DOI issue:
Nr. 2
DOI article:Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna: How the West corroborated socialist realism in the East: Fougeron, Taslitzky and Picasso in Warsaw
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.49349#0333
How the West corroborated Socialist Realism in the East
323
paintings there were two works by Taslitzky and none by Fougeron. Only the latter was
addressed by name in the poem.58
The ubiquitous stress in Polish verbal and visual discourse on the policing of art in a
capitalist state might be read as a displacement of Poland's own mechanism of contro! and
persecution of the decadent 'formalism' in the arts during precisely the same period. Ironie
in this context was the subsequent detention of Taslitzky's first version of Henri Martin...
stored in the National Museum's repository after its removal from the walls of the Zachęta
Exhibition Hall in 1952. In an even more striking contrast, another of these 'arrested' paint-
ings, Boris Taslitzky's La ripostę, depicting the police attack on the dockers of Port-de-Bouc
who were protesting against the French involvement in Indo-China, has been recently added
to the Art and Commitment Room at Tate Modern, next to Fougeron's Civilisation Atlan-
tique.
Both of the discussed works, by Fougeron and Taslitzky, landed in the Warsaw museum
as the spattering of the big splash of the French-Polish cooperation in the construction of
international socialist realism, marked by the 1952 exhibition. And yet, at the same time,
the Zachęta 'blockbuster' proved unprecedented, if not subversive, in its selection of
works. On the one hand, the exhibition contained four of the 'seven dangerous composi-
tions' removed by police from Salon d'Automne of 1951, the event duly recorded both in
the introduction to the catalogue and in its review, including Ist May Parade by a woman
artist, Anne-Marie Lansiaux and Gerard Singer's 14th February at Nice (ill. 9)'59 as well
as Les dockers by George Bauquier and Jean Milhau's Maurice Thorez va bien (i.e. Mau-
rice Thorez is getting on well).60 While the titles of the other exhibited works, which
translate into English as: The Expelled, Launders of Cher, The Communist Party Meeting,
We Demand Peace, confirm the homogeneous political message sent by French Commu-
nist artists to their comrades in Poland - 'unmasking the reality of the marshallised France'
- the works themselves demonstrate a wide variety of understanding of the 'social-realist
idiom', involving a good deal of 'anti-bourgeois appeal' and of 'modernist distortion',
such as Eduard Pignon's Mineurs, or Bernard Lorjou's Conference (ill. 10), the latter also
acquired by the Ministry of Art and Culture, and today hanging among the abandoned
works in the storage.61
58 A. MIĘDZYRZECKI, Siedem Obrazów: Minąpłótna. Gdy miłości w nich nie ma/Ani oddechu zagniewanych ust - /
Miną. W krajobraz odejdą milczenia,/ W ściemniałe szyby, które srebrzy mróz. // Lecz przetrwa sztuka, co epoki naszej/
Ukaże trud i ludzkie sprawy zliczy -/ Wasza sztuka, przyjaciele malarze!/ Siedem waszych groźnych kompozycji!//
Fougeronie! Pierwsza linia malarstwa/ Jest linią ognia. Łun bitewny błysk/ Zapalał porty, wybuchał na masztach,/
Spadała na chmurne doki La Palice.// Tę morskę noc, co oparła się burzy/I piękna jest, bo śmierć i strach przemogła,/
Ogrodom Francji o świcie powtórzy/ Z miasta do miasta przewożony obraz. // Bo gdy wam dłoń w pochodzie wspólnym
poda/Alzacki górnik iflandryjski tkacz -/Nie miną płótna. Sztuka wasza młoda/ W milionach oczu i serc będzie trwać.
'Nowa Kultura', 1951, pp. 51-2.
59 The painting by Singer is believed to be included today in the collections of the Museum of Art in Szczecin
(A. BAUDIN, 'Why is Soviet Painting Hidden from Us?' Zhdanov Art and its International Fallout, 1947-1953, [in:]
eds. Lahusen, Dobrenko, Socialist Realism Without Shores, op. cit., p. 247, ill. 8). However, the curators of the Museum
(oral communication in November 1999) do not confirm information.
60 STANISŁAWSKI (ed.), Wystawa Współczesnej Plastyki Francuskiej, op. cit., cat. nos 3, 20, 26, 40.
61 It was also acquired from the same exhibition by the Ministry of Art and Culture; its overt formalism was bypassed
in the review by Stanisławski, who emphasised instead its political content, comparing it to Goya and presenting it
as a sharp criticism of United Nations diplomacy (STANISŁAWSKI, Nowe drogi malarstwa francuskiego, op. cit.,
p. 69).
323
paintings there were two works by Taslitzky and none by Fougeron. Only the latter was
addressed by name in the poem.58
The ubiquitous stress in Polish verbal and visual discourse on the policing of art in a
capitalist state might be read as a displacement of Poland's own mechanism of contro! and
persecution of the decadent 'formalism' in the arts during precisely the same period. Ironie
in this context was the subsequent detention of Taslitzky's first version of Henri Martin...
stored in the National Museum's repository after its removal from the walls of the Zachęta
Exhibition Hall in 1952. In an even more striking contrast, another of these 'arrested' paint-
ings, Boris Taslitzky's La ripostę, depicting the police attack on the dockers of Port-de-Bouc
who were protesting against the French involvement in Indo-China, has been recently added
to the Art and Commitment Room at Tate Modern, next to Fougeron's Civilisation Atlan-
tique.
Both of the discussed works, by Fougeron and Taslitzky, landed in the Warsaw museum
as the spattering of the big splash of the French-Polish cooperation in the construction of
international socialist realism, marked by the 1952 exhibition. And yet, at the same time,
the Zachęta 'blockbuster' proved unprecedented, if not subversive, in its selection of
works. On the one hand, the exhibition contained four of the 'seven dangerous composi-
tions' removed by police from Salon d'Automne of 1951, the event duly recorded both in
the introduction to the catalogue and in its review, including Ist May Parade by a woman
artist, Anne-Marie Lansiaux and Gerard Singer's 14th February at Nice (ill. 9)'59 as well
as Les dockers by George Bauquier and Jean Milhau's Maurice Thorez va bien (i.e. Mau-
rice Thorez is getting on well).60 While the titles of the other exhibited works, which
translate into English as: The Expelled, Launders of Cher, The Communist Party Meeting,
We Demand Peace, confirm the homogeneous political message sent by French Commu-
nist artists to their comrades in Poland - 'unmasking the reality of the marshallised France'
- the works themselves demonstrate a wide variety of understanding of the 'social-realist
idiom', involving a good deal of 'anti-bourgeois appeal' and of 'modernist distortion',
such as Eduard Pignon's Mineurs, or Bernard Lorjou's Conference (ill. 10), the latter also
acquired by the Ministry of Art and Culture, and today hanging among the abandoned
works in the storage.61
58 A. MIĘDZYRZECKI, Siedem Obrazów: Minąpłótna. Gdy miłości w nich nie ma/Ani oddechu zagniewanych ust - /
Miną. W krajobraz odejdą milczenia,/ W ściemniałe szyby, które srebrzy mróz. // Lecz przetrwa sztuka, co epoki naszej/
Ukaże trud i ludzkie sprawy zliczy -/ Wasza sztuka, przyjaciele malarze!/ Siedem waszych groźnych kompozycji!//
Fougeronie! Pierwsza linia malarstwa/ Jest linią ognia. Łun bitewny błysk/ Zapalał porty, wybuchał na masztach,/
Spadała na chmurne doki La Palice.// Tę morskę noc, co oparła się burzy/I piękna jest, bo śmierć i strach przemogła,/
Ogrodom Francji o świcie powtórzy/ Z miasta do miasta przewożony obraz. // Bo gdy wam dłoń w pochodzie wspólnym
poda/Alzacki górnik iflandryjski tkacz -/Nie miną płótna. Sztuka wasza młoda/ W milionach oczu i serc będzie trwać.
'Nowa Kultura', 1951, pp. 51-2.
59 The painting by Singer is believed to be included today in the collections of the Museum of Art in Szczecin
(A. BAUDIN, 'Why is Soviet Painting Hidden from Us?' Zhdanov Art and its International Fallout, 1947-1953, [in:]
eds. Lahusen, Dobrenko, Socialist Realism Without Shores, op. cit., p. 247, ill. 8). However, the curators of the Museum
(oral communication in November 1999) do not confirm information.
60 STANISŁAWSKI (ed.), Wystawa Współczesnej Plastyki Francuskiej, op. cit., cat. nos 3, 20, 26, 40.
61 It was also acquired from the same exhibition by the Ministry of Art and Culture; its overt formalism was bypassed
in the review by Stanisławski, who emphasised instead its political content, comparing it to Goya and presenting it
as a sharp criticism of United Nations diplomacy (STANISŁAWSKI, Nowe drogi malarstwa francuskiego, op. cit.,
p. 69).