CTTE_A_159012.

fm Page 211 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM

Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 2, March, 2006, 211–221

Mapping the Legacy of the

Political Change of 1956
in East European Art

Piotr Piotrowski

On the evening of 5 March 1953, at the Moscow Kremlin, Joseph

Third
10.1080/09528820600590298
CTTE_A_159012.sgm
0952-8822
Original
Taylor
202006
20
piotrpio@amu.edu.pl
PiotrPiotrowski
00000March
Text
and
& Article
Francis
(print)/1475-5297
Francis
2006Ltd (online)

Vissarionovich Stalin – a man whose impact on world history cannot be

overestimated – passed away. His influence may be measured not only by
the sheer number of citizens he had murdered from almost every country,
but also by developments in the artistic culture of an immense area,
including – in particular, though not only – the eastern part of Europe.
Stalin’s death was the beginning of the long decline of a system of
subjugating the nations of Eastern Europe in which, through a ruthless
strategy, art had played a significant role.
In 1954, one year after the death of Stalin, and two years before Nikita
Khrushchev gave his famous speech on Stalinist terror, Ilya Ehrenburg
published his most famous novel Ottepel or The Thaw, which could be
also translated as Warming. It is of interest to us for the story it tells of
two painters. Vladimir Pokhow, or Volodia, left Moscow for a city that
was then a socialist construction site, having had a small disagreement
with the Soviet art establishment. By leaving Moscow, however, he did
not intend to leave Socialist Realism. On the contrary, coming to the city-
factory, he continued to do almost the same sort of painting, such
as portraits of the local Communist leaders. The other protagonist of
Ehrenburg’s novel, the non-conformist painter Saburov, paid no attention
to the Socialist Realist art establishment in Moscow or the local situation.
He just wanted to paint. Volodia is conscious that Saburov is a great artist
and admires him and his painting. However, not only is he unable to
emulate Saburov’s art, but also, during a debate on art in the workers’
club and under the influence of alcohol, he launches a public attack on
Saburov’s painting. It is made absolutely clear to the reader of Ehrenburg’s
book that the moral winner in this case is Saburov rather than Volodia.
The issue here is not who the winner is, but rather what sort of painting
is recognised in the book as non-conformist or non-official great art.
There is one scene in particular in which we are able to picture what
Saburov’s painting really looks like. Ehrenburg gives us a short description

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2006)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820600590298
CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 212 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM
212
1 Susan E Reid, ‘Art of
Socialist Countries,
Moscow 1958–1959, and
the Contemporary Style of
Painting’, in Style and
Socialism. Modernity and
Material Culture in Post-
War Eastern Europe, eds
Susan E Reid and David
Crowley, Berg, Oxford
and New York, 2000,
pp 101–32
2 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘After
Stalin’s Death: Modernism
in Central Europe in the
late 1950s’, Art Margins.
Contemporary Central and
Eastern European Visual
Culture, 2001, available at:
http://
www.artmargins.com/
content/feature/
piotrowski.html
of it during Volodia’s visit to Saburov’s studio. The pictures, as we are led
to imagine them, are more or less French post-impressionist paintings, at
least Fauve-like landscapes. Let us remind ourselves that we are speaking
of the year 1954 when on both sides of the Atlantic abstract art was widely
accepted even as official museum art. In the USSR, however, classical
modern painting was still the avant-garde. Ehrenburg’s book anticipated
a large exhibition of French classical modernism, which took place in
Moscow in 1955. The period of thaw in Russian art was already complete
by the end of 1962, the year in which Nikita Khrushchev famously got
angry with modern art at the Manezh exhibition. Such art was prohibited
in public exhibitions in the Soviet Union at least until the mid-1970s.
Visual culture in the USSR during the ‘thaw’ period seems strongly
orientated towards the West, and particularly towards classical modern-
ism and abstract art, both of which were shown in Moscow at that time
under the umbrella of official international cultural exchanges. But state
cultural policy was open neither to Western influences nor to local tradi-
tion; the early Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s seemed forgotten.
In the rest of Eastern Europe, with the exception of Yugoslavia, which
had been outside the Soviet bloc since 1948, Poland stood perhaps as the
most advanced country in terms of accepting Western abstract painting,
as well as its own constructivist or avant-garde tradition from the inter-
war period. This was visible not only in non-official art shows (as in
Czechoslovakia) but particularly in highly official ones, for example at
the Moscow exhibition of the ‘Art of Socialist Countries’ in 1958, the
most official in Eastern Europe. In contrast to the other national repre-
sentatives, the Polish pavilion contained the only example of abstract
painting in the entire show.1 The differentiation in cultural policy
between various countries in the Soviet bloc was the first legacy of the
political change of 1956 in Eastern Europe. While Russian art remained
conservative, even if many non-conformist artists rejected Socialist
Realism, Polish artists (including some official ones) wanted to take part
in the international art scene and accepted Abstract Expressionism,
which they perceived as avant-garde.
The other important legacy of 1956 in the region is the rapidly grow-
ing differentiation between Central European countries themselves in
terms of how they were dominated or colonised on the political level by
the USSR. This applies both to their art production and to official
cultural policy. As an introduction let us compare two paintings from
two different countries and separated by two years, yet both expressing
the same disguised hope for the future.2 The first is the Three Literary
Editors by Tibor Csernus from 1955, one year before the Budapest
Uprising, which represents the interior of a café with three seated men.
They sit at a table covered with a cloth on which there are some glasses,
a bottle and a newspaper. They are all wearing, as became the literati of
that time, suits and ties. A common café scene, typical of European
painting, yet this is exactly why the picture is interesting. Not long
before, to have shown such a painting in public would have been
completely out of the question, and, in a sense, Csernus here performs a
truly revolutionary gesture, even though it is revolution à rebours. He
refers to the café tradition as an institution of literary life at the moment
when others were painting very different interiors with men wearing very
different clothes. If a man of letters ever appeared in the iconography of
CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 213 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM
3 Katalin Keserü, ‘Historical
Iconography of the
Hungarian Avant-Garde’,
Acta Historiae Artium
Hung, 35, 1990–92, p 79
4 Karin Thomas, ‘Krise und
Ich-Findung im
künstlerischen
Psychogramm
Freundesbild und
Selbstportät’, in
Deutschlandbilder. Kunst
aus einem geteilten Land,
ed Eckhart Gillen, Berliner
Festspiele GmbH,
Museumspädagogischen
Dienst, Dumont, Berlin,
1997, pp 545–7
213
Socialist Realism, it was certainly not in a café, which the ideologues of
Marxism-Leninism associated with bourgeois idleness rather than
commitment to Socialism. By rejecting the official iconography of
Socialist Realism, Csernus went against the grain of Communist ideology
and claimed the writer’s and artist’s right to be free of Party pressure, to
work in cafés and not necessarily on the construction sites of Socialism.
He favoured the tradition of a literary culture in which the café repre-
sented the myth of non-commitment and liberty – of rebellion against a
purposefully organised society. Sitting in a café and writing poems (or
not) is the writer’s right, as it were, to be different from the bourgeois
philistine (previously) or (now) the worker. The painting also contains
another significant element, particularly important from the point of
view of the opposition to the artistic practice of Socialist Realism,
namely, the objects of everyday use on the café table – the glasses, bottle
and newspaper. According to Katalin Keserü, whose historical account
of the iconography of Hungarian painting is the background for this
interpretation, these bring to mind the tradition of ‘small still lifes’ char-
acteristic of the art made under Admiral Horthy’s dictatorship (1920–
44), condemned – as was the whole period of the admiral’s rule – by the
Communists.3 Hence an apparently innocent interior, normal-looking
men and common objects acquired a deep political meaning. In the era of
totalitarian oppression and Socialist Realism they expressed hope for
change; for a ‘thaw’ that would came after the long years of biting ‘frost’.
The other painting, Die Freunde, completed in 1957 by the East
German painter Harald Metzkes, is equally set in the local context of
hopes for the future and possible threats. It was painted at a moment
when the changes in the USSR were already well under way. In the
German Democratic Republic (GDR), on the one hand, a special French
issue of Bildende Kunst included a debate on the art of Picasso, which
was treated by local artists as the model of modernity; while on the other,
the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a declaration on
the ‘ideological struggle for socialist culture’. The painting – a portrait of
a group of friends, East Berlin artists – is a triptych, referring, according
to an interesting analysis by Karin Thomas, to the Expressionist tradition
of Max Beckmann (1884–1950).4 The scene is located in the atelier of the
Academy in Paris Square, Berlin, which is made explicit by a view of the
nearby Brandenburg Gate. In the foreground, the first figure on the left is
the painter himself holding a huge saw as if it were a double bass, an
instrument associated with jazz music, which was very popular among
East German bohemians yet considered decadent by the authorities. Next
to Metzkes we can see Manfred Böttcher who later became a legendary
figure of independent art in the GDR, and the sculptor Werner Stötzner,
separated from Böttcher by a sitting waitress. Perhaps the most interest-
ing is the fifth figure, somewhat distanced from the rest of the group,
Ernst Schroeder, wearing fashionable clothes, with a cigarette in his
hand, remarkable not only for his art but for his original lifestyle. This
distance, writes Karin Thomas, is ostentatious, since Schroeder’s position
among the other artists was quite specific. He would often visit Paris
(which explains his chic suit) and must have been familiar with the latest
trends of that then unquestionable capital of modern art. In a sense
Schroeder provides a semantic key to the painting, since what is at stake
here is modernity or, more precisely, the right to practise modern art,
CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 214 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM

214

emphasised by the side-panels of the triptych, which are characteristic of

Pittura Metafisica. Moreover, the painting contains a number of refer-
ences to Picasso, particularly to the early stages of his art (a man with a
trumpet, another sleeping on the table and an acrobat wearing dark
tights); Bernard Buffet (the figure of a woman holding a child); and the
still lifes of Giorgio Morandi (the bottles in the top left corner of the left
side-panels). The picture conveys certain expectations, but also fears that
the ‘thaw’, which had just started, might all too soon come to an end.
This other motif can be related to two coffin-like chests on the right side-
piece – a kind of requiem for lost hopes for freedom of artistic expression.
Even while executing his collective portrait of the Berlin painters,
1 Harald Metzkes, Friends, 1957, oil on canvas, private collection

Metzkes was already aware that any hope that the Party’s grip on artistic
culture would loosen after Stalin’s death was nothing but an illusion. In
the GDR, the artistic ‘thaw’ never truly set in. In East Germany, the
traces of abstract painting and particularly of the informel, which at that
time was the icon of modernity – evidence of freedom of expression and
an awareness of current trends in art – were virtually nowhere to be
found.
The situation in Poland at that time was quite different. In 1957,
Tadeusz Kantor painted his best known informel pictures (among
others, Amarapura, Akonkagua, Oahu, Ramanaganga, all in the
National Museum in Poznań).5 In the same year the so-called second na[]eu
ct

‘Exhibition of Modern Art’, which opened in the Warsaw Zache˛ta eo[g]on

5 Piotr Piotrowski, ed, Odwil

Gallery, was, according to Mieczys law Por e˛bski, a kind of ‘levy’ of non-
zd
[ot

ż . Sztuka ok. 1956/ The

]
o
rtsk
l[] eo[go]n

Thaw. Polish art ca. 1956, objective art and included many examples of tachisme, abstraction and
Muzeum Narodowe, other modernist poetics.6 It was by no means a small private undertaking
Pozna ń , 1996; Piotr
n[acu
e]t

Piotrowski, ‘Modernism hidden from the sight of the authorities – on the contrary, party dignitar-
and Socialist Culture: ies took part in the opening ceremony, which was described in detail by
Polish Art in the late 1950s’,
in Style and Socialism, op
the national press.
cit, pp 133–47 I will focus on Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland to illustrate the
6 Krystyna Czerni, Nie tylko
legacy of political change that occurred in Eastern Europe in 1956
o sztuce. Rozmowy z outside the Soviet Union. I leave aside Bulgaria and Romania, and – for
profesorem Mieczys l aw ro
stlk
[]
quite different reasons – Yugoslavia. The political change in 1956 left no
Pore˛bski: Wydawnictwo
o
eg[o
]n

Dolnoś la˛skie, Wroc l aw,

ascu
[e]t ao[go
]n o
rtsk
l[]
legacy in Bulgarian visual art and neither did it influence art in Central
1992, p 103 Europe or Russia, since it did not bring about the introduction of

Harald Metzkes, Friends, 1957, oil on canvas, private collection

CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 215 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM
7 For a deeper comparative
analysis of Central
European art circa 1956,
see Piotr Piotrowski,
‘Totalitarianism and
Modernism: the “Thaw”
and “informel” Painting in
Central Europe, 1955–
1965’, Artium
Quaestiones, 10, Poznań,
na[]eu
ct
2000, pp 119–74.
215
modern (or abstract) art. What we can observe at that time is a sort of
revival of Socialist Realism, rather than an acceptance of modern art and
the neo-avant-garde in particular. The real modernisation of Bulgarian
art took place in the late 1980s. There was no political change in
Romania in 1956. Change took place in 1965 when paradoxically
Nicolae Ceauşescu seized power and later became the bloodiest dictator
]cse[d
li
in Eastern Europe. In Yugoslavia the year 1956 was also insignificant.
Visual culture in Yugoslavia carries the legacy of political change in
1948 rather than 1956. The GDR, although mentioned above, is
excluded from this article, for cultural rather than political reasons. The
independent art milieu was definitely weakened at that time in the GDR.
It is interesting that East German independent or non-official artists
more or less shared the official so-called ‘anti-imperialist’ ideology of the
government and its critique of Abstract Expressionism. An attitude of
that kind would be hard to find in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland or
Russia. This process prevented a broader reception of informel painting
and later made the situation of the East German neo-avant-garde, which
is the main topic of my analysis here, rather unique. The neo-avant-
garde in the GDR was not critically related to the cult of modern easel
painting, a symbol of political change in art in 1956, but should rather
be seen as a continuation of a sort of non-socialist ‘realism’, the real field
of the East German struggle for a free post-1956 visual art.7
First of all it should be noted that although 1956 was crucial for
Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, they faced very different political
situations in the years following Khrushchev’s speech, since the process
of ‘defrosting’ Stalinist cultural policy had a different rhythm and
dynamic in different localities. The effects of the ‘thaw’ in the Soviet
Union appeared first in Poland and were definitely at their deepest and
most visible there, while in Czechoslovakia political change was much
slower and more superficial. Its effects in Czechoslovakia were to
develop in the 1960s and gained momentum until reaching the climax
and epilogue of August 1968. In Poland a sort of modernisation of
culture was involved in local political manoeuvres, designed to legitimise
the new power system with the intelligentsia. This is why the Polish poli-
ticians who replaced the Stalinists in October 1956 supported modern
art in the second half of the 1950s and accepted it as the official (or
semi-official) art. What it was possible to show in public galleries, exhi-
bition halls and museums in Poland – abstract art, particularly informel
but also neo-constructivist – in Czechoslovakia had to be shown in
private studios, as the famous ‘Confrontations’ exhibitions in Prague
and Bratislava in 1960 and 1961 proved. In Hungary, the political
process of de-Stalinisation was the most radical, soon turning into the
de-Sovietisation of the country and the Uprising of October 1956. The
reaction to it was also the most violent and brutal. In the years following
the Uprising, the Communist government only once allowed the organi-
sation of an exhibition of modern art, the ‘Spring Exhibition’ in Mucsar-
nok in 1957. This took place in the same year as the so-called second
‘Exhibition of Modern Art’ in the Warsaw Zache˛ta Gallery. From that
o
eg[]on
time until the end of the 1960s, modern art shows were not officially
accepted in Hungary.
Although the political changes of 1956 in Central Europe gave spur
to both informel and neo-constructivist abstract art, the real legacy
CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 216 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM

216

would be neo-avant-garde art, a critique of modernism and of painting

as a symbol of high culture. The meaning of the neo-avant-garde and its
strategies in Central Europe are rooted in the second half of the 1950s.
The diverse conditions under which modernism would flourish in certain
Central European countries defined the extent and sense of neo-avant-
garde critiques of modernist painting in those particular countries, and
in turn defined the different status of the neo-avant-garde in relation to
politics.
In Poland, where the government was the most open towards
abstract art, the neo-avant-garde adhered to the modernist value system
of a non-political, autonomous art, placing the artwork above criticism.
Generally speaking, Polish art of the neo-avant-garde was the least
political and tended to avoid any direct political references, with a few
exceptions. The Hungarian neo-avant-garde, in contrast, was heavy
politicised due to political repression after the Budapest Uprising. Art in
Czechoslovakia, in the centres of Prague and Bratislava, was much more
complex. It was deeply involved in the cultural critique of the establish-
ment, it viewed both official (Socialist Realist) and non-official (abstract)
art as part of a single structure, since both of them – according to the
neo-avant-garde artists – shared the same system of values, namely the
traditional cult of easel painting.
One of the most prominent Polish artists of that moment, in both
abstract art and the neo-avant-garde, was Tadeusz Kantor. His informel
paintings made in 1957 were some of the key examples of that form in
Poland. In 1963, however, Kantor showed his Popular Exhibition at the
Krzysztofory Gallery in Kraków, which, by aiming to redefine his art
and direct it towards the neo-avant-garde critique of painting, created
the cult of the ready-made object. In the gallery space more than nine
hundred objects were collected. Some of them were ‘artistic’ in character
(drawings, projects, sketches); others were ordinary, banal, everyday
things. The latter have been called by the artist ‘low rank objects’, or the
‘poor ones’, and related to his theory concerning the significance of
everyday objects. Kantor’s art seems to approach the French nouveaux
réalistes, but analysis will reveal their distinct functions. French artists
wanted to replace easel painting with everyday objects and in this way
make their critique of high culture. This does not apply in Kantor’s case,
even if he shared a critique of easel painting. For him, the most impor-
tant function of the ‘low rank objects’ was a poetic one. He looked for a
particular poetry, even for the metaphysical dimension of such objects,
and definitely did not reject high culture, seeing it as his task to elevate
such objects to the rank of (high) art and define them as artworks. The
‘low rank objects’ exhibited in Kraków did not involve a critique of high
culture, nor were they related to politics. On the contrary, Kantor tried
to avoid any political connections in his art, or art in general, and to
keep his distance from politics. He followed the mood of the 1950s in
Poland where modernism (ie, abstract or informel art) was understood
as non-political expression, a response to Socialist Realism, recognised
by Polish artists as political art. Both his informel painting of 1957 and
the objects in the 1963 Popular Exhibition should be seen as Kantor’s
opposition to the political paradigm in art.
The memory of Socialist Realism was so fresh at the beginning of the
1960s that the critique of easel painting did not move on to the critique
CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 217 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM
8 Magdalena Radomska,
Miklós Erdély – Erdély
Miklós, manuscript in the
Institute of Art History,
Adam Mickiewicz
University, Pozna ń , Poland,
n[acu
e]t
2002, p 51
217
of high culture. Kantor sought elitist art (despite the name of the exhibi-
tion), rather than sharing a common neo-avant-garde approach to mass
culture and popular commodities as an alternative expression to high art.
Of course, the contextualisation of informel painting in the second half
of the 1950s undoubtedly suggests political meaning, since all cultural
processes were related to politics and precisely to the de-Stalinisation of
the country. However, even though de-Stalinisation was more or less
complete by the beginning of the 1960s, artists were still thinking in the
same paradigm. Due to the recollection of Socialist Realism as cultural
terror, they stood closer to the modernist myth of the autonomy of high
art rather than engaging in its critique and, in particular, the political
critique that artists in the West (and not only in the West as we shall see)
recognised as neo-avant-garde art. They were far from using everyday
objects as political, anti-establishment manifestations, as for example the
nouveaux réalistes and American neo-Dada artists did. Thus, the real
legacy of the political change of 1956 in Polish art was the depoliticisa-
tion of the neo-avant-garde and, at the same time, the conservation of
modernist myths of the pure autonomous work of art. Tadeusz Kantor is
the key and most visible figure in that process, the protagonist who
allows us to understand the neo-avant-garde in specific local terms.
The reason why Polish artists did not abandon the modernist para-
digm of autonomous art is the relative freedom they were allowed by the
Polish cultural authorities to produce art in modernist forms or styles.
Artists did not want to lose that unique freedom and therefore kept to an
unspoken agreement with state power not to get involved in any kind of
political art. For the authorities, this was a sort of strategy; for the artist,
it was a sort of conformity.
The situation in Hungary was different: 1956 saw a bloody and
unsuccessful attempt to change politics, followed by a harsh reaction.
That misfortune distinguished Hungary from Poland and Czechoslovakia
and made Hungarian art of the neo-avant-garde much more sensitive to
politics than in any other Central European country.
The artist Miklós Erdély is the key figure of the Hungarian neo-
avant-garde. He had some experience of abstract art at the turn of 1950s
but tried to avoid direct political references in his art. Yet some of his
works, for example Last Year’s Snow (1970), could be interpreted in a
political framework. The work consisted of a thermos flask supposed to
contain snow from the previous year. Whether it did or not cannot be
verified, since it is closed. Bearing in mind the fact that the late 1960s
and beginning of the 1970s represented a period of defrosting in
Hungarian culture after the repression of the Budapest Uprising, Last
Year’s Snow could be interpreted as a metaphor for post-1956 ideology,
frozen but still existing in a sealed form. The thermos flask prevents the
snow from defrosting – does this mean that the snow could be removed
from the container in the same form as it had been put in? But we do not
know whether the thermos flask really contains last year’s snow. This
work might be compared to Michel Foucault’s model of the prison,
based on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, with its watchtowers and ever-
present absent guards invisible to the prisoners. In both these cases, no
one knows whether the snow or the guards really exist.8 The same
applies to the repressive post-1956 ideology: we cannot see it now but
can presume that it still exists and could be dangerous.
CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 218 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM

218

Erdély’s work does not express political meaning directly, unlike

other Hungarian artists, among them Tamás Szentjóby. His Cooling
Water (1968) could be compared with Last Year’s Snow. Both refer to
post-1956 Hungarian politics, although the political metaphor of the
Cooling Water is far more explicit. Water in the jar has been alternately
heated and cooled – just as Hungarian politics has been – which has
played with cultural liberation on the one hand and limited free expres-
sion on the other. Szentjóby’s interest in politics applies particularly (but
not only) to his art production around 1968 as a response to the
Warsaw Pact’s military invasion of Czechoslovakia. His Czechoslovak

Tamás Szentjóby, Cooling Water, 1968, glass jar, water and heater; photo
from the artist’s collection
CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 219 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM
9 Karel Srp, ‘This is not
Happening but a…’, in
Akce, Slovo, Pohyb,
Prostor/Action, Word,
Movement, Space, ed Vit
Havránek, Galerie
hlavniho msta Prahy,
Prague, 1999, p 358
Milan Knižak, Novy Svet, Prague, 1964, photo from the artist’s collection
219
Radio (1968) or Portable Trench for Three Persons (1968) clearly
addressed political issues. Many Hungarian artists shared Szentjóby’s
approach to art, arguably because political change in 1956 did not
accelerate the ‘thaw’ process, as happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia
and even in the Soviet Union, but, on the contrary, froze into hard
Communist ideology, particularly in the context of cultural policy. This
situation stimulated a more radical strategy for free art in opposition to
bureaucratic and repressive policies, given that in other Communist
countries liberation processes were by comparison much more advanced.
There are surface similarities between Tadeusz Kantor’s art in Poland
and Milan Kni žak’s work in Czechoslovakia. Before turning to neo- zca[o
rn]
avant-gardes, both were interested in the informel, even if Kni žak’s zca[o
rn]
production in that field is less significant than Kantor’s.9 Both of them
left painting at the beginning of the 1960s (although Kantor returned to
it later) for the object and actions or happenings as their main means of
expression. Both of them wanted to plunge art into reality and dissolve it
into everyday life. But this is not the issue. The issue here is that while
Kantor did not question high culture and art, Knižak began to make a zca[o
rn]
radical critique not only of painting and modernism but of the entire
establishment, both official and unofficial, recognised as a complete
cultural universe.
In his performances Mariánské Láznĕ and Nový Svě t in 1962–1964
3 Milan Kni[
oan]rczk, Novy Svet, Prague, 1964, photo from the artist’s collection
ya]eu
c[t o
acern
[]
he accumulated everyday objects on the streets, thereby not only replacing
easel painting by the objects themselves but also changing the street into
the exhibition hall, and turning casual passers-by (to whom the ‘action’
was addressed) into the art viewers. Sometimes he also included himself
as an ‘art object’, lying down on a board so ‘that it was not clear whether
he was simulating a dead person for a photographer and whether he had
o
aczrn
[]
CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 220 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM

220

perhaps surrounded himself with objects that were related to him: a

broken violin, a tailor’s dummy and a crucifix’, as Karel Srp has
remarked.10 In such actions, he wanted to reject everything connected
with art at that moment, the pathos of art, shared by both official Socialist
Realists and unofficial ones who usually showed their abstract painting
in private studios and celebrated art events in practically the same way as
the official artists. Knižak recognised culture, whether official or unoffi-
zca[o
rn]

cial, as something that limited the freedom of human beings, since it was
based on comparable conventions in which easel painting and its social
status were the essential issue. Only the radical rejection of art, according
to the artist, would enable the creation of real freedom. Not only anti-art
activities were involved in such manifestations, but also a non-main-
stream way of life. This stands in real opposition to what Kantor did. He,
in contrast to Kni žak, really believed in the extraordinary, even romantic
zca[o
rn]

position of the artist, and looked for freedom not outside but inside the
art system. In short, while Kantor wanted to create himself as a ‘great
artist’, Kni žak searched for the human being whose activity could be free
zca[o
rn]

as much as possible, even from art.

Kni žak’s radical critique of art had a political meaning, however indi-
zca[o
rn]

rectly expressed. In Czechoslovakia, where cultural liberation was devel-

oping slowly, anything could have a political meaning if it was
connected with a discourse of freedom. But that was not the task of
Knižak’s activity. He wanted instead to go beyond politics and in search
o
aczrn
[]

of deeper foundations. Even later, in the course of the 1960s, Czech and
Slovak art did not, generally speaking, formulate a direct political
critique but took an ironic approach to the world in which politics, of
course, played a crucial role. Let me give one example, the Happsoc I, a
conceptual project in Bratislava, 1965 by Stano Filko and Alex
Mlynárčick, that included the whole reality of the city. The Happsoc
o
acrn[]

Manifesto, written by the artists together with Zita Kostrová, defined

‘happsoc’ in a dozen ways, including an ‘action that spurs the receptive-
ness and complex enjoyment of reality exempt from the stream of its
everyday existence’ and ‘a synthetic manifestation of social existence’.
According to the twelfth definition, ‘happsoc’ was ‘realised for the first
time in Bratislava from the first until the ninth of May in the year 1965
and has become a manifesto in itself’. The text also catalogues the
objects that were incorporated in the project: ‘Women – 138.93, Men –
128.727, Dogs – 49.991, Houses – 18.009, Balconies – 165.236,
Agriculture estates – 22, Plant buildings – 525, Flats – 64.725, Water
supply in flats – 40.070.’11
It is not clear whether the duration of the project was 1–9 May (as in
the quoted manifesto) or between 2 and 8 May (as stated in the list of
included ‘objects’). This is important because, if it were the former, then
May Day, celebrated in the entire Communist world, would have been
included in Happsoc I. This small but significant point gives an ironical
political framework to the entire project. The artists incorporated that
ritual political event of the Communist world as a ready-made object,
familiarised and deprived of ideological meaning, but did not make a
10 Ibid
direct political critique of it.
11 Stano Filko, 1965–1969: The unclear political situation of the late 1950s and the slow process
Tvorba, Works-Creation,
Werk-Shaffung, Ouvraged, of cultural liberation in the 1960s, which gained momentum in the
Bratislava, 1970 Prague Spring, helped artists to develop a radical cultural critique
CTTE_A_159012.fm Page 221 Tuesday, April 4, 2006 7:53 AM
12 Vitaly Patsiukov, ‘The
Second Russian Avant-
Garde’, in Forbidden Art.
The Postwar Russian
Avant-Garde, ed Garrett
White, Curatorial
Assistance and Distributed
Art Publishers, Los Angeles
and New York, 1998,
pp 201–31. Patsiukov used
this term after Hans-Peter
Riese’s essay published in
the catalogue The
Nonconformists: The
Second Russian Avant-
Garde, VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn, 1996. See ibid,
p 201
13 Margarita Tupitsyn,
Margins of Soviet Art,
Giancarlo Politi Editore,
Milan, 1989, p 71
14 Victor Tupitsyn,
‘Nonidentity within
Identity. Moscow
Communal Modernism,
1950s–1980s’, in
Nonconformist Art:
The Soviet Experience,
1956–1986, eds Alla
Rosenfeld and Norton T
Dodge, Thames & Hudson
in association with the Jane
Voorhees Zimmerli Art
Museum, Rutgers, New
Jersey, New York and
London, 1995, pp 64–100
221
derived from a particular Surrealist attitude to reality – particularly
strong in Czechoslovakia – and at the same time, to avoid any direct
political metaphors, as the Czechoslovak Surrealists were accustomed to
do. The situation in Czechoslovakia, which could be seen as the legacy
of relatively weak political change in 1956, did not produce an anxiety
of losing something they already had, since not much had been won in
the late 1950s. Consequently, on the one hand, they did not tend to
mythologise an autonomous high art, as Polish artists did, and, on the
other, they did not feel great pressure to defend free culture as the
Hungarians did, and – as a result – were not as involved in political crit-
icism through art.
Let us return finally to the USSR to retrace the map of the legacy of
political change in East European art. As mentioned earlier, the Manezh
exhibition in 1962 marked a sort of closure of the immediate legacy of
post-1956 political change. The next step in the cultural revival of non-
official art was the so-called ‘Bulldozer Exhibition’ of 1974, which accel-
erated the art scene in the country. Apart from the stagnation observable
in Russian art of the late 1960s and early 1970s, at least two fields of the
neo-avant-garde, sometimes called ‘the second avant-garde’,12 emerged:
sots-art and Moscow conceptualism.
Numerous papers have been written about this neo-avant-garde
phenomenon, particularly in the West but also recently in Russia. I will
limit myself to saying that these two approaches to Russian reality in the
post-1956 period are unique on the map of European postwar art. This
is due to Russian artists’ relative isolation from the Western art scene at
the time, combined with a peculiar Russian self-understanding of itself
as a non-Western country. Whereas there are some artists, for instance
Komar and Melamid, who joined both sots and conceptual art, these
two art productions and theories represent different approaches to
Russian reality. While one of the key artists of the first, Eric Bulatov,
dealt with the external features of Soviet reality, the protagonist of the
latter, Ilya Kabakov, was interested in the existential dimension of Soviet
life. Bulatov’s paintings, such as Horizon (1971–1972) or Krasikov
Street (1977), are ordinary landscapes that do not look like subversive
art production at all.13 However, looking more closely at them allows us
to notice some very clear visual references and reminders of the omnipo-
tence of Soviet ideology. Kabakov, on the other hand, tried to analyse a
personal environment in the framework of the so-called kommunalka
(communal dwelling), as for example in his famous series of albums Ten
Characters (1972–1975) in which there is a search for identity within
non-identity, if I can reverse Victor Tupitsyn’s argument.14 The same can
be said of Voktor Pivovarov’s series Plan for the Everyday Objects of a
Lonely Man (1975), which presents a kind of a catalogue of personal
objects belonging to the small private universe of someone who lives
alone in the kommunalka apartment.
The second wave of avant-garde art in the USSR, sots-art and
Moscow conceptualism, was further removed from the kind of art prac-
tised by Saburov, the protagonist of Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel. Saburov
represents a point of departure in this process, just as the de-Stalinisation
of the USSR in 1956 is the source of the whole process of dismantling
the Soviet bloc’s homogeneity and the beginning of a growing diversity
in East European visual culture.