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 - - Ember a városban
the illegal communist party's periodical 700% launched a speech-choir movement. Andor Sugár illustrated this theme for 100% with the title Speech Choir. Who Is Taking Steps to the Right? showing a stage moment during the performance of Mayakovsky's poem March Left! Even the ironic title of Workers' Stroll depictingthe walk of prisoners is a tool of agitation. Sugar's stereotypical, dynamically moving figures suggest the power of the organized masses in the idiom of cubism and expressionism. These prints exemplify that the speech choir was a compound artistic genre, Gesamtkunst, which integrated elements of visual arts and had its reaction upon fine arts, too. Later Sugár joined the Group of Socialist Artists, who first exhibited in 1934. The circle, a venue of polemics about political engagement in art, was also attended by Pál Varsányi, whose graphic series - Fascism, Gulliver in Capitalia - responded to the rightist shift in domestic politics and the ascendancy of fascism on the international stage. His prints reached leftist papers abroad and were popularized by the appreciative words of Romain Rolland. Rolland wrote the preface to Gyula Zilzer's album entitled Gas, too. In some sheets of the album caricature, while in others and in Destructive Time the visionary realm of early 20th-century symbolism serves agitation. Jolán Gross Bettelheim, who studied in Hungary and worked in Germany and later in America, found an authentic form for man-eating machine monsters and human monsters-turned-machines in constructive, dynamic composition reflecting the impact of the metropolis. She endowed the frightful machinery of the modern age with the formidable suggestiveness of mythological creatures in her lithograph entitled Fascism. But not only leftwing artists spoke up against the war. Kálmán Gáborjáni Szabó, who joined the "rural" writers - a movement whose members put highest priority on the national issue and were concerned with analyzing the state of the peasantry -, conjured up his experiences of World War I in his illustrations to Géza Juhász' book War. The Brave New World AM: In the Polish engravings of the interwar period there is a distinct lack of such subjects as night-time entertainment in the city, namely cafes, balls, dances, cinemas and theatres. This was obviously not the main current of the social life of the period; the theme of a sense of social injustice, of jealousy resulting from the fact that we could not afford expensive entertainment often appears in literature, e.g. in Krystyna Nepomucka's or Maria Ukniewska's novels. Yet, the subject of sport often appeared in Polish engraving. This was a new phenomenon: 50 years before every sport was considered even detrimental to the health, particularly as far as women were concerned. The first Olympic Games were held in 1896, and from then on the belief mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body) became more and more widespread. Woodcuts by Janina Konarska, Skoczylas's student, are a perfect example of women's coloured engravings from the interwar period. This was not a rule, but coloured engraving of that period was mainly done by women, men coloured more willingly their engravings with watercolours. Konarska's sport series consists of four engravings: Regatta, Tennis, Skiers, and Football. For this last engraving, the artist won one of five equal prizes at an Olympic Art Competition, organized in Warsaw by the Ministry of Religious Beliefs and Public Enlightenment WRiOP and the Polish Olympic Committee PKOI in 1932. 13 Japanese engraving undoubtedly served as an inspiration to Konarska's colour experiments. One can see the colour palette being limited to a few colours, sometimes derived from a common primary colour, which is why some of Konarska's coloured engravings remind us of atmospheric watercolours.
