In the summer of 2022 a new exhibition opened in the National Museum in Cracow: A New Beginning: Modernism in the Second Polish Republic. It is an all too welcome an occurrence, for aside from the work of a few individuals, such as Witkacy, Zofia Stryjeńska and Władysław Strzemiński, Polish art of the interwar period is not well known. The exhibition consequently casts a light on a subject that has received far too little attention.

There are numerous reasons for this neglect. In part it is the result of the regrettably limited level of international interest in Polish art, design and architecture. Yet, ironically, the National Museum in Cracow has also been partly responsible for this situation. When it was still part of the Habsburg Empire, Cracow was a major artistic and literary centre; the ‘Sztuka’ artistic group notion has been justly celebrated, as has the wider fin-de-siècle Młoda Polska (Young Poland) movement. Unfortunately, however, this fame has also come to be a burden. Just as Vienna has long laboured under the label of ‘Vienna 1900,’ as if nothing of any artistic interest happened in the city for the rest of the twentieth century, so, too, the myth of ‘Cracow 1900’ has dominated the artistic identity of the city. It is a situation in which the National Museum has been an eager participant. It has repeatedly staged large-scale temporary exhibitions celebrating this moment, including retrospectives of turn-of-the-century artists such as Stanisław Wyspiański, Olga Bosnańska and Jacek Malczewski, as well as thematic exhibitions on topics such as Polish National Styles 1890-1918, or Cracow 1900, or Forever Young! Poland and its Art Around 1900. Between 2017 and the present, the National Museum staged no fewer than five separate exhibitions on Wyspiański. It has also promoted this image abroad, too.

When we set it against this background, A New Beginning offers a breath of fresh air. It is an ambitious, large-scale enterprise, and the exhibition is framed by the rebirth of Poland as an independent state following its erasure from the political map in 1795. The first section of the exhibition is titled ‘Bolshevism and Nazism at the Gates,’ and the visitor is confronted by a bloodthirsty anti-Bolshevik poster, a product of the war of 1919 – 1921 between the newly created Polish Republic and the Soviet Union. Poland was nearly extinguished at birth, and the Soviet Union collaborated with Nazi Germany in destruction in 1939, and the exhibition offers a timely reminder of this.

The exhibition as a whole is less a presentation of individual artistic achievement than about the ways in which the visual arts contributed to the process of state formation, as well as social, cultural and economic modernization. As the official documentation of the exhibition states: it ‘presents the dynamics and original character of modernism in Poland in the interwar period, using various exhibits for this purpose: from works of art to technical inventions, from architecture to fabric designs, from furniture to everyday objects.’ In this respect it is a considerable success, and it makes it all the more astonishing why Polish modernism remains a blank space for most scholars outside of Poland. The exhibition includes numerous works of art, but it is concerned with visual culture more generally and thus includes posters, furniture and ceramics, fashion, architectural photographs, and book illustrations.

A New Beginning has been carefully curated and laid out, with the visitor being taken on a clear route through a number of (colour-coded) thematic sections on, for example: history and tradition, industrialisation and technology; sport and the modern body; world fairs and exhibitions; health and hygiene; education; typography and design; urbanism. It is carefully laid out and each flows seamlessly into the other. As such, it is a social and political history of Polish modernism, and it also touches on the fact that there were competing ideas of a Polish rebirth might mean. For some this meant a resurrection of atavistic cultural memories from the deep past, or the recovery of folk culture (an idea that had already gained traction in the late nineteenth century) or a rebirth of religious belief. For others it included embrace of new technologies, avant-gardism and political radicalism.

The new government was intent on building up Poland as a modern industrial state – the exhibition includes a remarkable poster from 1939 that outlines the 15-year plan for industrialization – there was no shortage of artists who offered a rather more dystopian image of the poverty and human misery inflicted by modern industry. Those in the show include a striking photomontage by Janusz Maria Brzeski (1907-1957) of a corpse and a robot against the looming outline of an industrial plant, with titled Twilight of Civilisation (1933), or a painting by Strzemiński of The Unemployed (1927).

An eye-catching watercolour from 1917-1922 by Leon Chwistek on Zakopane in New York captures some of the tensions involved. It is set in the Tatra mountains, centre of the turn-of-the-century Zakopane folk revival movement, yet the way the mountains morph into New York skyscrapers reveals an entirely different vision: Americanism, technological modernization, progress.

Yet an engaging poster by Wojciech Kossak from 1937 advertising FIAT cars shows a very different approach. The car seems to be in a race with a horse drawn carriage, driven by a group of peasants in traditional garb. Apart from the fact that the carriage seems to be winning the race, the image offers a reassuring image of harmony new and old, a puzzling message given that it is supposed to be marketing the benefits of this new mode of transport.

A New Beginning is reminiscent of a similar exhibition that was held in the National Gallery in Prague in 2015-16, Building a State, which was concerned with the contribution of the visual arts to the creation of a visual identity for the new Czechoslovak Republic between the wars. Yet here there is a greater sense of the plural and contradictory nature of the visual culture of Poland – although as will become evident, there are also limits.

Hence, alongside a display of commercial posters celebrating aviation, we see a self-portrait by Luna Drexler (1882-1933), standing in an imaginary Buddhist temple, or a bronze (1923) by Jan Raszka of Perun, the old Slavic god of thunder; both of these latter are testimony to a counter-culture that harboured an interest in mysticism, spiritualism and pagan beliefs.

A notable feature of the exhibition is the number of women artists included in the show. That this requires comment reflects the fact that proper representation still has a long way to go. Some women artists, such as Stryjeńska and Katarzyna Kobro (1898-1951) have managed to secure a place on the landscape of Polish modernism, but the curators should be applauded for their inclusion of others, such as Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska’s painting of swimmers at a lido (1939), or the interior designer Barbara Brukalska (1899-1980), whose kitchen design merits comparison with the famous Frankfurt Kitchen of Margete Schütte-Lihotzkly, with whom she was in context. Yet, unfortunately, certain clichés persist; the section devoted to the crafts movement consists almost entirely of work by women artists, thereby restating the connection between the two. More generally, too, for all its inclusion of women, the exhibition is remarkably silent on the topic of gender.

As in neighbouring Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, there was a lively discourse between the wars of the ‘New Woman’ (Nowa kobieta), which was part of the wider exploration and redefinition of identities in the wake of the First World War. Yet there is no mention of this in the exhibition, even though many of the works on display seem to thematise concerns that were so central to the reformation of gender roles. Indeed, the exhibition as a whole seems to avoid becoming drawn into any issue that might be seen as politically controversial or as having a resonance in the present. This includes the opening section on Nazi Germay and the Soviet Union. As grim as this story is, it is hardly controversial; indeed, it provides the basis for a stirring narrative of Polish heroism, martyrdom and resistance.

One notable absence from this story, and from the exhibition, is Jewish culture. Immediately after the First World War some of the most vibrant artistic groups were Jewish organisations such as Bunt, based in Poznań, or Jung Idysz in Lódź, to be followed by Srebrny Wóz (The Silver Cart) and the Grupa Łodzian. Given that Jews were so numerous and prominent in interwar Poland, it is a strange omission. But then, perhaps, it is not so unexpected, for the very presence of specifically Jewish artistic and cultural associations highlights the awkward fact that there were frictions between Jewish groups and Polish society (immediately after the First World there were large-scale anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland).

This would be difficult to accommodate in an exhibition which, for all its many qualities, is a celebration of Polish nationhood and artistic achievements. Yet along with this comes a peddling of old myths. Even the title, A New Beginning, indicates this, for it presents the now familiar mythology of rebirth. Yet while Poland did indeed rise again as a new independent state, there was considerable continuity with the past; most of the political class of the new Republic was drawn from the old social and political elites of pre-war Polish society. Many of the artists whose work is featured here were already active before 1918.

Given that creation of the new Polish state is the central narrative of the exhibition, it is curious that it fails to ask what it meant to be Polish or, indeed, to consider the contributions of its various minorities, including its large Jewish population. In this respect we may compare it with another exhibition held at the National Museum in 2018-2019: Independence: Around the Historical Thought of Józef Piłsudski, which likewise did little to bring into question well-worn patriotic myths both about this hero of the Second Republic and about Polish history more generally.

For all its flaws, A New Beginning is nevertheless an important exhibition. For those unfamiliar with interwar Poland, it presents a wealth of material that repays extended viewing, and it gives a clear indication as to why Polish scholars have every right to bristle with indignation at international indifference towards Polish art and visual culture. Yet, the exhibition has its limits. The absence of more critical reflection is a pity. Yet with President Andrzej Duda as its honorary patron, we may understand, too, that its reluctance to go beyond canonical accounts of Polish national history reflects the political context in which is taking place.

Note: A New Beginning: Modernism in the Second Polish Republic continues at the National Museum until 12 February 2023. Details are available here: https://mnk.pl/exhibitions/a-new-beginning-modernism-in-the-second-polish-republic