How the West corroborated Socialist Realism in the East

317


9. Gerard Singer, 14 February at Nice, 1950-51,
present location unknown

and expressiveness.36 The status of Fougeron, indeed, was growing rapidly in Poland,
manifesting itself in a variety of ways in both official and private discourses. An almost
univocal esteem for the artist can be singled out, for instance, as a recurring motif in an
array of memoirs of contributors to the First Exhibition of Modern Art in Cracow, whose
works were published a few years ago in the catalogues of the Galeria Starmach, providing
a rich testimony of the different strands of the debates among art-critical circles in the
Poland of the late 1940s. Tadeusz Kantor, the enfant terrible on the Polish art scene, did
not miss the opportunity to visit and interview Fougeron in his study in Montrouge during
his scholarship to Paris in 1947. An outcome of this visit, a letter published in 'Przegląd
Artystyczny' prior to the periodical's removal from Cracow to Warsaw and its transforma-
tion into an official organ of the Polish Artists' Union, does not hide Kantor's uncondi-
tional approval of Fougeron's expressive interpretation of realism. He reported also on the
artist's idea of increasing the French influence in Poland, not by the means of bursaries for
Polish artists to visit and study in Paris, but rather by sending French artists as teachers to
Polish academies of art.37
Significantly, the authority of Fougeron did not diminish in the early, and most militant
years of the Stalinist era. However, the evidence for it comes now mainly from the main-
stream official publications. His even stronger presence in Polish art criticism transpires
from the pages of the Polish press, and, in particular, from those of the reformed 'Przegląd

36 J. WOŹNIAKOWSKI, Nieznany czar Zachodu: Odszukiwanie kontaktu, [in:] Sztuka polska po 1945 roku, Warsaw
1987, p. 116; Interview with Mieczysław Porębski by Marek Świca, [in:] eds. M. ŚWICA, J. CHROBAK, I Wystawa
Sztuki Nowoczesnej: Pięćdziesiąt Lat Później, exhib. cat., Cracow, Fundacja Nowosielskich, Galeria Starmach 1998, p.
16; I. WITZ, Współczesne malarstwo francuskie, 'Przekrój', 1946, 62, repr. ibid., p. 142; cf: Kantor's memory of the
exhibition recorded in 1971, ibid., p. 143; also texts by B. SZWACZ, J. KRAUPE and T. TYSZKIEWICZ, [in:] eds.
Świca, Chrobak, Nowocześni i Socrealizm, op. cit., pp. 31, 51, 58.

37 Kantor, List do Redakcji, op. cit.