The Summer that Changed Everything: Revisiting Warsaw’s Festival of 1955

wojciech_jankowski_uczestniczki_festiwalu_sierpien_1955_muzeum_warszawy.jpg, default, Wojciech Jankowski, Festival participants, August, 1955, photograph, a piece from the exhibition ‘The Summer that Changed It All: The Festival of 1955

#photography & visual arts

In August 1955, Warsaw became the improbable centre of the world. For two dizzying weeks, tens of thousands of young people from across the globe gathered in a city scarred by war but bustling with hope and colour. The exhibition ‘The Summer that Changed It All: The Festival of 1955’ at the Museum of Warsaw invites us to relive this momentous time – a festival that became a rite of passage for an entire generation, and a small moral revolution, all sanctioned by the party and funded by the state.

In Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s 2017 novel Jak Zawsze (As Always), the plot is set in motion by an inexplicable anomaly – the two main characters travel back half a century, to their youth, albeit one set in an alternate version of history. In this slightly reshaped post-war world order, Poland in the early 1960s finds itself in the orbit not of the USSR but of France. Warsaw is seeing the rise of apartment blocks designed by Le Corbusier. Instead of Parade Square, the city centre is criss-crossed by tree-lined boulevards in the Haussmann style, surrounded by bustling cafés, and migrants from the Maghreb are a common sight on the streets. So much for fiction. But if the residents of the real-life Warsaw of the Polish People’s Republic could ever have experienced a dozen or so days in an alternative reality like this, it was in early August 1955.

A world arrives in Warsaw

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Mój Pamiętnik Festiwalowy’ (My Festival Diary), property of Roma Perłowska, 1955, a work displayed during the exhibition ‘The Summer That Changed it All: The Festival of 1955’ at the Museum of Warsaw, 2025, photo: Museum of Warsaw

Picture image

moj_pamietnik_festiwalowy_wlasc._roma_perlowska_1955_muzeum_warszawy.jpg

In 1954, just over 16,000 people left the Polish People’s Republic to go abroad. Of these, only 2,116 crossed the borders of countries outside the Eastern Bloc. These minuscule numbers, for a country of over 27 million people, best illustrate the scale of the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students, which brought over 26,000 people from several continents to the capital – alongside over 137,000 national delegates.

Teenagers and twenty-somethings whose childhoods and youth had passed in the shadow of first the occupation and then Stalinism had their first real encounter with the world beyond the Polish People’s Republic, and even beyond the Iron Curtain – represented not by press articles, photographs and images, but by actual faces, voices and bodies. Every visitor, whether from the GDR or Algeria, could feel like a movie star for a moment, signing autographs that were collected in ‘festival diaries’.

In his 2023 book Festiwal, Jacek Świdziński reconstructed the atmosphere of this period using meticulously excavated archival materials. The exhibition The Summer That Changed it All: The Festival of 1955, curated by Zofia Rojek and Błażej Brzostek at the Museum of Warsaw, incorporates stills from Świdziński’s comic book into the narrative, supplementing this evocative story, presented in sparse conventional forms, with tangible, factual, and artistic details. The exhibition follows a well-proven model, characteristic of the Warsaw museum – combining archival materials, including objects and stories gathered through a public call among the capital’s residents, with period artworks and contemporary projects created by artists specifically for the exhibition. The individual chapters unfold in classic chronological order – from an introduction to the pre-festival context, through the preparations, to the two weeks of the festival itself, and the remainder of the summer after its conclusion. Thanks to the carefully selected artefacts, this tried-and-tested formula works exceptionally well here.

Art, ideology & the Arsenal: reimagining Polish identity

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

View from the exhibition ‘The Summer That Changed it All: The Festival of 1955’, Museum of Warsaw, 2025, photo: T. Kaczor / Museum of Warsaw

Picture image

fot._t._kaczor.jpg

In the first room of the exhibition, we wander among the works under the grim gaze of Stalin perched on a plinth. The stocky silhouette of this utterly conventional socialist-realist image of the leader doesn’t, at first glance, reveal that it is an early work by one of the most important Polish artists of the 20th century, Alina Szapocznikow. An equally banal production piece hanging nearby – encouraging young girls to study at vocational schools – turns out to be the work of Artur Nacht-Samborski, one of the leading colourists. This is the landscape of Poland on the eve of the festival – a country where over a third of the population are youths, for whom the only sanctioned communal experience was their involvement in the ZMP (Union of Polish Youth), and a country of declared gender equality, yet one implemented only selectively and superficially. The ideological tensions are best captured by three adjacent representations of women (two of which, incidentally, were created as nudes by men) addressing the theme of motherhood.

This realistic – though a realism more in the spirit of the 19th century than the more formulaic and didactic prefixed with ‘soc’ – full-figure portrait of a pregnant woman in a simple dress, arms crossed over her belly, is by the now-forgotten sculptor Elżbieta Kołakowska-Zaliwska. Presented at the famous exhibition at the Arsenal that became a symbolic beginning of the country’s artistic thaw, under the title Przeciw Wojnie – Nowe Życie (Against War – New Life), it echoes the message of Andrzej Wróblewski’s famous painting Mothers (Anti-Fascists), also exhibited at the Arsenal. However, if motherhood and caregiving become a form of antifascist activism on a par with political action, reproductive rights cease to be a woman’s individual concern.

This is confirmed by Edward Koniuszy’s Bad Mother, also from 1955, placed nearby. Simplified and hieratic, like a Greek kouros, the figure holds an aborted fetus in her hand. Unlike Kołakowska-Zaliwska’s figure, her face remains cold and aloof. In this unsubtle anti-abortion propaganda, the private becomes political, and termination of pregnancy is practically a crime against the state and its system. Over time, abortion law in the Polish People’s Republic became more liberal, but this was not the right moment – the regulations in force a decade after the war date back to the Second Polish Republic and are as restrictive as the familiar ‘compromise’ of 1993. The situation is thus well summed up by a painting by Zbigniew Dłubak (another surprise, reminding us of a different stream within the neo-avant-garde photographer's work) with the telling title Macierzyństwo – Niepokój (Motherhood – Anxiety).

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Tu Stanie Nowy Dom’ (There’ll Be a New Home Here) by Czesław Kaczmarczyk, 1950, a work displayed during the exhibition ‘The Summer That Changed it All: The Festival of 1955’ at the Museum of Warsaw, 2025, photo: Museum of Warsaw

Picture image

czeslaw_kaczmarczyk_tu_stanie_nowy_dom_1950_muzeum_warszawy.jpg

While some old forms of oppression persisted under the rhetoric of classlessness and emancipation – now supplemented by a handful of entirely new oppressions – the authorities were undoubtedly successful in their preparations. The impressive ‘resurrection’ of the rebuilt capital is underscored by two major initiatives being completed just in time for the 1955 festival – the Palace of Culture and Science, and the 10th Anniversary Stadium. These landmarks define the two poles of contemporary architecture – on one hand, there was the pompous socialist realism imported from Moscow, and on the other, the functional socialist modernism designed by Hryniewiecki, Ihnatowicz and Sołtan, the latter of whom collaborated with Le Corbusier.

After this double introduction, we finally enter the space dedicated to the festival itself. The initiative originated with the World Federation of Democratic Youth a decade earlier in Paris. Although the organisation initially brought together youth organisations of diverse ideological orientations, the USSR quickly placed its ideological umbrella over it. However, the festivals (held biennially from 1947 to 1959, then irregularly thereafter) were not always held in Eastern Bloc countries – in 1959, Vienna hosted the festival, and in 1962, it took place in Helsinki. However, the fifth edition in Warsaw was particularly significant – organised after Stalin’s death, it offered hope for mending relations between the two Cold War blocs.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

View from the exhibition ‘The Summer That Changed it All: The Festival of 1955’, Museum of Warsaw, 2025, photo: T. Kaczor / Museum of Warsaw

Picture image

fot._t._kaczor_3.jpg

Although the festival was not particularly significant politically – and in textbook narratives it is overshadowed by the subsequent 1956 Poznań protests – on a social level it amounted almost to a micro-revolution of morality. Ironically, it did not unfold in opposition to the party, but through it and with its blessing – an overture to the later revolution of 1968. Summer romances, synthesised in Janina Jasińska-Luterek’s sentimental painting Zakochani (In Love), seem, in retrospect, a more important generational experience than the dozens of festival events orchestrated by the authorities.

The colourful hall, filled with memorabilia and decorative elements, also demonstrates – in contrast to the initial crudeness of socialist realism – the significance of the festival’s visuals. Propaganda slogans on Warsaw’s streets were replaced by multilingual glossaries integrated into the street decorations, facilitating flirtation rather than political debate. Solid red banners gave way to colourful garlands of flags and truly carnivalesque decorations featuring motifs of suns, peace doves, lions, dragons and monkeys. The 400-metre frieze designed by Henryk Tomaszewski and Wojciech Fangor that stretched along Marszałkowska Street, as well as Fangor’s copy of Picasso’s Guernica, painted especially for the festival, foreshadowed the entire subsequent history of modernist visual art created under the auspices of the state, but free from the shackles of socialist realism. Above all, however, it was the Ogólnopolska Wystawa Młodej Plastyki (National Exhibition of Young Visual Art), titled Przeciw Wojnie, Przeciw Faszyzmowi (Against War, Against Fascism) – known as the Arsenal after its venue – which accompanied the festival and most clearly heralded the new artistic opening.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

View from the exhibition ‘The Summer That Changed it All: The Festival of 1955’, Museum of Warsaw, 2025, photo: T. Kaczor / Museum of Warsaw

Picture image

fot._t._kaczor_11.jpg

In discussions about post-war art, the 1955 exhibition at the Arsenal is regarded as a pivotal event, symbolising the end of socialist realism and the beginning of the period known as the Thaw. However, as is often the case with such mythologised events, its image in the public imagination is highly fragmented. The exhibition at the Museum of Warsaw demonstrates just how much. Alongside Marek Oberländer’s famous Stigmatised, the curators present a number of completely unknown works – some displayed here for the first time since that memorable exhibition seventy years ago. Among other pieces, visitors can see a sculpture by a young Jerzy Bereś – later a major figure in performance art – depicting a portrait of his mentor, Xawery Dunikowski.

Some forgotten works could easily become symbols of this moment of artistic breakthrough, such as Gabriela Obremba’s Zosia – a subtle portrait of a girl with a sharp, slightly melancholic gaze, delicate make-up, and a beauty that faintly recalls the later screen star Krystyna Stypułkowska. Portrayed before a rickety table filled with a few seemingly random objects and set against the backdrop of a blue wall with a high, unnaturally small window reminiscent of a prison cell, she seems out of place in this flat, artificial and oppressive interior.

The end of the carnival: memories, melancholy & the Thaw

‘The Summer That Changed Everything. Festival 1955’ at the Museum of Warsaw [Image Gallery]

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

The final chapter of the exhibition, depicting the post-festival melancholy, is composed with equal finesse. On 15^thAugust, many participants woke up with either a literal or metaphorical hangover. The carnival had ended, fleeting romances were cut short before they could truly blossom, and stuffy train compartments – where air conditioning was still unimaginable – carried the delegates home, returning them to their everyday routines at universities and workplaces. What remained were memories: official festival memorabilia, photographs, diary entries, the occasional ‘western’ cigarette, biscuits in tin boxes later stored for years in drawers with treasured keepsakes, and other mementos cherished like relics. And then, of course, there was the art.

The Thaw’s fresh beginnings and the loosening of norms in visual and literary culture are shown here by, among other things, paintings by Teresa Tyszkiewicz and Lech Kunka, as well as key books of the time. Tyrmand’s Man with the White Eyes, published a few months after the festival, and the first Polish translation of Françoise Sagan’s Hello Sadness (published by Iskry in 1957), both fit perfectly into the image of the liberated West that was constructed during those two weeks. The cover of the latter novel (designed by Janusz Stanny) pairs beautifully with a small sculpture of an embracing couple by Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, and, in this social context, the abstract informal paintings acquire an additional emotional charge not provided by presentations focused solely on formal qualities.

Removed from the strict context of art history, contemporary theory and criticism – and treated, in a sense, on a par with a packet of Gauloises or a bottle of Coke, as expressions of longing for the real and imagined West – these works unexpectedly gain new life. They show that, indeed, the Thaw began in the summer of 1955, but not solely in the halls of the Arsenal – it was also present in tent cities, in the stadium stands, on evening walks, and during the, not entirely official, night-time episodes of cultural exchange.

Originally written in Polish, translated by Michał Pelczar, September 2025

Language English