1725), referring to the tradition of Roman Baroque, exemplified by Guido Reni, but enriched by a heavy dose of exalted emotion. In his works from the San Bonaventura church in Palatino, Czechowicz appears also as a continuator of the classicising style of 17th-century paintings.

One of the most eminent Polish Baroque painters, Tadeusz Kuntze-Konicz (1733-1793), a student of a few Roman academies, eventually settled in Rome in 1766, where he passed away. Italians called him Taddeo Polacco. His graceful paintings and frescoes are to be found in palaces and churches all around Rome (for instance San Stanislao and Il Gesu), but also in numerous towns in Latium which boast well-known and frequently visited churches (such as those in Bracciano, Caprarola, Tuscolo, Viterbo). What’s particularly interesting is the abundance of Konicz’s artwork in the famous villa town nearby Rome – Frascato. There he painted frescoes (for the Il Gesu church), decorated the bishop’s palace and Villa Borghese, finally he created effigies of the bishop Henryk Stuart. The painter also stayed in Spain for a certain period of time, and he’s said to have been in contact with Goya. However, this and other Spanish traces in the biography of this great painter remain shrouded in mystery.

Poland under partition & the exodus of artists

Due to Poland’s loss of independence at the end of the 18th century, the number of Poles abroad started to grow significantly. That included artists educated, sometimes permanently settled, and working on all continents, where more often than not they created first-class masterpieces. The places which attracted artists the most were, of course, those which were home to the largest groups of Polish political emigrants: Paris and Rome. In Rome, one could find an interesting piece by Konstanty Hegel, one of the Polish apprentices of Bartel Thorvaldsen. The work is typical for that type of neoclassical style in which the great Danish sculptor made monuments and gravestones for Poles. Santi Sergio e Bacco church is home to a raw epitaph sculpted by Hegel, commemorating, through an antique stelle, the Polish emigrant Juliusz Miszewski (1827).

From the beginning of the 19th century, more and more Polish sculptors were active in Rome, engaging in consistent artistic practice. The scholar Tomasz O. Sosnowski (1810-1886) spent almost all of his artistic life in Italy, leaving behind numerous artworks – mostly in Rome. The best-known is the Pieta, located by Scala Santa in Lateran (around 1870-1873), which possesses a distinct poignancy despite the cold classical style it employs. It’s accompanied by the nearby realistic sculpture of Pope Pious IX praying. Both pieces were commissioned by the Pope, who supported the Polish sculptor. On top of that, other works Sosnowski left in Rome include religious sculptures, torsos and a relief depicting the Angel of Resurrection, which adorns the artist’s own gravestone in the city’s largest cemetery, Campo Verano.

This was also where another Polish emigrant, quickly deemed one of the most eminent representatives of international academic art, Wiktor Brodzki (1826-1904) created a gravestone for a then well-known Roman lady, Enedina Giordano Sanna Apostoli (1875-1878). It was a sensation of its time: it appeared on the pages of Italian newspapers, it was even a topic for panegyrical poems; according to one of these poets, Brodzki had overcome the destructive power of nature!

Mermaid in Powiśle, photo: Dawid Lasociński / Forum

To this day, the statue is considered one of the main attractions of this enormous necropolis; what remains astonishing is the mastery with which the artist conveyed the beauty of the deceased woman and the delicate drapery covering her. Brodzki is buried nearby, in the same Campo Verano cemetery, in a grave that he shares with the painter Aleksander Gierymski and with the author of the gravestone, the sculptor Antoni Madeyski (1904), who is highly valued in Italy. Despite its modest form, it’s a monument very interesting with regard to composition, commemorating artists who co-created the Polish colony in Rome.

However, without a doubt the most remarkable masterpiece of Polish 19th-century sculpture in Rome is the imposing gravestone for cardinal Włodzimierz Czacki in the Santa Podenziana church (1888-1891), modelled after early Renaissance Italian burial monuments with regard to the overall concept and the poses of the figures. Its author, Pius Weloński (1849-1931), was also under the influence of the masters of Quattrocento when creating the in-depth study of the deceased’s features. These patterns are also to be found in contemporaneous Italian sculptures, but none of those sculptors applied them as powerfully and consistently as Weloński. His superb knowledge of Quattrocento he attained during his almost 20-year stay in Italy.

What draws one’s attention in the Ressurectionists church in Rome is Weloński’s epitaph for the Resurrectionists, with brilliant realistic portraits of the founders of the congregation (1892), a tympanum by the same artist and Brodzki’s two dashing baptismal fonts. The statue of Copernicus, located in the courtyard, sculpted by Sosnowski (1873) represents yet another, more classical style. The church is also home to a solid example of academic art, ‘Transfiguration’, painted by one of the masters of this style, Henryk Siemiradzki, whose artistic oeuvre and glamorous studio were an object of admiration in late 19th-century Rome.

The most significant Polish artistic relic in Florence is a masterpiece of 19th-century sculpture, the tombstone for Zofia Czartoryska in the Santa Croce church. The author, however, was an Italian sculptor by the name of Lorenzo Bartolini. However, the tombstone is adjacent to a highly interesting piece by the Polish artist Teofil Lenartowicz. The well-known poet and eccentric sculptor lived in Florence between 1860 and 1893, and the aforementioned tombstone is the brown ‘door of death’ on the grave of Zofia Cieszkowska (1870-1872).

It’s distinctive due to its iconographic uniqueness, but it’s also, to a large extent, stylistically independent from the then predominant medieval and Renaissance influences, instead constituting a breath of Romanticism, so scarce in 19th-century sculpture. Among the countless tombstones and plaques in the Santa Croce church and monastery, another relief by Lenartowicz distinguishes itself thanks to its topic, which is uncommon in this country: the epitaph for Stanislao Bechi (1882), the Italian officer in the Polish January Uprising, depicts the moment of his execution.

In the 19th century, plenty of Polish artists were also to be found in France; Paris was even said to have been the ‘capital’ of Polish art during partition. Montmorency, a town under Paris that constituted a significant centre of Polish emigration in the 19th century, boasts an imposing tombstone for general Karol Kniaziewicz and Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1848), the most outstanding piece in Władysław Oleszczyński’s (1808-1866) oeuvre. The sculptor was educated by top French artists of the period, then worked many years for the local Polish colony.

Not only its scale, but also its ‘medieval’ concept, place the building among the most interesting instances of contemporaneous French historicist sculpture. What’s also impressive is the realistic depiction of the politicians’ features and their differences of character. Oleszczyński’s tombstone of Juliusz Słowacki in the Parisian cemetery Montmartre, in turn, constitutes a model statue of a Romanticist poet (arguably, no other great Romanticist has such a sublime tombstone!).

One of the peculiar cultural phenomena of the 19th century was the international career of Cyprian Godebski (1835-1909). Few sculptors of the era worked for such a multitude of commissioning parties scattered around the world. Godebski was not only associated with Polish patrons of art, but he also received commissions from leaders and individuals in many other countries. At the beginning of his career, in Vienna, he made two powerful statues of the officers of the emperor’s army for the pantheon of glory of the Austrian military in Arsenal (1864). He also worked in Saint-Petersburg and Italy. His statue of the officer of San Martin in Lima (1866) is one of the largest sculptures in South America. Godebski won an international competition to realise this project, during which he developed a whole repertoire of allegorical motifs and the complex, eclectic architecture of the multiple parts of the statue’s composition.

Overall, the piece glorifies new South American countries’ spurs of independence. Another, this time smaller-scale piece by Godebski is dedicated to his father-in-law, the great Belgian viola player A. F. Servais. The monument is located in Hal near Brussels. In France, the artist created numerous tombstones, which include monuments of Polish families, but also of the eminent French Romanticists, Th. Gautier and H. Herlioz in the Montmartre cemetery in Paris. In Monte Carlo, on the facade of the country’s famous casino, he sculpted a personification of Sculpture, while in 1091, on the dangerous rocky shore of the Pointe du Raz peninsula in Brittany, his huge statue of Madonna with Child was unveiled. This conventional piece deserves attention due to its embeddedness in the landscape and the conventional roles it serves: that of a landmark helping sailors navigate the stormy Atlantic Ocean and that of a memorial for people lost at sea.

In search of fame & profit

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, an increasing number of Polish architects searched for work and fame outside their partitioned homeland and all around the globe, often raising imposing and important buildings. In the new countries of Latin America, where engineers, builders and artists were in high demand, they were one of the most active in this regard among all foreigners. In Venezuela, already in the middle of the 19th century, the builder and inventor Wojciech Lutowski, who was educated in Warsaw, already stood out from other professionals. Among all his pieces created on the American continent, one deserving of special attention is a monumental classicist work – the church in Antimano (1857-1867).

Of great importance for the history of Peru was the engineering work of Ernest Malinowski, the creator of the impressive Transandine Railway. At his recommendation, numerous Polish engineers and lecturers were active in Peru at the end of the 19th century, and in the first half of the 20th century, Gwido Ryszard Jaxa-Małachowski was considered the most important architect of the country, in which he settled in 1911. His projects from the 1920s and 1930s – the lavish Presidential Palace, as well as the Archbishop’s Palace, which is full of native details – constitute artistic interpretations of American colonial architecture.

Along with the town hall, which was completed as late as 1946, with its far more modernist forms, they form the consistent urban layout of Lima’s main square. Another Polish architect, Brunon Paprocki, designed the equally monumental High Court in Lima and the Santa Rosa basilica, after which he conducted the reconstruction of the National Pantheon in the capital of Paraguay, Asuncion (from 1936).

The obvious direction chosen by Polish artists was, of course, the Russian Empire, which then included a part of Poland. Except for Kiev, Odessa and other Russian cities, Poles built and painted in numerous smaller artistic hubs. Due to the scale and artistic quality of their designs, two architects stand out from among others in the region, ones who would later, in the times of Poland’s rebirth, become known for their monumental projects realised in Warsaw. Before that happened, the later author of the building of the Sejm in Warsaw, Kazimierz Skórewicz (1866-1950), worked (among other Polish architects) in the main city of Azerbaijan, Baku, where he created a series of pieces between 1895 and 1905.

His glamorous Tagiyev Passage (1896-1898) is Baku’s key centre of commerce. Skórewicz’s projects in this Transcaucasian country constituted modern interpretations of European historical styles. Better-known pieces are those located in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, authored by Marian Lalewicz (1876-1944), to whom reborn Poland would later owe its majestic public buildings and banks. His imposing townhouses and utility buildings from the first two decades of the 20th century are considered one of the best realisations of Russian academic classicism.

The Mertens Trade House in Petersburg (1913), in turn, combines this style with the very modern forms of huge glass-panelled arcades. It’s one of the most daring examples in contemporaneous Europe of combining the tradition of historicism with a new approach to construction and with the new requirements imposed by a great metropolis.

One of the chosen countries of Polish refugees and artists was Switzerland. That’s where the 19th century saw the beginning of the brilliant career of the Polish painter Antoni Patek, the founder of a well-known horologic company. That’s also the emigration place of writer and Nobel prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz (commemorated through sculpted medals in Vevey by Lac Léman) and the great piano virtuoso and politician Ignacy Paderewski. Switzerland was also the place where one of the great masterpieces of Polish art was created: Józef Mehoffer’s series of stained glass windows (1869-1946) in the Fribourg cathedral.

After winning an international competition in 1895, the Cracovian painter continued designing the rest of the cathedral’s windows up until 1936, forming a whole that was unique due both to its scale and to its iconographic inventiveness. He also managed to include numerous historical and artistic references to Swiss history. Consistently using the Art Noveau style, the artist created the most complete work of such orientation in world decorative art. Mehoffer’s stained glass is also to be found in other Swiss towns, and his masterpiece exerted a strong influence on Swiss creators of decorative art in the first half of the 20th century.

When it comes to 20th-century monumental painting, there is a special place in Polish art for Jan Henryk Rosen (1891-1982). His pieces are scattered around several countries: in Vienna, he decorated with his polychromy the Jan III Sobieski chapel by the St. Joseph church on the historic Kahlenberg hill (1930). This small-scale project presents scenes from the 1683 Battle of Vienna in a simplified style, using bold colour schemes and blunt symbolism.

It represents neither avant-garde nor historicism but constitutes one of the most prominent mural realisations in the current of the ‘golden mean’, which gained traction in many European countries in the 1920s and 1930s. In Italy, in the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo, Rosen’s Polish patriotic-religious scenes are located: the Defence of Częstochowa and the Battle of Warsaw (1934). In the USA, where he settled in 1937, the pieces that stand out from among his numerous realisations are the paintings in the Anglican cathedral in Washington D.C. and the mosaic – considered the biggest one in the world – in the Saint Louis cathedral.

Prominent 20th-century Polish sculptures left singular, yet important works all around the world. ‘Fatum’, the famous symbolist sculpture by Xawery Dunikowski is known from its numerous versions, including one made of concrete, located in the Passy cemetery in Paris on the grave of the hairdresser Antoine Cierplikowski (1915), who was famous in the fashion world of the time. Dunikowski (1875-1964), undoubtedly one of the most eminent early 20th-century European sculptors, worked in Paris for many years, co-creating the large local Polish artistic colony. That’s where his somewhat cubist concept of a plastic form developed, one that stands out, due to its modernity, from the conventional burial monuments in the Parisian cemetery.

In Paris, one can also find famous sculptures by the younger generation of artists, close to modernised French classicist art. The stone sculpture ‘Ewa’ (1912-1914) by Edward Wittig, considered the artist’s most important work, is located in the Trocadero Park, nearby the aforementioned piece by Dunikowski. In the gardens of the Polish Embassy, located in a beautiful 18th-century palace, stands Henryk Kuna’s statue ‘Rhythm’. It achieved such enormous success during the 1925 international exhibition in Paris that the decision was made to inscribe it into the historic complex of the embassy. Another interesting work in Kuna’s oeuvre is a small statue of a hero of Polish independence, Marshal Józef Piłsudski in Rome, funded in 1937, located nearby the model district of Foro Mussolini, in Viala Maresciallo Pilsudski.

After 1945 – new emigration & citizens of the world

In the postwar history of Polish art, one can encounter examples of the artistic activity of emigrants who settled abroad for political or economic reasons as well as of artists living in Poland who achieved great success worldwide. In the USA there are numerous traces of the work of Polish authors of monumental art, ones associated with Polonia, i.e. a group of a couple million Polish emigrants. Between 1965 and 1986, numerous American churches boasted stained glass windows made by Jerzy Białecki; some of them are distinctive due to the Polish iconography, which is exotic for Americans; for example, the stained glass complex in the church of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown.

Jerzy Nowosielski w swojej pracowni, Kraków, 12 lipca 1987, fot. Włodzimierz Wasyluk — Jerzy Nowosielski in his studio, Kraków, 12 July 1987, photo: Włodzimierz Wasyluk

In the field of religious art, in turn, particularly surprising are Jan Lebestein’s stained glass windows in Paris. The artist (1930-1999) achieved a brilliant success in Parisian Biennale in 1959, then settled there, putting down roots in the international Ecole de Paris. He was perceived as one of the restorers of European figurative art of the 1960s. Nevertheless, the stained glass windows in the Pallottines chapel (1970), which apart from them contains a few other valuable religious pieces by Polish contemporary artists, constitute an exception among his other works. Lebestein’s imagination gave birth to a bestiary, and hence to a convincing depiction of the Revelation, a rare phenomenon in contemporary visual arts.

In France one can also find another surprising work of Polish religious art: paintings in the church of the Dormition of the Mother of God in Lourdes, created by Jerzy Nowosielski in 1984. Specialising for many years in decorating churches and inspired by Russian icons, the artist created an astonishingly cohesive synthesis of contemporary figuration and truly religious art depicting the deepest mysteries. It’s yet another instance of a Polish artist’s ‘exotic’ in Western culture.

Polish monuments constitute the second important group of polonica around the world. Their long list begins with artworks famous as historical relics but still underappreciated as masterpieces of landscape architecture – cemeteries, specifically burial monuments for Polish soldiers fallen in Italy during World War Two. The Monte Cassino necropolis – created in 1945 in the heat of the moment, in patriotic rapture, but realised very tastefully and according to a well-thought-out spatial layout – is particularly deserving of its rightful place in the history of Polish architecture and sculpture. In Loreto, also beautifully located on a hillside with a view over the Adriatic Sea, the more modest Polish cemetery constitutes an impressive composition of geometric forms, contrasted with abundant nature and enriched by a few discreetly placed artistic symbols.

Admittedly, monuments authored by Polish artists around the world are mostly works commemorating wartime martyrdom, especially Poles’ struggle and heroism on several fronts during World War Two. However, the most interesting projects are those of an entirely different kind. Two famous Poles are commemorated through statues all around the world, and most of these statues were made by Polish artists: Mikołaj Kopernik (Mieczysław Welter in the capital of Mexico, 1973; Ludwika Nitschowa in Brussels, 1974; Tadeusz Łodziana in Bogota, 1974) and Fryderyk Chopin (August Zamoyski in Rio de Janeiro, 1944; Ludwika Nitschowa in Guadalajara, 1964 and Manchester, 1973; Zofia Wolska in Mallorca, 1998; Gustaw Zemła in Uruguay).

Some of them are more traditional in terms of form, other exemplify experiments of more modern artists – their search for expressive sign unrelated to the traditional vision of the statue of a given person. Zamoyski’s work, a simplified figure of a contemplative artist, is understandable for all and seems exceedingly traditional; at the same time, the energy of the mass originates from the discreetly geometrical forms, which make one suspect that Zamoyski’s own artistic search led him at some point towards cubism.

Throughout the past years, several prominent and strongly unconventional monuments realised in Europe were created by Poles: Krzysztof Bednarski in Rimini, Mirosław Bałka in Stockholm. Both statues triggered heated discussions, as they touched upon painful issues in a way hitherto unknown to the tradition of commemorative sculpture. In the memorial for the victims of the ‘Estonia’ cruise ship catastrophe, Bałka risked creating an abstract composition, using no traditional forms or symbols.

The tree, the rocks and the wall simply give shape to a place, enabling one to honor the memory of the victims discreetly. Both realisations boldly undermine the conventions of European monument sculpture and prove that monuments can still evoke strong emotions and encourage discussions without giving up formal experimentation. A special role in the history of sculpture devoted to martyrdom is certainly played by the memorial of deported Jews on the Grunewald train station in Berlin. It’s a little-known work, hidden in a rarely visited district of Berlin, authored by Karol Broniatowski (1991) who, similarly to Bednarski and Bałka, is a graduate of Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts.

The piece itself can be considered one of Europe’s finest contemporary monuments. Sculpted in a huge stone block imitating a rock, there are shadow-like human figures, a simple yet memorable metaphor. Broniatowski created a poignant symbol of emptiness, lack, doubtlessly referring to the memorials of the victims of concentration camps, sculpted before on Polish land.

Due to their international fame, plenty of sculptures for public spaces have been commissioned in recent years from Magdalena Abakanowicz and Igor Mitoraj. The works of Mitoraj, who settled in Italy, aren’t related to any main current in contemporary sculpture. His travesties of ancient visual arts, made of precious and traditional materials, tap directly into the demand, common in many countries, for decorative complementing of the urban issue with sculptures referring to the great traditions of the Mediterranean culture (see, for instance, the Defense district in Paris and the Olympic Park in Lausanne).

Abakanowicz has been achieving great international successes for years, skillfully making the simple masses of her sculptures blend with the landscape. From among her expressive, mostly huge-scale spatial forms, the most impressive are the quasi-natural blocks placed in 1998 in the Europa Park forest near Vilnius, called ‘Space of Unknown Growth’. Almost abstract, they nevertheless make one reflect on the primordial forces of nature, while also evoking the memory of ancient ritual sculptures and stone circles – the pre-origins of European civilisations.

In the second half of the 20th century, numerous Polish architects worked worldwide. Some of their realised projects entered the history of architecture, for instance, the Paraboleum fair arena in Raleigh, North Carolina (1949-1953), famous for its bold shell, made of reinforced concrete and hung on two parabolic arches. This piece by the prematurely dead Maciej Nowicki is not only considered an achievement in terms of construction among the famous works of contemporary architecture. Over and above this, in fact, Nowicki has also created an incredibly simple and suggestive artistic form, a symbol of triumph over the force of gravity.

Without giving up the contemporary form, a few architects skillfully inscribe their works into the existing landscape and traditions of a given place. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje was designed by Wacław Kłyszewski, Jerzy Mokrzyński and Eugeniusz Wierzbicki (1966-1970) as Warsaw’s gift for this Macedonian city, which was ruined by an earthquake. The architects proposed to place the monumental but also blending into the landscape mass of the museum in a ‘temple-like’ location – on a hill. The contrast between traditional and modern materials and the rich spatial layout of the exhibitions make the building a fine example of contemporary museum architecture.

Interiors of the Warszawa Śródmieście train station, designed by Jerzy Sołtan and his team, photo: ZAB Academy of Fine Arts archive

Jerzy Sołtan, a well-liked lecturer at American architectural universities, designed several school buildings and private houses in the USA. A particularly beautiful work of his, however, is villa Sparoza in Greece, a house designed for Jacqueline Turwhitt in 1963. The power of the form originates from the contrast between the materials and geometrical forms of the mass, and the wild nature of Greece. Sołtan thereby alludes to the archetypes of Mediterranean culture. Just like the works of Mitoraj, Bałka and Abakanowicz, although for somewhat different reasons, the building remains outside the main current of the development of global art. Instead, it proposes its own interpretation of ancient traditions.

The story isn’t over yet…

And not only because there are numerous Poles are still making art all over the world, or because the buildings, monuments and paintings they make will keep appearing. It’s also because, due to the turmoils of Polish history, the exploration of this heritage, which has been scattered across different continents, was made difficult, traces and sources were destroyed, and it wasn’t so long ago that research in Poland was either banned or unwelcome. One may hope that now will be the time to remember and even discover other, more abundant works of Polish artists.

Written by: Andrzej Pieńkos

Language English

history of polish art