Artystki polskie i ich sztuka 1900–1939. Cz. II. Przedstawicielki awangardy

Abstrakt

POLISH WOMEN ARTISTS AND TH EIR ART. IN THE PERIOD 1900–1939. PART II. REPRESENTATIVES OF THE AVANT-GARDE

Until the end of WWI the legal status of women put them in a disadvantaged position in every aspect of life: they were deprived of inheritance right, denied the right to make decisions concerning their own properties, their access to education was limited, and so were their career and professional options, not to mention their civil and political rights. The legal status of women was comparable to that of minors and mentally ill persons. Legal restrictions aff ected women artists to the same degree as it did the rest of the womenfolk. The law limited their educational opportunities, restricted their artistic freedom and narrowed down the range of opportunities for artistic development. In compliance with binding social norms, girls were usually prepared to assume the roles of mothers and housewives, while young women from the upper class were taught how to manage the house matters and organize social life. Until the 1890s the access of women to secondary schools and – even more so – to institutions of higher education was very restricted. It was only in the late 1890s that girls were finally allowed to take the school-leaving exams (matura). The first gymnasium for girls which gave them the opportunity to take the matura examination established on the Polish territories opened in Kraków in 1896. Civil law regulations which put women in a position of legal disablement remained binding on the Polish territories until 1921. The positive transformations which influenced the social and cultural condition of women in Poland resulted from the equal rights they received following the adoption of the March Constitution on March 17, 1921. Together with civil and political rights, women had been given the opportunity to pursue education on all available levels, including the right to be admitted into art academies. Before the outbreak of WWII there were 830 professional women artists actively pursuing their artistic careers in Poland. Women artists either worked individually, or joined various art groups and associations which became extremely popular and numerous in the 1920s and 30s. Zofi a Vorzimer was a member of the Formists group in Lvov, and Małgorzata Kubicka joined the avant-garde BUNT group in Poznań. Constructivism in Poland in the interwar period was represented by such women artists as Teresa Żarnower, Katarzyna Kobro, Helena Syrkus, Barbara Brukalska, Maria Nicz-Borowiak, Wanda Chodasiewicz-Grabowska, Maria Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska, Wanda Wolska and Aniela Menkes. The abovementioned artists belonged to the “Blok”, “Praesens” and „a. r.” groups. Margit Reich-Sielska was a member of the “artes” Artists Association (based in Lvov), while Maria Jarema and Berta Grünberg joined the Kraków Group. Women artists who became involved in the avant-garde movement usually joined the same art groups as their husbands or partners, in accordance with the current social conventions. What they wanted to achieve was to join in the dynamically evolving trends in avant-garde art, merge their own works with the works produced by men and prove that they were able to create art which was equally good as that produced by their male fellow artists. A group of women artists comprising Katarzyna Kobro, Maria Jarema, Teresa Żarnower and Maria Nicz-Borowiak cannot be perceived as anything else but an assortment of diverse individualities struggling to express their artistic talent parallel to the artistic experiments performed by their partners and friends, and not an integrated group creating art which could be classifi ed as a unique phenomenon labeled as “women’s art”. It was as late as the 1970s that this kind of “women’s art” – a phenomenon born out of the specifi cally female existential and cultural experience – started to evolve. Avant-garde women artists contributed significantly to the development of the Polish variants of constructivism and postconstructivism with their individual talents. Until recently, their great services for the development of Polish avant-garde and modernist art remained underestimated and excluded from the public attention. Th e fi rst, miniscule symptoms signalling the change in attitude toward women artists appeared in the 1970s, and beginning with the 1990s this situation started to change rapidly due to the infl uence of feminist thought.