Bakos Katalin - Manicka Anna szerk.: Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben, Lengyel és magyar grafika 1918–1939 (MNG, Warszawa–Budapest, 2009)

III. KATALÓGUS - 1. VÁROS. TÖMEG. GÉP. A MODERNIZMUS ARCAI - - Az építés eszméje. Konstruktivizmus és geometrikus absztrakció

all these modern "paintings than Titian's paintings for example."

7 In the case of the creators of the avant-garde, reconstructions do not diminish the quality of the work of art: in the end, their authors were unanimously for mechanization and against an ultra-individualistic creative attitude. However, for art historians and particularly museologists, the first, original abstract works represent a higher value than the post-war reconstructions. The first centre of Constructivist art in Poland was, paradoxically, the conservative Cracow, where Tadeusz Peiper (1891-1969) edited a periodical "Zwrotnica" ["Junction"]. He thought that what our country - ravaged by years of partitions and the war - needed mostly was the development of cities. Consequently, Peiper criticized the idea of using folk art, created in villages, as a model in the search for the national style. Peiper's most famous article was entitled City. Mass. Machine. The most important group formed by creators of the Polish avant-garde was called Blok [Block] (1924-26). In their magazine, also called "Blok", works of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were reproduced among others. After a disintegration of the group, the majority of its members formed Praesens (1926-29), whose programme was in favour of "non-objective plastic art", of Abstract art "which expresses a balance between the relations of plastic elements"

8 (italso advised usingthe asymmetrical rhythm), it rejected extreme creative individualism - it opted for the mechanization of artistic endeavours, it advocated production standardization, it called for utilitarism, e.g. in architecture, the form of a building was to be determined by its function. After the dissolution of Praesens, its activity was continued by a group called a.r. ("artyści rewolucyjni" ["revolutionary artists"]) between 1929 and 1936. The proletarian Łódź became their main centre, and it was there that the famous International Collection of Modern Art of the a.r. group was deposited. The only markedly leftist periodical issued between the wars was "Dźwignia" ["Lever"], a journal edited by Mieczysław Szczuka (1898-1927), commissioned by the Communist Party of Poland. It must be said that the Communist Party of Poland did not enjoy an easy existence: in 1919 it was made illegal as a Soviet agency on the territory of the Second Polish Republic, and later, on the eve of the war, it was dissolved by its own centre, i.e. the Executive Committee of the Comintern, because of accusations of its rightist and nationalistic deviations. In "Lever", Szczuka worried (quite rightly) that "revolutionary approach in politics is connected with an absolutely bourgeois character in matters of culture" and that "proletarian character is inevitably connected with tackiness."

9 Also other avant-garde artists, such as Henryk Stażewski or Władysław Strzemiński, were aware of the fact that totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union represent a considerable threat to modern art. Henryk Berlewi, educated in Germany and in the Netherlands, was - together with Władysław Strzemiński, Henryk Stażewski and Mieczysław Szczuka - one of the most outstanding creators of the Constructivist Avant-garde in Poland. He was also an artist who "betrayed" avant-garde art for many years, in order to engage in its stead in naturalistic portrait painting. Berlewi created his theory of mechanofaktura [mechanofacture] in 1923. Under the notion of faktura [texture], he understood "the surface itself of the painting covered with paint, the way (direction) of guiding the brush and applying paint, the thickness or thinness of the paint layer, the matt or gloss, the roughness or smoothness" and "the degree of the intensiveness of colours". Texture, understood in that way, was to undergo "mechanization". Owing to the "mechanization of the means of painting expression", a "completely new system of creation"

10 was to emerge. In practice, this system meant that the artist worked within the sphere of Geometric Abstraction, and the mechanization meant that he/she used drawing instruments. In order to underline the relationship between avant-garde art and modern technology, Berlewi organized an exhibition of his mechanofactures in the Austro-Daimler Automobile Salon in Warsaw. At the same time, he took part in an exhibition of the members of "Blok" in the showroom of the automobile firm Laurin & Klement. The exhibition was sharply criticized by Antoni Słonimski in the weekly "Wiadomości Literackie" ["Literary News"]: he labelled the whole contemporary avant-garde as Mechano-rubbish. This sort of offence could only be erased in a duel, which is