Art: Polish Moderns

Of all countries behind the Iron Curtain, Poland has most successfully kept alive its cultural ties with the West. One of the hardiest roots has been the long Polish tradition of abstract art, some of whose practitioners date their conversions back to the days of early cubism and Russian constructivism. Even six years of Nazi occupation failed to eradicate it; a 1945 victory exhibition in Cracow abounded in fantastic expressionist and nonobjective canvases. Though this first frantic flowering was followed by a wintery decade of tough Stalinist socialist realism, Polish painters worked in secret. “For the mass of the people, the stumbling block between themselves and the regime was their Catholicism,” a recent U.S. visitor noted. “For the intellectual, it was abstract art.”

This week Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art opened a show of 15 modern Polish painters that clearly showed that modern Poland has at least two artists-Jan Lebenstein, 31, whose inch-deep art brut figures are powerful and evocative; and Tadeusz Kantor, 46 (TIME, April 6, 1959), whose impassioned swirls and splashes resemble France’s Mathieu and the late Jackson Pollock—as good as any modern currently troweling paint on canvas, plus another baker’s dozen far more varied and versatile than most.

To pick the painters, the Modern Museum’s Peter Selz two years ago made a trip to Warsaw. Since there are no private art galleries in Poland and no private collectors, Selz made the rounds of artists’ studios, as well as the museums, libraries and courthouses where the state hangs the art it buys directly from the artist. When the time came to select the paintings, Selz ran into a snag: the government overextended its helpfulness by wanting to exercise final authority on what was to go.

Returning last year, Selz hoped the officialdom would surrender the veto, but was disappointed. Then he got a bright idea. Selz simply asked two galleries in France and five in the U.S. to import the works he wanted. “As simple as importing Polish hams,” he said. The rest of the display he gathered from a variety of shrewd U.S. collectors, including Pittsburgh’s G. David Thompson. Manhattan’s Joseph Hirshhorn, and the world’s Joe Alsop, who bought early in the rising Polish art market.

Polish painters, as Selz found, have been relatively free to travel since Gomulka came to power in 1956. “They are swiftly aware of art events, whether in New York or Barcelona.” Selz points out. In a country where to be educated often means to speak French, the main tie is still with Paris, and even the Poles have not always escaped being more stylish than profound. But if the splashy oils, crumpled collages and floating, ambiguous forms often suggest bolder and earlier experiments by better-known painters in the West, the passion and verve behind the paintings is pure Polish. Says Curator Selz: “Their unusual inventiveness, undogmatic attitude and spontaneous vitality make them worldly sophisticates—as much citizens of the world of art as they are citizens of Poland.”