American Artists in the Muzeum Sztuki Collection International Symposium

2023 marks the fortieth anniversary of the Polish-American artwork exchange. Initiated by Constructivist artist Henryk Stażewski, it was modeled on a historic exchange in which he had participated at the turn of the 1920s and 30s. The International Collection of Modern Art, which consisted of dozens of works donated by European avant-garde artists, became the cornerstone for the modern art museum, located in Poland’s largest industrial city—Łódź. Four decades later, American artists (mainly from the West Coast: artists including Chris Burden, Frederick Eversley, Sam Francis, Ed Moses, Helen Pashgian, Alexis Smith, and DeWain Valentine) were invited to participate in a new exchange, “underscoring cultural support and links among artists in critical times'' (a reference to the rise of the anti-communist Solidarity movement in Poland). The project was met with great generosity. The Americans bestowed over three dozen works—sculptures, paintings, photographs, as well as more experimental forms—to the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. In exchange their Polish peers donated artworks to the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles.

Through this symposium, we wish to take a closer look into the Polish-American relations and art exchange in the 1980s. The main outcome of the project is to better understand the significance of the American collection within the larger context of the Muzeum Sztuki collection.

The first part of the international symposium took place in October 2022. The following scholars presented their papers there: Agnieszka Pindera (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź); Dr. Paweł Polit (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź); Prof. Lucy Bradnock (Courtauld Institute of Art, London); Prof. Michael Leja (University of Pennsylvania); Dr. Wojciech Szymański (University of Warsaw); Prof. Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska (University of Łódź) and Dr. Elizabeth Buhe (independent  researcher).

The second meeting will be focused on searching for the common denominator between the attitudes of artists taking part in the exchange from both countries.

A selection of donated American artworks is currently on view at the “Atlas of Modernity. Exercises” exhibition.

Symposium Agenda:

12:00 – 15:00

12:00 Agnieszka Pindera and dr Paweł Polit (Muzeum Sztuki)

How American Art Ended Up in the Museum?

Symposium curators will present their progress in collecting testimonies of the exchange participants, as well as their archival discoveries.

12:30 PD Dr. Christian Berger (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)

Sites in Exchange: Conceptualist Practices between Łódź, Los Angeles, and Elsewhere in the Polish-American Art Exchange

The scholar will focus on artists such as Douglas Huebler or Koji Kamoji.

13:15 Prof. Filip Lipiński (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)

“Cinematic” impulses in the work of selected American and Polish participants of Exchange

The presentation introduces the practice of among others: Paul Sharits, Robert Flick, Les Levine as well as Zygmunt Targowski and Ryszard Winiarski.

14:00 Dr. Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk (Jagiellonian University in Kraków)

Beholder as a fourth dimension? Between spatial construction and spatial relations in sculptural practice of Katarzyna Kobro, Eric Orr and Peter Shelton

The scholar will draw attention to a variety of approaches to the problem of space in the mentioned artist's practice.

Participant’s bios:

PD Dr. Christian Berger is a historian of modern and contemporary art. He received his M.A. (2007) and Ph.D. (2013) from Freie Universität Berlin and obtained his Habilitation in Art History at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (2022), with a thesis titled Worldly Matter – Materiality and Reference to the Real in Conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Frankfurt (2022) and Hamburg (2021–22) and was a research fellow and lecturer at the Universities of Mainz (2010–22) and Marburg (2007–10). He has been awarded several major grants, by the European Union and the Volkswagen Foundation, among others, which enabled him to conduct his research at international institutions such as the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and the German Center for Art History (DFK) in Paris. This coming spring and summer, he will be a Thyssen Foundation Fellow at KWI Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. His publications include the edited volume Conceptualism and Materiality: Matters of Art and Politics (Leiden: Brill, 2019) and a monograph on repetition and experiment in the work of Edgar Degas (Wiederholung und Experiment bei Edgar Degas, Berlin: Reimer, 2014) that stems from his PhD thesis. He serves as an editorial board member of Studies in Art & Materiality, a peer-reviewed book series at Brill.

Prof. Filip Lipiński is an art historian and Americanist, prof. UAM dr hab.; he works at the Institute of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. His academic interests concern modern and contemporary art, American art, theory and methodology of art history. He is a recipient of several research grants in the USA and Europe: Fulbright Fellowship at City University of New York (2007-8), Terra Summer Residency Fellowship (2008), Terra Travel Research Grant (2013), JFK Institut Research Grant, Berlin (2019) Kościuszko Foundation Research Grant at University of Southern California/Getty Research Center, Los Angeles (2019). Author of two books – Hopper wirtualny. Obrazy w pamiętającym spojrzeniu (Nicolaus Copernicus University Press 2013) [The Virtual Hopper. Images in a Remembering Look] and Ameryka. Rewizje wizualnej mitologii Stanów Zjednoczonych (Adam Mickiewicz University Press 2021) [America. Revising the Visual Mythology of the United States] as well as numerous academic articles and book chapters on modern and contemporary art and art theory in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, View, Artium Quaestiones, RIHA Journal. More recently, he contributed to the anthology Hot Art, Cold War (Routledge, 2020) and The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (Palgrave Macmillan 2021). He is also a translator of academic texts and the deputy editor-in-chief of the journal Artium Quaestiones.

Dr Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk is an art historian, curator and lecturer. She is a graduate of art history at Jagiellonian University, Kraków. She also studied art history at Universität Wien and at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Curator of the programme “Exercising modernity” at the Pilecki-Institut Berlin, as well as author and editor of several publications on 20th and 21st–century art and architecture, including “Katarzyna Kobro. The Movement of Space-Time” [2021] (with K. Słoboda); “Art as Organization of Life: Katarzyna Kobro and El Lissitzky” [2020], “Domesticated Modernism” [2019], “Composing Space. Sculptures of the avant-garde” [2019]. She has also been the curator of exhibitions such as Sections. Gallery of Polish Architecture of the 20th and 21st–centuries (with K. Kepinski, W. Grzesiak); Identity. 100 years of Polish architecture//Krakow; Composing the space. Sculptures of the avant-garde (with K. Słoboda). Member of the International Association of Art Critics AICA and of the Association of Art Historians in Poland.

The symposium is made possible thanks to the support of the Embassy of the United States of America