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Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius

what I had discovered in museum storage could not have been further removed from Ag-
nieszka^ agency. I was not, in fact, looking for what I had found there; those paintings,
after all, were not even on the records of my department, which meant that I too was at
liberty to act as though they did not exist. And ignore them is what I did: I simply shrugged
my shoulders in order to return to 'my' images of gods, saints and legitimate heroes. Little
did I suspect that, some years later, those unwanted pictures of workers with red banners
would reinscribe themselves as the objects of my own research.
At the end of the 1990s, when preparing a paper for the panel on socialist realism at the
College Art Association Conference in New York, I revisited those expelled images, still
attached to the same Old Masters' screens in the National Museum's repository. By then,
I was no longer working there any more, having lived in Britain for almost a decade.
Neither supported, nor weighed down, by the security and demands of a full-time job in a
mainstream museum institution in Poland, I had had to reinvent myself anew as a free-
lance art historian in Britain. And, in a startling reversal of the storage episode, my loyalty
to the Old Masters diminished, while my interest in the social radicalist strand of art in
post-1945 Europe started to unfold. A brief account of the background to this abrupt
change is probably needed here.
This sudden shift of my professional orientation was enforced directly by the prospects
of the job-market in Britain.6 However, on a more primary level, it was also in tune with
the ongoing process of the radicalisation of the discipline of art history, which, under the
label of the 'New Art History' and, subsequently, 'visual culture', was transforming the
structure of art history departments at British universities in the 1980s and the 1990s. To
put it simply, masterpieces, priesthood and connoisseurship were out, while the art of the
excluded and, above all, theory were in. The movement had been stirred, in turn, by the
New Left revolt, sweeping the field of humanities in the later 1960s and the 1970s, and
targeted broadly against the traditionalist approaches to studying culture, which absolut-
ise, depoliticise and mystify it as a higher and detached sphere of human activity. By
opening up its boundaries to include Tow culture', and by reconnecting its analysis to
generał theory of society, to Marxist cultural materialism and new theoretical apparatuses
of structuralism, semiotics, as well as Foucauldian discourse theory and psychoanalysis,
the movement foregrounded the entirely new discipline of cultural studies, increasingly
successful and increasingly authoritative.7 Accordingly, the 'New Art History', having
become a force in the rebellious ranks from the late 1970s, launched in its own field a
battle against an art history which, in the words of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,
'gives free rein to celebrating contemplation and finds in the sacred character of its object
every pretext for a hagiographic hermeneutics superbly indifferent to the questions of the
social conditions in which works are produced and circulate'8 This kind of untheoretical

6 To be sure, a job opportunity had also determined my career of Curator of Italian Painting in Poland's command and
non-market economy at the start of the 1980s.

7 R. WILLIAMS, Marxism and Literature, Oxford 1977; S. HALL, The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis
of Humanities, 'October 53', 1990, pp. 11-23; on the New Art History, see: the collection of texts which established the
term 'New Art History' for its Anglophone readership, eds. A.L. REES, F. BORZELLO, The New Art History, London
1986; also: J. HARRIS, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, London, New York 2001.

8 This quotation from Pierre Bourdieu (see: P. BOURDIEU, Outline ofa Theory of Practice, transl. R. Nice, Cambridge
1977, pp.1-2), precedes a text by Jon Bird, founder of the New Art History flag periodical, 'Block', J. BIRD On
Newness, Art and History: Reviewing Block 1979-1985, [in:] eds. A.L. Rees, F. Borzello, The New Art History ..., op.
cit., pp. 32-40.