Between Poland and the Low Countries – mutual relations and cultural exchange between Polish, Dutch and Belgian avant-garde magazines and formations (original) (raw)

Cultural Mobility in the Interwar Avant-Garde Art Network: Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands

2018

This book explores the issue of cultural mobility within the interwar network of the European avant-garde, focusing on selected writers, artists, architects, magazines and groups from Poland, Belgium and Netherlands. Regardless of their apparent linguistic, cultural and geographical remoteness, their mutual exchange and relationships were both deep and broad, and of great importance for the wider development of interwar avant-garde literature, art and architecture. This analysis is based on a vast research corpus encompassing original, often previously overlooked periodicals, publications and correspondence gathered from archives around the world.

MUTUAL EXCHANGE BETWEEN POLISH AND BELGIAN MAGAZINES: A CASE STUDY IN CULTURAL MOBILITY WITHIN THE INTERWAR NETWORK OF THE AVANT-GARDE

2015

In January 1924, Flemish avant-garde magazine Het Overzicht published a list of its congenial modernist for­ma­tions named ‘Het Netwerk’. It named nineteen magazines from Europe, the United States and Brazil, including the Polish magazine Zwrotnica. It exemplified the close and direct relationships within the supranational network of the avant-garde. Various formations belonging to this network, both bigger and smaller nodes, were linked to each other, often directly through befriended artists and writers. It did not only concern places such as Paris or Berlin, but also less pivotal nodes of the avant-garde network. In this paper I will present a case study of two countries, namely Poland and Belgium, as an example of European interwar cultural mobility. Joined in their pursuit of modern art, and crossing national and linguistic frontiers, Polish, French and Dutch-language magazines exchanged and re-printed each other’s texts and artworks, a practice also discussed in the correspondence between their representatives. Based on such tangible traces I will describe the cultural mobility and mutual exchange between the Polish and Belgian modernist journals, and attempt to shed light on the features, dynamics, and key figures of the network.

Merse Pál Szeredi, Gábor Dobó, Redefining the Role of Art and Artist: The Idiosyncratic Avant-Garde of Lajos Kassák, in Flouquet – Kassák – Léonard: The Architecture of Images during the Interwar Period (EN/NL), ed. Adriaan Gonnissen (Oostende, Mu.ZEE, 2018), 153–183 (invited).

2018

Belgium and Hungary belong to mutually distant regions of Europe, and although the two countries have had occasional dynastic, economic and cultural links over the centuries, there was little contact between them during the opening decades of the twentieth century. So why does this catalogue devote a whole chapter to Belgian-Hungarian avant-garde connections? One reason is the surprising structural similarities between the avantgardes that emerged in the two countries; another is that there were indeed contacts between avant-garde artists and journals.

Art and Politics During the Cold War: Poland and the Netherlands

Routledge, 2024

Drawing on thousands of historical documents from Polish and Dutch archives, this book explores Cold War cultural exchange between so-called 'smaller powers' of this global conflict, which thus far has been predominately explored from the perspective of the two superpowers or more pivotal countries. By looking at how cultural, artistic and scholarly relations were developed between Poland and the Netherlands, Michał Wenderski sheds new light on the history of the Cultural Cold War that was not always orchestrated solely by its main players. Less pivotal states-for example, Poland and the Netherlands-likewise intentionally created their international cultural policies and shaped their cultural exchange with countries from the other side of the Iron Curtain. This study reconstructs these policies and identifies the varying factors that influenced them-both o cial and less formal. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of the Cold War, postwar European history, international cultural relations, Dutch studies and Polish studies.

“A History of Polish Art” by Michał Walicki and Juliusz Starzyński in Poland between the World Wars. The West, Poland, the East

Artium Quaestiones

Writing an academic history of Polish art was an urgent task of art historians after World War I, when the country regained its political independence. An important and creditable achievement in that respect was a study by Michał Walicki and Juliusz Starzyński, published in 1934 as a kind of supplement to the monumental Geschichte der Kunst von der altchristlichen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart by the Marburg historian Richard Hamann, translated at that time into Polish. In 1936, the work of the Polish scholars was published again in the form of a separate book. The paper focuses on three problems that were addressed in it: the cultural and artistic ties of Poland to the West, the vernacular features of Polish art, and the presence of the “Eastern art” in Polish artistic heritage. The author examines also the question whether those issues were related to the political, social, and cultural reality of the Second Polish Republic.