Modus: Prace z historii sztuki (16.2016)

three decades and actively involved the progressive circles. At first it was the youth that
were involved in this project. Later the leaders of this circle (e.g. Jonathan Warschauer, Jan
Albert Propper) and sińce 1896 also the progressive women joined the project. At the end
of the first decade of the 20th century a conception of a full-figure statuę was dismissed,
and the funds raised were used to found a relief entitled The Admission ofjews to Poland
by Casimir the Great, which was madę by Henryk Hochman and which was hung in 1911
in the old Town Hall in Kazimierz.
In the following article the origins and the phases of the initiative of the aforementioned
monument were analysed (including the unrealized projects of the monument by Stanisław
Lewandowski and Jan and Mieczysław Zawiejski), and a hypothesis was formulated concern-
ing the reasons of the failure to complete the first conception of the statute.
An idea of the erection of the monument of Casimir the Great by the Cracow Jews, today
completely forgotten, is for yarious reasons worth reminding. Above all, it represents an
interesting example of the patriotic activities of the progressive Jews as well as the accul-
turational processes undergoing in this milieu. It also creates an absorbing context for other
initiatives of monument erection of that period (e.g. the monument of Adam Mickiewicz in
Kraków). And finally, it allows us to understand the context in which the work by Hochman
was created, whose version can be seen in the Town Hall in Kazimierz sińce 1996. #
Translated by Joanna Szczepańska-Wloch

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ARTYKUŁY

Alicja Maślak-Maciejewska