Second Wave Feminist Movement

This article examines Urszula Czartoryska’s critical review titled “Wyczekiwanie...” [“Looking forward...”], which provides commentary to two art exhibitions: “Młodzi malarze Krakowa” [“Young painters from Kraków”], organized in Kraków’s Pałac Sztuki [Palace of Arts] in April 1965, and “Ogólnopolska Wystawa Młodego Malarstwa” [“All-Polish Exhibition of New Painting”], which opened one month later in Sopot. Both exhibitions served for her as a point of departure for writing an article commenting on the current situation in Polish painting. According to Czartoryska, it leaned too heavily on colourism and abstraction. This would lead to a serious crisis in painting, which manifested in the artists’ growing distance towards figurative art and socio-political subjects. This distancing tendency would be rooted in the fresh memory of the socialrealist trauma, which effectively precluded any engagement with figurative art otherwise than by falling in line with the policy of the communist party. Among the critics reviewing the two exhibitions, Urszula Czartoryska was the only one to propose returning to the kind of figurative art that would tackle subjects beyond art itself. It soon turned out that the article “Wyczekiwanie...” successfully acted as a rejoinder to these shows, actually influencing the later decisions of individual artists. One year after its publishing, five artists from Kraków, who participated in the exhibition “Młodzi malarze Krakowa” – Maciej Bieniasz, Zbylut Grzywacz, Barbara Skąpska, Leszek Sobocki and Jacek Waltoś – founded the group “Wprost” [“Directly”], which set as its goal to comment on the “here and now” by employing a figurative language that would be accessible – as the artists argued – to the average recipient.
In this paper, the review “Wyczekiwanie...” is juxtaposed with Czartoryska’s 1974 book Od pop-artu do sztuki konceptualnej [From pop art to conceptualism], in which she broadly discusses selected trends that emerged in Western art in the late 1950s. In the last chapter, titled “Artysta zaangażowany” [“Engaged artist”], she acknowledges the dissent that swelled among French and American artists at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, who would rebel against the structures of capitalist power. In this context, one could also ask to what extent her commentary could be an allusion to the political and artistic situation in Poland at the time. Numerous protests were held then, while some of Leszek Sobocki’s works criticizing the communist authorities were removed from exhibitions by the censorship. It seems that Czartoryska was describing the dissenting attitude of Western artists in order to emphasize the lack of such an approach in Polish art. This was particularly visible at the time when the dramatic events of March 1968 and December 1970 demanded in vain to be expressed in art. Naturally, the author was perfectly aware of the censorship, but she also might have wanted to draw attention to this issue and try to address it in a way that would be possible under totalitarian rule.

“The stories these women tell envision a radically different moment in art-world history, one in which questions of career
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    Braderman’s take is unabashedly utopian and celebratory but looks to the past for lessons rather than
    nostalgia.”
    -ARTFORUM


    “gives a joyful sense of what it was like to be a feminist in the 1970s, a time when everything seemed possible.”
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    “The animation in THE HERETICS breaks new ground and adds a terrific element to this otherwise fascinating portrait of a generation of important artists and women.”
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