There they very soon came into contact with progressive artistic circles cubist, suprematist and constructivist – and the poets and architects who also frequented them. They were members of several Polish avant-garde groups, such as Blok or Praesens, before finally establishing a group of their own - a.r., for ‘revolutionary artists’ or ‘real avant-garde’ – with painter Henryk Stażewski and poets Julian Przyboś and Jan Brzękowski.
Strzemiński became an enthusiastic promoter of modernist art, organising group exhibitions and solo shows, including one by Malevich. Both artists were involved in international avant-garde movements, joining Cercle et Carré and then Abstraction-Création, and they also maintained contacts with De Stijl. They published in the journals associated with these movements, and publicised them in turn in Poland. Helped by their international contacts, notably Hans Arp and Fernand Léger, in the late 1920s the members of a.r. began to build up, through gifts, an international collection of modern art intended for the use of the public. The coordination was effected by Strzemiński. Featuring works by Hans Arp and Sophie Tauber-Arp, Léger, Sonia Delaunay, Jean Hélion, Vilmos Huszar, Enrico Prampolini, Kurt Schwitters, Georges Vantongerloo, Theo van Doesburg and others, the collection opened to the public in 1931, as part of the Muzeum Sztuki established in Łódź a year earlier.
When the museum reopened after World War II, Strzemiński designed what was called the Neoplastic Room, inspired by the example of El Lissitzky’s Abstract Cabinet, in which he himself arranged the hang of part of the collection, which counted in total more than a hundred works. Long absent from histories of the international avant-gardes, Kobro and Strzeminski were among the pillars of Polish modern art, their entire careers devoted to developing the possibilities of abstraction.
