The Life Cycle of a Monument

pomnik_monument-krolikarnia-photo_ernest_winczyk-059.jpg, default, A view from the exhibition ‘MONUMENT: Central and Eastern Europe 1918-2018’ at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture in the Królikarnia, Warsaw, p

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Among the cultural events organised to mark the centennial of Poland’s independence, the riveting ‘MONUMENT: Central and Eastern Europe 1918-2018’ was one of the few that introduced something fresh and capable of inspiring imagination.

Polish public spaces are dotted with so many monuments – rarely artistically outstanding, one should add – that crowding further models, fragments and pieces of documentation into a museum space feels like an attempt to torture the viewers. However, MONUMENT: Central and Eastern Europe 1918-2018 is a riveting exhibition, its level of drama closer to that of a thriller movie than that of a textbook. And it’s thanks to how the eponymous monuments have been pushed off their pedestals in two senses of the word – both literally and with regard to the curators’ approach.

The art history perspective is of secondary importance here. The exhibition, curated by the Królikarnia’s director Agnieszka Tarasiuk together with Ania Miczko and the artist Hubert Czerepok, doesn’t catalogue the monuments in terms of their formal characteristics. Rather, the curators view them with the detached eye of a biologist studying fauna. They don’t get attached to an individual specimen but rather recognise behavioural patterns and modes of life that apply to the entire species.

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A view from the exhibition ‘MONUMENT: Central and Eastern Europe 1918-2018’ at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture in the Królikarnia, Warsaw, photo: Ernest Wińczyk / MNW Królikarnia

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That’s why the exhibition may disappoint those who expected it to take a clear stance on, for instance, Jerzy Kalina’s monument to the victims of the Smolensk air disaster, hotly debated as of late. The piece does indeed appear in the exposition, but its presence is marginal, as is the presence of the Lech Kaczyński monument located nearby.

This marginalisation, however, is fully understandable. It can be read not as an indicator of political pussyfooting but as a consequence of curatorial strategy. The laboratory-like study of monuments makes it possible to select specimens already embalmed in the formalin of history instead of dissecting living organisms.

Thumbnail — A view from the exhibition ‘MONUMENT: Central and Eastern Europe 1918-2018’ at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture in the Królikarnia, Warsaw, photo: Ernest Wińczyk / MNW Królikarnia

What’s missing from the exhibition, however, is another monument to that president killed in the Smolensk plane crash – a sculpture by Paweł Althamer carved into the trunk of a birch tree, which was performatively placed in front of the presidential palace on the eve of the 2018 anniversary of the disaster. But even though that piece is artistically more interesting than many of the exhibits included here, its omission is justified. That’s because Althamer’s sculpture belongs to a different order of commemoration, namely bottom-up gestures from society. The curators of this exhibition, however, are interested in something else – the monument as manifestation of power, as an example of the authorities’ perception of themselves and of society.

With that purpose in mind, the exhibition is structured as a quasi-scientific story about the life cycle of a monument, beginning with a chapter titled ‘Conditions’. Through sketches and models, we get to familiarise ourselves with a simplified typology of monuments, mostly those from the early 20^th century. Embedded in their form is the basic message the authorities want to convey to society, located somewhere on the axis between celebrating conservative values and the belief in modernising society. This division is reinforced by the logic of the avant-garde, which had been a presence up until the 1960s.

Located closer to the conservative end of the spectrum, then, are realist and representative monuments that maintain 19^th-century-like veins. In the opposite camp, we find a striving towards abstraction and experimentation. Outside of this delineated division, the curators highlight ‘the individualists, such as Stanisław Szukalski’.

If there’s any section in the substantive part of the exhibition where there are oversimplifications, it’s this one. The most spectacular example of the contrast between the language of the radical avant-garde and the kind of power it’s supposed to serve is famously from outside Central Europe – the Italian futurists’ affair with Mussolini’s government. One doesn’t need to search that far afield, however. In the opening chapter of the exhibition, the curators present, for instance, the design for a Vilnius monument to Adam Mickiewicz by Zbigniew Pronaszko – a formist piece that evoked extreme emotions and ended up never being created. However, the winner of that Vilnius competition was the aforementioned Szukalski, who proposed a project even more adventurous in form but much more conservative in its content, even martyrological in spirit.

But the exhibition really gains traction in the further sections, in which the curators focus not so much on individual sculptures as on places where subsequent monuments were erected and pulled down, depending on how the winds of history blew. As a result, we view the fates of certain hot spots in the struggle for memory, places deemed crucial due to multiple factors: from their topographic and urban locations to their historical significance. One example is the former Saski Square – now Piłsudskiego Square, which in between was also Adolf Hitler Square and Victory (Zwycięstwa) Square. Needless to say, but with each name change, the monuments in the square were replaced too.

One of the exhibition’s key points is the history of another place, one linked to a single extraordinarily traumatic historical moment – the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.

Western European civilisation’s ethical defeat there became a place where

classic monumental sculpture has failed too, and so does its potential replacement, the avant-garde. The former has no language capable of narrating the tragedy of the place more than the place can itself. The latter, in turn, hits a wall made up of the commissioning party’s expectations.

The exhibition devotes a lot of attention to the 1957 international competition for a monument to the victims of fascism in the Oświęcim-Brzezinka area [the Polish name of Auschwitz-Birkenau – ed.]. This competition was the reason a very well-known yet never implemented design was made – The Road, conceptualised by the team of Oskar and Zofia Hansen, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Edmund Kupiecki, Julian Pałka, Tadeusz Plasota and Lechosław Rosiński. The project, drawing from Hansen’s idea of the Open Form, foreshadowed the later anti-monument movement of the 1980s. Mostly, however, it resulted from the ineffectiveness of traditional sculptural tools in the face of material testimony to the Holocaust. Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz described it best:

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We worked from the assumption that everything that happened here […] is now unimaginable […], that it cannot be conveyed by any sculpture, no matter how excellent or dramatic; that only the place itself can properly bear witness to the events. We believed, then, that the viewer should be made a co-author of the monument, and our own involvement should come down to the role of directors who foreground the most weighty elements of this tragic spectacle.

The foregrounding assumed the form of the eponymous road, a path several dozen metres wide symbolically crossing the camp and leading the viewer along its remains. These, in turn, were meant to be conserved only in the form of the pathway, with everything outside of it being subject to natural entropy, crumbling and decaying, ravaged by time and vegetation slowly growing into the fissures. Although the jury expressed unanimous admiration for the idea, it turned out to be too bold for the organising committee. In the end, a compromise was arrived at and a classic sculpture was erected in the camp – it was small, making no attempt to overshadow the surroundings, and dramatic, though nowhere near as much as The Road, whose dramatic quality derived not from encountering a form of representation but a real theatre of tragedy.

In the next exhibition rooms, the curators make use of the Królikarnia’s rich collections, mainly the works of its patron Xawery Dunikowski. In the cramped warehouse, we find numerous models of monuments and their fragments merging into one monumental mass, in which a sculpture of Stalin naturally finds itself in the proximity of Chopin’s head, and somewhere on a shelf between them there’s still space for gems such as the design for Sickle and Hammer, made by Dunikowski in the year of Stalin’s death. Intended to be a monumental sculpture, here it’s the size of a knick-knack placed on a mantelpiece.

The histories of subsequent monuments tell us a lot about the mentality of the authorities that commissioned them. We learn, for instance, the story behind a monument to Marshal Józef Piłsudski, which was meant to come from a competition announced after his death. The Sanation government authorities expected the project to be pompous and wouldn’t have hesitated to demolish buildings to make space for their sculptural-architectural objective. After multiple editions of the competition, long pending due to the symbolic weight of the monument, a piece designed by Ivan Meštrović –Rodin’s apprentice and a star of Croatian art – was selected for implementation. The war interrupted the plans, and then the post-war socialist authorities weren’t too keen on having a monument to the marshal erected in the capital. It was only after the political transition of the 1990s that a Piłsudski monument was erected – two, in fact – and this time there was no lengthy divagation and expert deliberation, but rather a prevailing 1990s spirit of ‘anything goes’.

The rhythm of the narrative is somewhat disrupted by the histories of the most characteristic monuments brought in from other Central and Eastern European countries, such as the world’s tallest Stalin in Czechoslovakia and Vojin Bakić’s avant-garde spomeniki in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Their stories are mostly conveyed through a couple of photographs and texts in the otherwise excellent publication accompanying the exhibition. Still, the disproportions and gaps in these chapters are plainly visible.

To display them all in Warsaw by employing a larger number of material artefacts would have been near impossible, but a few years ago, the Intermarium travelling exhibition curated by Piotr Sikora and Łukasz Białkowski demonstrated how to circumvent such issues. Intermarium was held in several countries in the region, each time in a slightly different iteration adapted according to its location. To include all the aforementioned elements in one exhibition is a backbreaking task. In MONUMENT’s narrative hurdle race, structured by a description-photos-description-photos rhythm, the viewer struggles to catch their breath.

The final chord of the exhibition is of an elegiac nature – we view fragments and splinters of monuments that seemed untouchable up until recently. Only a hand remains of some, while others are simply debris. The Warsaw monument to Feliks Dzierżyński, once a hated symbol of the socialist regime, is now a wispy carcass full of dents, dramatically illuminated by a shaft of light coming from one small lamp – it disappears in the expanse of the venue’s classicist rotunda. Here, ‘Iron Feliks’ more closely resembles an ailing elderly man, thereby serving as a visual closure to the curator’s narrative – a monumental story about what seem like the most enduring kinds of sculpture, but in reality are the feeblest, vulnerable to the faintest blows of the winds of history.

Originally written in Polish, 2019, translated by Anna Potoczny, July 2025

Language English

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