Warsaw Voice - Prewar Avant-garde

KATARZYNA KOBRO
The Tragedy of Avant-Garde
2 April 2000

Katarzyna Kobro, a prewar leader in the world of the avant-garde whose sculptures fell out of favor in communist Poland, is being rediscovered.

Before the war, Katarzyna Kobro was a brilliant star of avant-garde, thanks to her revolutionary ideas about sculpture. However, in communist Poland her art was not officially accepted. For a long time Kobro, the leading Polish constructivist, was seen simply as the wife of Włodzimierz Strzemiński, an outstanding painter and sculptor. Only in recent years have her works been discovered again.

Kobro's youth led her to Russia. Riga, Moscow and Smolensk were the successive steps on her artistic path. During the Bolshevik revolution she studied sculpture in Moscow. In 1915 she first met her future husband while she was volunteering in a Moscow hospital where Strzemiński, a severely injured Polish sapper officer, was recovering.

Kobro's Russian period produced her first artistic fascinations. Smolensk and Vitebsk, along with Berlin, were centers of avant-garde art at that time. Constructivism and Suprematism were the newest trends, giving priority to an art work's form and the materials used, instead of the subject matter. She created her early works during this period-for example, Hanging Composition (1921-1922)-and established contacts with Marc Chagall, Vasili Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. Under Malevich's influence, Kobro created various hanging sculptures in 1921-1924.

When she met Strzemiński for the second time in Smolensk, he was already a recognized painter. In late 1921 or early 1922 they decided to get married. Soon after, the Soviet authorities turned away from abstract, "non-proletarian" art, and many of Kobro's contemporaries left the country for Western Europe. Strzemiński suggested that they leave for Paris. In 1922, the couple managed to illegally cross the Polish border, where they were briefly detained as spies but then released and sent back. In Poland they continued their avant-garde work, and Kobro received Polish citizenship.

In the 1920s and 30s Kobro's work was dominated by spatial and abstract sculptures of irregular and geometric forms. In the mid-1920s, she started to create spatial compositions consisting of sculpture forms based on exact arithmetic relations. At the same time, she was working on figural sculpture, creating cubist-influenced female nudes. Beginning in 1924, she and her husband joined the most important Polish artistic groups, first Blok and then Praesens. In 1929, she participated in establishing the a.r. group, which operated until 1936 and maintained contacts with the most important centers of European avant-garde, such as Cercle et Carre in Paris. At that time the French capital was a place for innovative creators whose ideas were close to the works of Polish artists. Unfortunately, Strzemiński and Kobro never managed to get there.

In the late 1920s, Strzemiński and Kobro started to formulate some theoretical statements about sculpting, eventually published in a book in 1931. They both accepted the popular assumption that, contrary to painting, which is related to flat surfaces, sculpture is the art of space. They maintained that the structure of sculpting space is determined by the rhythms of shapes and color surfaces, not by solids and their mass.

In 1928 Kobro began to teach the "esthetics of interior," first in Koluszki, and later in Łódź. Together with other members of the a.r. group, she helped found a museum of modern art in 1931 in Łódź, a major European collection of works by Polish and foreign avant-garde artists. Kobro was also the only Polish artist to sign Manifeste Dimensioniste, issued by several famous artists, including Jean (Hans) Arp and Marcel Duchamp.

Kobro's brilliant artistic prospects didn't last long. She had a difficult time from 1937 to 1947, when the artist had to give up her work due to the illness of her daughter Nika, who had been born in 1936. Avant-garde art was difficult to understand and did not enjoy popularity, so it was impossible to live off her work. In order to sustain her family, Kobro sewed rag toys.

After the outbreak of World War II the family was trapped. To escape from the Germans, they went to eastern Poland and shortly afterwards found themselves under Soviet occupation. Since Kobro and Strzemiński had left Russia illegally in the 1920s, they could have been sent to Siberia, so they returned to German-occupied Łódź. There they signed the so-called "Russian list" for Russians with anti-Bolshevik and anti-communist views, to avoid repression and protect their daughter, but this decision would later cause the artist many problems.

After the war, Kobro parted with her husband. The Polish communist authorities decided she had "betrayed Polish nationality" by signing the Russian list, and sentenced her to six months in prison, but an appeals court acquitted her. In 1948, she sculpted her last four nudes in gypsum and painted several pastel works.

Kobro died of cancer Feb. 21, 1951 in a hospice. Strzemiński died of tuberculosis in December 1952. Kobro was buried at an Orthodox cemetery in Doły. Her daughter placed an enlarged epoxy resin copy of her last sculpture, A Female Nude, on her grave in 1990.

Kobro shared the fate of many avant-garde artists; her works were forgotten for a long time, largely due to their novel formula and their creator's misfortunes. During the German occupation, some of the sculptures were lost, while others ended up in garbage dumps. Some were burned by the artist herself shortly before Łódź was liberated because she lacked firewood.

Only recently have Kobro's works come to light again, particularly due to the efforts of her daughter, Nika Strzemińska. In polls about the best of the 20th century, both artists and critics mention Kobro and Strzemiński at the forefront. The couple is finally assuming their rightful place in Polish culture.

Anna Kosowska-Czubaj