Brzeski, who was born in Poznań, trained at the Parisian Vu, and eventually settled in Kraków, was very aware that Dadaist photomontage was both an ingenious, simple, and modern tool for illustrating extraordinary theories and animating the imagination, and a medium fed by stereotypes and cultural clichés. Photomontage was persistently employed by politically engaged artists, and to a press illustrator, is a practical medium that questions the high-low art division, ever so cherished by the avant-garde.
Thanks to the combination of his characteristic surrealist sense of humour and his true craftsmanship, Brzeski’s pieces are appealing but at the same time escape the straightforward political tradition of photomontage practiced by the leftist avant-garde artists such as Mieczysław Szczuka, Mieczysław Berman, and John Heartfield.
If we assume that the Dadaists learned montage from American advertisements (as Hans Richter and others claimed), then Brzeski reverts this technique back to the avant-garde’s cultural counterpart. One would be better off comparing Brzeski to the Czech surrealists, such as Jindřch Štyrský, rather than to the propagandists inspired by the Soviet constructivism.
Brzeski’s photomontages were published again in 1936 in the As (Ace) magazine, as illustrations to Zbigniew Grotowski’s article Za kulisami przyszłej wojny (Behind the Scenes of the Future War). Admittedly, Grotowski’s pathetic visions reach far into future, but nevertheless his words, and Brzeski’s images even more so, were uncannily predictive about the nearing storm front. The time of light-hearted fantasies about a catastrophe was coming to an end.
The threat of war! – he cries – It is approaching […] We are in for a war. It will burst the borders of the Spanish mayhem any day now and threaten the whole of Europe […] The clatter of falling houses. Tons of bombs falling on the city. The proud skyscrapers crumble. The city that breathed fun, joy, and laughter is turning into a terrible graveyard.
Author: Adam Mazur, August 2014, transl. Ania Micińska, October 2014