…or return of the Avantgarde into that blog after a long break and the end of so called Munch year 2013 on 12th of Dezember. 2013 we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Edvard Munch’s birth on 12th of December 1863. Munch is one of the most important artists of Modernism, and a number of cultural events with focus on his work was arranged all over the world in the Munch year.

Tube Station Töyen, near to Munch-Museum in Oslo (Photo make by Lidia Głuchowska)

Anyway it is a wonderful story and I am sure you have never know, that – maybe, maybe – the most famous picture in the world was influenced by Polish writer!!!!

Lidia Głuchowska

Munch, Przybyszewski and The Scream

Munch recorded Stanisław Przybyszewski’s demonic physiognomy many times, not only in portraits but also in such figure compositions as In the Man’s Brain, Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair, Jealousy or Virgin Creeper. And not without reason; Przybyszewski was known in Berlin as the “king of Bohemia” and more ambiguously as the “German satanist” as well as (after Strindberg) “the ingenious Pole”.
His book from 1894 was also considered genial. It was the first monograph devoted to Munch, who at that time was appreciated by few.
Munch’s paintings and Przybyszewski’s monograph, which initiated the research on Munch, opened in 1893 the “expressionist epoch”, which was closed by Przybyszewski’s most distinguished novel – The Scream (1914–18) – and by his memoirs (1926), which contain a mythologized genesis of Munch’s most famous work and recount the writer’s visits to Norway.
This article will present how during this epoch several (pre)expressionist works in word and image were created, which confirmed both the transmedial career of Munch’s The Scream and Przybyszewski’s writings concerning the Norwegian artist’s oeuvre.

Photographie d’Edvard Munch 1908-1909 musée Munch / Photo Annie Dalbéra

(…) The mystified genesis of the picture

In 1926, when recalling the circumstances of the creation of the “Psychical Naturalism” essay (which was the origin of his monograph The Works of Edvard Munch), Przybyszewski (re)interpreted it in the following way: When my study of Munch showed up, the whole literary fraternity was convinced that I’d lost my mind. Munch came up to me greatly moved: “I’m terrified that somebody is eavesdropping on me in my most secret, creative moments, but I’ve also eavesdropped on you.” The next day he showed me his famous painting, which I now constantly see in books on futurism: Skrig – The Scream. Przybyszewski thus described his friendship with Munch as a relationship in which they both considered each other as their alter ego.

In another passage in his memoirs, he even suggested that his rhapsody from 1893 anticipated and inspired Munch’s painting: “I can’t imagine that you could transform a literary work in color in a more powerful way – in this case Totenmesse [Polish: Requiem Aeternam, Requiem Mass].”

To read more, to see the pictures, to know captions of pictures and quotations – look here: Gluchowska-Munch-Przybyszewski

One of the thousands marchendising items invented for the Munch Year, photographed in Munch Museum in Oslo: Skrik Kake.

Lidia Głuchowska

Zdrój  and the Poznań Expressionism

The periodical Zdrój. Dwutygodnik poświęcony sztuce i kulturze umysłowej (The Source. Bi-weekly dedicated to arts and intellectual culture), was the most efficient Expressionist publication and the first avant-garde magazine in Poland. It was published in Poznań, the capital of western Poland, prior to the state’s regaining its sovereignty after being divided for123 years between Prussia, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Printed by the Ostoja Publishing House from April 1917 to December 1920, Zdrój made 68 issues in 13 volumes, which, though planned as a monthly, closed down in 1922 after the publication of one issue (as vol. 14). The print-run rose to 1,500 copies and thanks to representative offices in Warsaw, Kraków, and Lvov (Lwów, Lviv), it reached a nationwide readership. It had the most extensive international contacts among the early avant-garde Polish reviews; nevertheless, the term ‘Poznań Expressionism’ associated with it wrongly limits its impact to a local phenomenon.

The editor-in-chief of Zdrój, Jerzy Hulewicz was a printmaker, painter, novelist, and dramaturge. For over a year, however, the magazine was informally led by Stanisław Przybyszewski, the Nestor of the Polish avant-garde, who enjoyed ambivalent fame as a ‘genius Pole’ and Satanist in turn-of-the-century Berlin. Later, as the editor of the art magazine Życie, he transferred the ideals of German and Nordic modernism to Kraków. From mid-1917, first covertly and then openly, he exerted a powerful influence on the programme and structure of Zdrój. Each editorial was followed by poems, prose, translations, articles about art and philosophy, as well as ‘Miscellanea’, comprising reviews, correspondence with readers, and socio-political polemics. As a local cultural centre Zdrój held eight ‘matinées’ and ‘soirées’, musical concerts and open lectures, some of which were repeated in Warsaw and Lvov.

The art profile of the magazine evolved over distinct stages. During the first year, under Przybyszewski’s influence, the magazine was somewhat eclectic. It promoted the epigone stylistics of so-called ‘Young Poland’ and its ideals of ‘l´art pour l´art’. This was appropriate to the ‘unpoetic district’ of Poznań which, under German rule, was reluctant to adopt new trends and was regarded as provincial. Therefore, Zdrój initially asked for the cooperation of some older literary authorities like Wacław Berent and Jan Kasprowicz, while the magazine’s graphic design was dominated by Art Nouveau.

The heroic era of the magazine’s existence, and the second most intriguing stage of its history, was ushered in by the ‘palace revolution’ of April 1918, instigated by the Bunt (Revolt) group (1917-22). This consisted of the artists Władysław Skotarek, Stefan Szmaj, Jan Jerzy Wroniecki, August Zamoyski, the poet Adam Bederski, and the trio of Margarete and Stanisław Kubicki and the editor Hulewicz, who all three aired their views in texts and art works. The group published Zeszyt Buntu, which promoted early avant-garde tendencies, usually defined in Zdrój by the cover term ‘Expressionism’, first used in 1917.

Kubicki, the ‘spiritus rector’ of the group’s radical wing, proclaimed a collective declaration of the Bunt in his aphoristic credo, ‘Notes’:

I. Art has nothing in common with the concept of ‘beauty and goodness’ (kalokagathia) …. We are far removed from the aesthetic game …

II. The fight is on, not for images of aesthetic issues but for MAN and for our DAY  (it will come) against the sordidness of your day ….

III. WE are Art.

The group’s appeals affirmed activism and the identification of art and life, and as in other avant-garde manifestos, were of a performative character oriented towards interaction with the audience. Their main ideas were presented during meetings accompanying the first exhibition of the Bunt group, held amidst a moral scandal. The Jury of the Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych (Society of Friends of the Fine Arts) had prohibited the exhibition of two ‘obscene’ works by Zamoyski and Szmaj. Residents of Poznań were ambivalent towards Expressionism. They associated it both with German art and also with the German occupation. For the Bunt group, a revolutionary movement operating without institutions, and emphasising the role of ethics rather than aesthetics, it was a pars pro toto of modernity, perpetuating a myth of a ‘new art’ for a ‘new man’.

The linocuts appearing in the magazine were shocking in their use of contrasting black-and-white surfaces and primitivist deformation. Apocalyptic in Skotarek’s prints, examples of organic abstraction by Jerzy Hulewicz, Kubicka, and Zamoyski or Kubicki’s geometrical abstraction were a complete novelty. The explosive synergy of word and image, typical of avant-garde periodicals, highlighted the programmatic attempt to ‘épater le bourgeois’.

Like the Berlin periodicals, Die Aktion and Der Sturm Zdrój engaged in publications, exhibitions, lectures, music events, and the production of a series of postcards. It also included translations from Die Aktion and undertook joint publishing and exhibition projects, inspired by the Kubickis. The Zdrój artists expressed their ideas in an international visual language, and the parallel publications of their poetry and manifestos in Poland and Germany overcame the differences in literary idiom. For Kubicki, an author of Polish and German revolutionary-biblical poetry who came to terms with the utopia of a ‘new society’, the bilingual and international character of art was a matter of course.

Fragments of the article published with footnotes as:

Lidia Głuchowska, Poznań and Łódź: National modernism and international avant-garde. Zdrój (1917-22); Yung-Yidish (1919); and Tel-Awiw (1919-21) (Kap. 51). In: Brooker, Peter/ Thacker, Andrew/ Weikop, Christian/ Bru, Sascha u. a.  (Hg.): Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History. Vol. 3, part 2: Europe 1880-1940, Oxford University Press 2013, S. 1208-1233.

Monday. A day for history of art stories by

Lidia Głuchowska

From: Lidia Głuchowska, Poznań and Łódź: National modernism and international avant-garde. Zdrój (1917-22); Yung-Yidish (1919); and Tel-Awiw (1919-21) (Kap. 51). In: Brooker, Peter/ Thacker, Andrew/ Weikop, Christian/ Bru, Sascha u. a.  (Hg.): Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History. Vol. 3, part 2: Europe 1880-1940, Oxford University Press 2013, S. 1208-1233.

Tel-Awiw – “A Hill of Spring”

The vision of a ‘new world’ and a ‘new man’ which underpinned the myth of the avant-garde and the rhetoric of its manifestos opened the first issue of the monthly Tel-Awiw in 1919. However, the periodical was traditional both in its literary style and graphic design.The Tel-Awiw publishing house, through its periodicals and books, the organisation of lectures and exhibitions, organised also outside of Łódź, aspired to be the pivot of a new culture, serving the ‘cause of the Jewish nation’. The first editorial declared openly: ‘A rebirth of the nation concerns the body, but … first and foremost the spirit. Therefore we will assign a privileged place here to Jewish thought, poetry and arts … Representatives of tomorrow can be found in the ranks of the young generation. Therefore … the Jewish youth will be assigned an equally privileged position.’

Youth and the future are other typical components of the manifestos of the time. A ‘new world’, the great spiritual generational project, located outside the here and now, integrated the tradition of all the countries of the Jewish diaspora: ‘first and foremost, however, the land of fathers and sons, a land of an immortal past and of the future’. The magazine was to be a foundation stone for the construction of a new world – Tel-Awiw (‘A Hill of Spring’) – which would be settled by a ‘new man’ – a ‘New Jew’.

Today, when leafing through Tel-Awiw (1919-21), issued in Łódź by Zygmunt Bromberg-Bytkowski from a branch office in Warsaw, readers may find it exotic or foreign. For here is an unknown world, which ceased to exist not only in Poland, but throughout Central Europe at the conclusion of World War II. The very dating of Tel-Awiw reflects a telling yearly division in line with the Jewish calendar rather than with the universal calendar. Thus issues 1 to 4 came out in 1919; issues 5 and 6 in 1920, and subsequent issues – 1 to 8 – in 1921, including double issues 3-4 and 7-8.

The cover of the penultimate issue of Tel-Awiw featured the information that this was the only Jewish monthly in the Polish language. While this language is a bridge to a better understanding of the magazine’s content, it frequently fails to communicate the reality recorded in its 12 issues and 600 pages across such a historical and ideological distance. In the national culture the Jewish language was used both by assimilated Jews and Zionists, who did not always know the elitist Hebrew language. Polish-Jewish literature (that is to say, Jewish literature published in Polish) was disseminated through education, which was the cornerstone of cultural integration. In turn, the participation of assimilated Jews in the development of Polish literature was unprecedented among Poland’s national minorities.

Unlike in the former Soviet Union (where traditional and new Hebrew literature was hardly tolerated) in Poland the individual components of the tripartite linguistic poly-system of Jewish culture went unscathed. Although in the two decades between the world wars the centre of Hebrew literature moved from Eastern Europe to Palestine, in Poland it served as a reference point for those Jews who were considering migration. 80% of the Jewish population spoke Yiddish, a language of instruction in an extensive network of cheders, yeshivas and Bejs Yankev (schools for girls) – religious educational institutions – and in the secular high schools. By 1939 a total of 1,500 titles accounting for around two-thirds of all Jewish periodicals were issued in Yiddish. Since 1908 this language was treated on a par with Hebrew as a national language. At one time over 150 magazines with a total print-run of at least 350,000 copies were issued in Yiddish. These were dailies, weeklies, and monthlies, including specialist publications, representative of all political factions and ideologies. Moreover, there were many literary magazines and literary and arts periodicals, including Yung-Idish, whose authors cooperated with the editorial board of Tel-Awiw and which were therefore extensively discussed in the latter magazine. After Poland regained national sovereignty 1918, the Jewish press resumed its activity with redoubled energy and soon enjoyed a principal position among the titles issued by national minorities. In Łódź alone the Jewish press was published mainly in Yiddish (in for example Lodzer Togblat, Lodzer Morgnblat, Folsksblat, Nayer Folksblat, Oyfgang), even if there were also periodicals in Polish (such as Republika and Głos poranny).

Bromberg-Bytkowski’s personality had a powerful impact on the ideological profile of the Tel-Awiw magazine. He was one of the few Polish Jews, in whom a high European culture and a profound dedication to Polish culture co-existed with a commitment to Jewish culture and its Enlightenment heritage. He was a sophisticated European literary scholar, translator, and aesthete, a supporter of Polish Romanticism, the founder of a Palestine colony, and an active promoter of Zionism. He managed to persuade the most prominent intellectuals of his own generation and the next to publish in Tel-Awiw. The magazine offered articles by the renowned historians Majer Bałaban and Maksymilian Bienenstock, the ideologist Max Nordau, and the writers Sholem Asch and David Ben Gurion, the future first Prime Minister of the Israeli government.

Bromberg-Bytkowski stressed the role of culture in the magazine but also reacted strongly to events like the act of San Remo or the foundation of the Clarté organisation, both key events in the implementation of Zionist ideas. Tel-Awiw regularly introduced its readership to politicians and men of letters, such as Herzl, An–ski and Heinrich Heine, Yosef Hayim Brenner, Chayym (Hayim) N. Bialik and Shaul Tchernichowsky, the dramaturge A. Vayter (Ayzik Meyer Devenishski) and the precursor of Yiddishism, Yitshok Leybush Peretz. The literary preferences of the editor were the polar opposite of avant-garde – critical of Naturalism and modernism but a defender of Romanticism whose renaissance was observable in the works by Knut Hamsun. The literature section of the magazine is memorable thanks to translations of new Hebrew and German poetry by Bialik, Tchernichowsky, and Heine. In addition, the literary texts included folk songs, prose by Ben Gurion, and Asch, as well as texts by the poet Jakób Kahan. The ‘Song of Songs’ came out in excerpts, posthumously considered to be Bromberg-Bytkowski´s master-work in translation.

Initially there were few articles about the visual arts. Marek Szwarc’s article ‘Sztuka a Żydzi’ (Art and the Jews) was published in November 1919.

In January 1921 Tel-Awiw published an article by Moshe Broderzon, another representative of Yung-Idish. Entitled ‘Al kidusz ham’ (At the Altar of the Nation), it was an homage to An-sky the author of the legendary Dybbuk, the founding father of Jewish ethnography and the main writer of the post-haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) epoch.

In May and June the magazine published reviews of the exhibition written by Bromberg-Bytkowski. Launched on April 3 in the rooms of the Merchant Society, the show is said to have attracted especially big audiences.

The review judged Szyk, the author of the vignette of the magazine (as well as another for Bytkowski´s translation of ‘The Song of Songs’) the major artistic personality of the show and saw his calligraphic style as referring to traditionally Jewish techniques of miniature and metalwork. In Szyk, Wilhelm Wachtel, and Jerzy Merkel Bytkowski found too an Eastern and Jewish propensity for fairy-tale visions. He praised the Palestine landscapes by Haneman, whose print he had reproduced in Tel-Awiw, and singled out the older artists Józef Budko and Henryk Glicenstein, along with the Warsaw-based artists Regina Mundlak and Adam Herszaft.

The Salon of the Futurists, Cubists, and Primitivists containing works by the artists associated with Yung-Idish (except Dina Matus) were unfavourably assessed.

The initiative taken by Bromberg-Bytkowski, then, not only resulted in a representative display of current Jewish arts but also provided a powerful impetus for similar projects and the integration of Jewish cultural elites domestically and abroad. The last page of Tel-Awiw included information about the back copies and issues scheduled to be published. In December 1921 the names of collaborators were included and a subscription for the following year was announced. However, in the era of Polish hyperinflation, the situation of little periodicals promoting radical modernist ideas and aesthetics, such as Zdrój or, of those which also represented  national minorities, such as Yung-Idish or Tel-Awiw, was in many ways difficult. Tel-Awiw failed to appear in 1922 and Bromberg-Bytkowski died on March 13, 1923.