Trans-Europe Express by Owen Hatherley

Author:Owen Hatherley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141985961
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Workers’ housing, factory, clock

Another response to this can be found in the Museum of Art, which was placed in one of the Poznański dynasty’s palaces, in 1930, by members of the a.r. group of Łódź-based Constructivists – Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński and Henryk Stażewski. Even in the Piłsudski era the city was dominated by the Polish Socialist Party and its close allies, the Jewish Labour Bund, and the museum can be seen as part of their attempt to modernize this extremely Victorian and anti-egalitarian city. Although not as wild as the Scheibler House, these rooms, in a Romanesque villa with armadillo-like rustication, are still showcases of High Victorian bad taste and the mysterious creatures it creates. Into this, the Constructivists placed, pointedly, their design for the new everyday life. Strzemiński, a painter, and Kobro, a highly original abstract sculptor, had worked in Soviet Russia in its early years – Strzemiński in UNOVIS, the Suprematist abstract workshop presided over in Vitebsk, Belarus, by Kazimir Malevich, himself of Polish-Ukrainian background. When at UNOVIS, Strzemiński designed abstract agitprop posters. Returning to Poland in the early 1920s, the pair brought these ideas with them. Their collection still forms the basis of the museum, and much of it is arranged in the ‘Neo-Plastic Room’, aligning works by a.r. members themselves with those by Dutch De Stijl, German Bauhaus and Soviet Constructivist artists, through an all-embracing architectural design by Strzemiński himself, of primary colours, clearly defined volumes, and a grid of patterned roof-lights. The room was destroyed during the Nazi occupation, and Strzemiński reconstructed it after 1945. The dialogue of eclectic-modern is now supplemented by works ‘commenting’ on the Neo-Plastic Room, in the manner common to much contemporary art of thesis–antithesis–commentary.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.