Maria Pinińska Bereś
Agata Jakubowska: Ambiguous Liberation. The Early Works of Maria Pinińska-Bereś (2014)
(The text was published in: Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History Volume 83, Issue 2, 2014, p. 168-182.)
Most of Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s (1931–1999) early works still belong to her family. Although the artist is well known and appreciated in Poland, the first period of her career continues to remain marginalized by both art historians and curators.1When the National Museum in Wrocław bought in 2000 three sculptures from the Corset series (1965–1967) and included two of them into the permanent exhibition, they are exposed in a way suggesting that they do not belong to the core of the artist’s works. The main reason for this seems to be the fact that the works she created before 1968 do not fit in with the wellpreserved image of her oeuvre. A good illustration of this could be one of the most recent important expositions of the artist’s works entitled Three Women: Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, which was organized in the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw in 2011. The artists were presented as pioneers of Polish women’s art. Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s works were referred to as soft, pink forms […], openly linked with female sexuality.2Three Women: Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, curator: Ewa Toniak, Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw, 2011, http://zacheta.art.pl/en/article/view/203/trzy-kobiety-maria-pininska-beres-natalia-lach-lachowicz-i-ewa-partum [20.09.2013]. Her works from the early 1960s – which definitely are not soft, pink forms – were not exposed. They were mentioned in a newspaper accompanying the exhibition as works in which the future feminine aesthetics of her work was first heralded.3Three Women: Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, a newspaper accompanying the exhibition, http://zacheta.art.pl/files/wystawy/2011/Trzy%20kobiety_ %20gazeta_PL.pdf [20.09.2013]. This is a typical reception of those works – if they are considered at all then only as a sign of Pinińska-Bereś’s proper art that is to come. In the only text devoted solely to her early works – in Ewa Małgorzata Tatar’s article entitled Negotiating the Female Subject4E. Tatar, “Negocjując podmiot kobiecy – wczesne poszukiwania rzeźbiarskie Marii Pinińskiej-Bereś” [Negotiating the Female Subject – Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s Early Sculptural Experiments], Rzeźba polska, No 8, 2008, pp. 237–244. – continuity of the artist’s interest in culturally constructed femininity which, in my opinion, characterizes her art created after 1968, is underlined. In my text I am going to reject the dominant interpretive perspective of the ironic play with ‘femininity’; instead, I will analyze the artist’s early work in relation to her personal experiences. I will also show that the joyful mood that is so appreciated, both by traditional and feminist critics, was not present from the beginning, but rather slowly replaced the gloominess of her early works.
Maria Pinińska studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow in the studio of Xawery Dunikowski (1875–1964), a well-established sculptor, where she received her diploma in 1956. A joint exposition, which was organized in 1958 at the Dom Plastyka (House of Visual Artists) in Cracow with Jerzy Bereś (her husband) and Tadeusz Szpunar, also graduates of the Dunikowski studio, is considered to be her first exhibition. Her first real solo exhibition took place in 1970 at the Piwnica pod Baranami (Cellar under the Rams club). This exposition gathered most of the works created by the artist in the 1960s and could be considered a summary of the first period of Pinińska-Bereś’s artistic practice. Yet, it is clear now that her new style was slowly emerging at that time, a style that was soon defined by one of the critics in a text entitled ‘Pink, White, Soft’, as classical feminine art.5A. Osęka, “Różowe, białe, miękkie” [Pink, white, soft], Polska, No 314, 1980, pp. 14–15.
In a leaflet accompanying the above-mentioned exhibition the artist included the following commentary: My way from sculpture in stone, cement, through an adventure with cloth, to paper sculpture is not dictated by caprice, but is a kind of protest against professionally and commercially legitimized sculpture-monuments.6Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Piwnica pod Baranami, Cracow 1970, a leaflet accompanying the exhibition. With this declaration, the sculptor expressed her displeasure with how sculpture was developing in Poland. After completing her studies she did not want to join artists who treated their work as a craft, rather than as art, and who, caring only about the benefits, concentrated on prestigious official orders for monuments. The artist’s husband – Jerzy Bereś (1930–2012)7They married in 1957 and their daughter Bettina was born in 1958. – saw the situation in a similar way, which led them to initiate, in 1962, Rzeźba Roku (Sculpture of the Year), an annual exhibition with prizes, by which they hoped to promote ambitious avant-garde sculptural works.
At that time they were both seeking new artistic formulas. Bereś picked up unfinished wood as his main material to create a series of Phantoms first, and then Wheelbarrows. He kept using this material his whole life, even in his Manifestations (as he called his performances). Pinińska-Bereś experimented with materials throughout the whole decade of the 1960s. At the beginning she formed several sculptures in concrete (Rotundas), then gradually introduced fabric (in the form of quilted linen) and other delicate, lightweight materials such as burlap, papier maché, and plywood. At her first solo exhibition in 1970, she wanted to emphasize experimentation with non-traditional materials. There was only one work exposed that was made of concrete, but it was the one where she used cotton fabric as well – Lady with a bird from 1964. At that time she did not relate this change of material directly to the content of her works, or at least that relationship was not verbalized. This reflection came, or was expressed, later. In 1998, in a text entitled ‘And what about this feminism?’ she wrote: In 1965, when I broke away from crafted sculpture and I looked at my own personality, this female reservoir suddenly unlocked.8M. Pinińska-Bereś, “Jak to jest z tym feminizmem?” [How is It with This Feminism], in J. Ciesielskiej and A. Smalcerz (eds.), Sztuka kobiet, Bielsko-Biała: Bielska Gallery, 2001, pp. 194–195. By stating this she revealed that reaching out for new materials and techniques had not only been a reaction to what was happening in the sculptural environment in Poland, as she had claimed earlier – it also resulted from an attempt to find the best way to address her experience.
The Rotundas have the most ambiguous status in this process. Five sculptures created by the artist in the years 1961–1963, initially marked with numbers, now function as: Rotunda with votive offerings, Rotunda with a bell, Rotunda mill, Rotunda with a chain, Rotunda bell tower. These are compact concrete forms. Only one of them, which was unfortunately partially destroyed – Rotunda bell tower – was made of quilted cotton material.9It was destroyed by the artist as she needed the fabric – information from the artist’s daughter. These works were not included in the 1970 exhibition. The artist wrote about them that they were still in a sense written in the cultural course of crafted sculpture,10M. Pinińska-Bereś, “O feminizmie w sztuce?” [About Feminism in Art?], in B. Gajewska (ed.), Maria PinińskaBereś 1931–1999, Cracow: Bunkier Sztuki, 1999, p. 29. which explains why she did not want them to be exhibited with the other works that demonstrated her material experiments.
Rotunda means a building built on a circle, mostly with a dome, usually a church, but in the past it also meant – as Janina Ładnowska pointed out in her text devoted to PinińskaBereś – a lady’s overcoat, sleeveless, in the shape of a circle, extending downwards.11J. Ładnowska, “Ptyś i rąbek nieba” [A Puff and the Edge of the Sky], in ibid., p. 20. Pinińska-Bereś’s Rotundas oscillate between these two meanings. Some of them resemble female figures. In the artist’s archive there is a set of black-and-white photos from 1965 documenting the early arrangements of the Rotundas that suggest reading them as statues; for example, Rotunda with votive offerings stands on a platform covered with a napkin with lit candles in front of it. Thanks to the sacred aura created in the photo and the votive offerings embedded in concrete, this Rotunda seems to be a figure standing in an altar, perhaps that of the Virgin Mary. With the other Rotundas we return to the basic meaning of the title word. Rotunda mill and Rotunda bell tower resemble buildings more than they do statues. In the later arrangements – for instance an arrangement made in 1999 shortly before the artist’s death – all Rotundas change their character. Removed from platforms and placed on the ground, not far one from another, they bring to mind architectural miniatures, and the whole exhibition seems to be a kind of architectural reserve.
Just as architectural reserves present cultural monuments of a particular region, so in the early 1960s Pinińska-Bereś recreated a kind of mental landscape in which she came of age. In her later writings she talked about her family history as the context explaining her early sculptures. She confessed that she grew up under specific conditions, in an ultra-Catholic family whose head, because of deaths during the war, was the patriarch, a senior formed by the 19th century.12M. Pinińska-Bereś, Gorsety i wieże [Corsets and Towers], 1994, the artist’s archive. That senior was her grandfather, Oscar Heincel, born in 1887 near Sosnowiec, an engineer educated in Berlin who, along with his wife and their daughter Lya, settled in Poznań in 1926. Lya married Piotr Piniński, an officer in the 15 Cavalry Regiment. In 1931, a year after their marriage, Maria was born. Piotr Piniński was sent to the east of the country before the start of World War II and did not return. Many years later it turned out that he was murdered by the Soviet army in Kharkov. Throughout the war and after it, Lya with her children, including Mary, lived with her parents, and it was her father, the grandfather of Maria Pinińska, who had the role of being the head of the family. After the war they settled in Katowice, where Maria Pinińska attended an art college. She left her family and moved to Cracow to study sculpture.
Cracow is a very particular town in Poland, where – as Anna Markowska has written – there are more legends, old stories and customs than in any other city.13A. Markowska, Sztuka w Krzysztoforach, Między stylem a doświadczeniem [Art in Krzysztofory. Between Style and Experience], Cracow-Cieszyn: Art Association Cracow Group and Silesian University, 2000, p. 76. It is the former capital of the country, with Wawel Castle where kings were buried and which is still the most prestigious burial place in Poland. Cracow has many historical, often medieval buildings where cultural clubs and art galleries were organized in cellars; Piwnica pod Baranami, where Pinińska-Bereś’s exhibition in 1970 was organized, is also situated in a cellar in one of the buildings in the Main Square. Cracow is a city with a rich romantic tradition and multiple traces of culture developing during the Partition period (1795–1918), when culture was involved in fight for independence and for preservation of the Polish tradition.14Poland lost its independence in 1795 after the so-called Third Partition (of Polish land between Prussia, Austria and Russia) and regained it in 1918. Cracow was under Austrian governance. The latter was often looked for in the nearby highland regions and in the region’s inhabitants, who were, and still are, conservative and patriarchal.
It is in the context of the latter remarks that one has to perceive the work of artists in mid-twentieth-century Cracow who made references to Polish culture and history. Although the communist government in a way took over Polish folklore and turned it into one of its main export goods, there were still many artists in this milieu that continued the tradition of looking at rural societies as at a reservoir of authentic Polish culture. Jerzy Bereś’s art could be a good example in that matter, an important one here because it was created in the closest proximity to Pinińska-Bereś. As I have already mentioned, at the beginning of the 1960s he began creating the Phantoms, which were made of rough pieces of wood. These were joined with stones, ropes, and pieces of burlap, and often resembled primitive rural tools. Bereś also made special arrangements using his early sculptures with the same photographer that Pinińska-Bereś worked with – Wojciech Plewiński. He decided to expose them outside, in the fields, by which their references to nature became very strong. Phantoms were and are a testament to my getting on together with nature, Bereś wrote, as I entered an argument with civilization, and that in relation to the totalitarian communism.15J. Bereś, “Zwidy”, in J. Bereś (ed.), Wstyd. Między podmiotem a przedmiotem [Shame. Between Subject and Object], Cracow: Association Open Studio, 2002, p. 181. Pinińska-Bereś’s Rotundas are also rough, yet they lead to another set of associations. It is worth noticing that, contrary to gender stereotypes, it is he who refers to nature as looking for a rescue from the false political reality. She, in turn, makes references to the cultural landscape of an ultra-Catholic mentality with the chief sin of a body and the vision of damnation, which she referred to in her autocommentaries as the milieu she had grown up in.16Pinińska-Bereś, 2001, pp. 194–195. There is one more important difference in their attitude. For him, who was strongly influenced by the romantic tradition, it was Poland, his fatherland, that was at stake. Pinińska-Bereś did not seem to have been interested in acquiring this kind of position as an artist that has to fight for Poland. In her case references to the Polish tradition, to the rural Catholic culture, were used in a process of confronting her own past, a past that appears to have been gloomy and mysterious. Rotundas are heavy solid forms, sometimes with chains, that evoke feelings of enslavement. What is very important in these sculptures is the tension between the exterior and interior. Concrete forms often seem to suggest that they are a kind of shell armor for what should be hidden – and what could be revealed. In the Rotunda with votive offerings an intriguing element, in the back part of the sculpture, and thus not visible in most photographs, is a triangular recess with a hole in the middle surrounded by traces of keys.
The gloomy aura of these works was contrasted by the Rotunda bell tower, which differed from the previous works in this series in that it was made not of concrete but of quilted linen stretched over a metal frame. This form became even joyful by the fact that the frame was springy, and could be trimmed by pulling a string. The playful tone also characterized two other works made at that time – Lady with a bird, where instead of the earlier votive offerings she used a comb, ring and beads, and Lucy.17The 1970 Pinińska-Bereś’s exhibition was the only one at which Lucy was exposed. Today this sculpture is in a bad condition and requires restoration. For the artist, according to the statement that I have already quoted, what was crucial in these works was the introduction of linen as one of her main materials and sewing as one of the main techniques. This is what allowed later definition of her art as feminine.
Somewhat contrary to the artist’s intention, I propose to look at the above-mentioned works through the lens not of the later but of the earlier works. Lady with a bird and Lucy remind one of gravestones and seem to complement the cultural landscape that was drawn earlier by the artist. Lucy – as Ewa Tatar has suggested – refers to St Lucy who lived in the third century in Sicily.18Tatar, 2008. Lucy as a child secretly vowed chastity in order to beg for her mother’s recovery. Then she refused marriage and her would-be fiancé reported her as being a Christian. She was arrested and tortured in order to force her to give up her faith. When she stubbornly refused, she was locked in a brothel and forced into prostitution. In order to make herself less attractive, she poked out her eyes. Eventually the young disobedient woman was beheaded at the age of 23. Lucy’s dress as made by Pinińska-Bereś corresponds to what her character could have worn in a brothel. Both Lady with a bird and Lucy are wearing underwear that does not cover the body but, on the contrary, exposes its parts, especially the breasts. As was the case in relation to Rotundas, we are dealing here with a coupling of sexuality and religiosity. What is particularly important in the story of St Lucy, and what corresponds with the story as told by Pinińska-Bereś about her youth, is a combination of religion and a woman’s sexuality as two elements joined in exercising control over young women.
Earlier in my text I compared Pinińska-Bereś’s works to those of her husband in order to show the context in which she functioned. The Bereś who, as I wrote earlier, were looking at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s for new artistic formulas, found favorable conditions to develop their ideas in the milieu of the Grupa Krakowska [Cracow Group]. This was a group of avant-garde artists, established in 1957 (actually it transformed then from Grupa Młodych Plastyków), who referred to the inter-war tradition.19The first Grupa Krakowska functioned in 1933–37 and some of its participants joined the second Grupa Krakowska. Krzysztofory Gallery was their home. It consisted of a gallery and a club with a cafeteria where they gathered by sitting at a table called Olympus. Grupa Krakowska dominated the artists’ life in Cracow, and Tadeusz Kantor was the main figure there. Grupa Krakowska was elitist and formalized, one had to apply to become a member and then one had to pay fees. Pinińska-Bereś was accepted only in 1979, and she had her first exhibition in Krzysztofory in 1980. Yet she was a part of this artistic circle – which is documented by her sitting at the Olympus, sometimes next to Kantor – also because her husband was not only a member of the group, but also Kantor’s friend at that time.
I am convinced that she undertook some sort of an artistic dialog with her colleagues. Her Lady with a bird, for example, strongly reminds me of one of Tadeusz Kantor’s costumes – that of Daisy for Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Tadeusz Kantor, working as a painter and as a set and costume designer (it was later that he started creating his famous spectacles), prepared the scenography and costumes for Ionesco’s Rhinoceros that was staged in the Stary Teatr (Old Theater) in Cracow in 1961. Among the costumes there was a kind of corset for the female character of Daisy. It was later included by the artist in his ground-breaking Popular exhibition (Anti-exhibition) in 1963, where he used 937 objects of the lowest rank, to use his term, as what one considers in his art to be an embarrassing thing, marginal, deprived of artistic status.20J. Mytkowska, M. Jurkiewicz and A. Przywara, eds., Tadeusz Kantor z Archiwum Galerii Foksal [Tadeusz Kantor from the Gallery Foksal Archive], Warsaw: Foksal Gallery, 1998, p. 14–15. What is clearly visible in this costume project is his fascination with mannequins and some reminiscences of the surrealist usage of them or their parts.
It was in Cracow, in the milieu of Grupa Krakowska, that surrealist tendencies were the strongest in Poland, where generally speaking they did not develop much. And it is Kantor who is considered to have been one of the most influential artists in introducing these tendencies here.21Along with Jerzy Kujawski, who was much closer to the surrealists because he actually collaborated with them, but who did not have that strong a position in the Cracow art scene. See also D. Kuryłek, Przypadek Aleksandra Kobzdeja. Paradoksy obrazu w sztuce polskiej 1945–70, master’s thesis, Department of Art History, Jagiellonian University, Cracow 2005. Yet, Agnieszka Taborska, a Polish researcher of surrealism, observed that Polish artists who were close to the surrealist aesthetics referred more often to the uncanny tendency that flourished in Cracow at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (with such artists as Jacek Malczewski and Józef Mehoffer) than to Breton’s theories. From the 1930s till today there are, she notes, individualities in Polish art that have a surreal imagination, but they don’t explore their unconscious.22A. Taborska, “Wstęp. Gdyby Witkacy żył nad Sekwaną…” [Introduction. If Witkacy lived by the Seine…], in J. Banasiak (ed.), Zmęczeni rzeczywiśtoscią. Rozmowy z artystami [Tired with the Reality. Interviews with Artists], Warsaw: 40,000 Painters, 2009, pp. 10–11.
This latter remark is helpful in drawing a comparison between Kantor’s costume and Pinińska-Bereś’s sculpture of Lady with a bird, and in acknowledging her specificity on the Cracow art scene. When reviewing the spectacle, Andrzej Wirth wrote that Kantor’s costumes destroyed it as they made it impossible to demonstrate the metamorphosis of the play’s protagonists. The latter cannot be shown as undergoing a transformation from human to nonhuman forms because they are deformed from the very beginning.23Andrzej Wirth, “Ionesco skantoryzowany” [Ionesco Kantorianized], Nowa Kultura, No 13, 1961. Available online http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/126102.html (accessed 11 November 2013). Daisy’s costume is, in fact, very stiff and grotesque. Its main purpose seems to have been to designate a woman by exposing two breastlike forms. In the Popular exhibition it was hanging in a wardrobe as if waiting for a person to wear it. It was a part of the rich environment that functioned as the Kantor’s statement on what art and an art work are.
In the case of Pinińska-Bereś’s early sculptures we are dealing with much more individualized representations of female breasts. Two of her above-mentioned works are of special importance here: Rotunda with a chain and Lady with a bird. The first one is, in fact, a single big breast embedded in a bigger form. A thick chain, a loose part of the sculpture, is each time slightly differently put on the concrete form, but always in such a way that it seems to be tying up a body. If we have in mind the basic meaning of the word Rotunda, then we can think here about some kind of a tower and a person that is imprisoned in it. And tortured perhaps. The body itself, the breast’s skin, is very rough, as if carrying traces of acts of violence. Lady with a bird is much more subtle. Her breasts, which are exposed through holes in the lady’s lingerie, are delicate. If one compares them with what Kantor proposed in Daisy’s costume, then their vulnerability is what strikes one the most. While in his costume they were frontal and aggressive, here they seem fragile. He showed breasts as if detached from a real body and from a female subject. In the above-quoted sentence he used the word embarrassing to describe the status of such objects in his art. The word could be used in relation to Pinińska-Bereś’s sculptures as well, yet with a reference not to discussions within art discourse, but to sensitivity of the body and the affective dimension of the process of its representation.
In 1965, Pinińska-Bereś wrote a text which was to announce a new series of works:
Corsets Real / Corsets Mental / Throughout the centuries they have accompanied women / they constrict / deform / body, psyche / bodies go by / pass away / corsets remain / grandmother’s corsets / great-grandmother’s / great-great-grandmother’s / cages of young bodies / cages of hot hearts / cages of mind / imagination / through the ages it holds captive / corset – a cry from the darkness.24Gajewska, 1999, pp. 30–31.
Corsets belonged to the past and had a somewhat archaic character when the artist referred to them. Also, it was hard to find the fetishist form of the corset in Poland, and thus far from the obvious point of reference, as the sex industry did not develop in that country. It is worth remembering, when analyzing Pinińska-Bereś’s works, that real socialist countries were very puritanical and the sex industry did not develop here.25Especially Władysław Gomułka who ruled the Communist Party in the 1960s was known for his puritanism. Thus, although the artist began her text with real corsets, it does not seem that a piece of cloth which shapes the body, at the cost of unspeakable discomfort and health injuries, was her reference point. Corsets should be understood here metaphorically as formative/ deformative for the entire personality.
We find confirmation of these remarks in the forms of Pinińska-Bereś’s works. Let us take a look at one of these works – Standing corset (1967) – whose status is ambiguous. On the one hand, it is a stiff form that could be filled with a body. Its material, burlap and leather strings, could loosely refer to real corsets which usually looked different from the eroticized elegant versions we often have in mind. On the other hand, like the Rotundas, it is to some extent anthropomorphized, especially because of the three thick branches taking on the role of legs. The leather belts strengthen the sense of oppression, and even of physical violence. The problem of imprisonment (even slavery, to say it more strongly) is emphasized by a chain attached to one of the legs. This is the chain which, by association with a doghouse chain, links this work with the earlier Rotundas and the cultural landscape they refer to.
One can think of a corset as a kind of armor which aims at preventing anything from coming out. What could come out is to be seen by looking into the Standing corset. Inside there is delicate (especially in comparison to the outer burlap) pink cotton linen spread out that reminds one of bedclothes, but also evokes the flesh. The most touching element of the work is the long, straight, real black hair glued to this fabric. The hair looks as if it had been falling down upon the body or lying on the pillow and was trimmed by the edge of the corset. This hair can easily be identified, on the basis of the photographs, as belonging to the artist herself.26This is the only work in which the artist used her body directly.
A change in a haircut is a very significant event in most cultures. In more traditional cultures it is often a part of the passage rites designating a change in the social status. In modern cultures, it remains an element of communication. In the case of women it is usually referred to in terms of sexuality, as in the case of popular movie scenes showing a woman loosening her hair, which so far was carefully tied, which is clearly a sign of her opening up to a sexual adventure. On the contrary, a radical haircut often refers to a taming of sexual energy. In the Standing corset it is the corset, or rather what it refers to, that seems responsible for the restrictions put on sexuality. In the artist’s archive there are several sketches that show she was interested not only in corsets, but also in chastity belts – which strengthens this aspect. This is even more obvious in relation to another corset, that of Corset on a board (1967), which takes the form of an elongated board on which a form resembling a corset, or a chastity belt, is attached in such a way that the leather belts seize the board. The board is covered with delicate drawings of naked bodies and with footprints at one of its ends, by which it clearly evokes a bed.
When talking about Corsets it is important to make one more remark. In Pinińska-Bereś’s above-quoted poetic text she did not make any references to contemporary popular culture with its expectations toward the female body (this will come a little later in her art). It was her family, and more precisely speaking the women in her family that appeared to be responsible for transferring mental restrictions. The artist’s listing of a grandmother, greatgrandmother and great-great-grandmother seems to be an answer to Lucy Irigaray’s appeal to building a feminine genealogy, which she formulated in the next decade.27L. Irigaray, Le corps-à-corps avec la mère [Body-againstBody with the Mother], Québec: Le Plein Lune, 1981. The answer is à rebours, as in the case of Pinińska-Bereś’s art, this feminine genealogy is not a source of female power but rather of enslavement. These are mothers and their mothers, not the male members of the family, who destroy corps-à- corps by inclining their daughters to shape their minds by the use of corsets.
In this light Pinińska-Bereś’s earlier works, especially those dealing with breasts, gain new meaning as well. They can be seen as referring to the artist’s ambivalent relation to her mother who, as one can assume from her statements, was not able to protect her from the patriarchal patriarch. What makes these family references even more interesting is the fact that Pinińska-Bereś’s drawings of corsets and chastity belts were made on single pieces of paper in lines that were typical of primary school notebooks. On one of them there is a fragment of a sentence clearly written by a child – probably the artist’s daughter, Bettina, who had just started school at that time. With this we obtain a richer picture of Pinińska-Bereś, who is not the last in the lineage of women. Who is not only a daughter, but also a mother.28I would like to thank Monika Bakke for drawing my attention to this.
When talking about the feminine genealogy, it is also worth mentioning Pinińska-Bereś’s relationships with other women artists. One of the reasons why the feminist art movement did not develop in communist Poland was that women worked separately. In the milieu of the Grupa Krakowska there were several women artists; for example, Maria Jarema, Jadwiga Maziarska, Maria Stangret, and Erna Rosenstein – but they never decided to collaborate as women.29See Jadwiga Maziarska’s letters to Erna Rosenstein in: Kolekcjonowanie świata. Jadwiga Maziarska [Collecting the World. Jadwiga Maziarska], Ed. B. Piwowarska, Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2005. The fact that they seldom developed an artistic conversation is meaningful. When writing about Pinińska-Bereś’s representation of breasts, I could have mentioned Maria Jarema alongside Tadeusz Kantor. The former, a representative of the pre-war avant-garde, also worked in the theater, and it was in her costume for a character from Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s Cuttlefish that the stiff breasts appeared for the first time.30It was the costume for Alice d’Or. The Cuttlefish inaugurated a new theatrical scene in Cracow Cricot 2. See more in: B. Ilkosz, Maria Jarema 1908–1958, Warsaw– Wrocław: Institute of Art Promotion and National Museum in Wrocław, 1998, pp. 58–63, 189–191. The reason for my concentrating on Kantor, instead of on Jarema, is that, in my opinion, it was he who was Pinińska-Bereś’s point of reference. Jarema’s costume was made for a 1956 spectacle that was directed by Kantor, who probably referred to it in his 1961 Rhinoceros as if paying homage to Jarema, who had died three years earlier.31He also referred to her costumes from Circus (1957) in his performance Hommage à Maria Jarema in 1968. Jarema, with whom he had collaborated for several years, was the only woman artist he really truly appreciated, and it seems that for Pinińska-Bereś it was not only Jarema herself, but mainly his appreciation of her that mattered.
At the 1970 exhibition the Corsets appeared alongside new works in which the mood had changed from somber to more playful. It is clearly visible when one compares works that in some way correspond to one another, for example, the Corset on a board with Table II – Feast (1968). What links these sculptures is the similar idea of a longitudinal board as a base of a composition to which some items are fixed. What they also have in common is their reference to the household, not to the outer surroundings that characterized earlier works.32Later there appeared the term “psycho-small-furniture” to designate Pinińska-Bereś’s works created at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. I interpreted the Corset on a board as a representation of a bed; in the case of the second work the artist pointed to a table in its title. It is the table on which a woman is lying. Her figure is partly drawn, partly represented by body fragments (breasts and a leg) which are made of paper maché. There is a tablecloth and table utensils are attached to the board, which makes this woman a dish ready to be eaten.
In a fairly obvious way this work reminds one of the performance Le Festin made by Meret Oppenheim twice in 1959; in Bern and then in Paris. I do not know whether Pinińska-Bereś knew anything about this work, but it cannot be ruled out.33Ewa Tatar in her text “Sztuka Marii Pinińskiej-Bereś i surrealistycznie rozumiana korporalność” [The Art of Maria Pinińska-Bereś and Surrealist Corporeality], 2010 (http://www.intertekst.pl/201_artykul.html, 05.05.2013) reproduced these two works together, yet she did not give any comments on this comparison. Similarities between Pinińska-Bereś and surrealist women artists are also mentioned in A. Kostołowski, “Azyl Marii” [Maria’s Retreat], in C. Pieczyński (ed.), Maria Pinińska-Bereś. Imaginarium cielesności [Maria Pinińska-Bereś. Imaginarium of Corporeality], Sopot: PGS Gallery, 2012. Available online: http://www.sztukpuk.art.pl/documents/ 764.html (accessed 11 November 2013). I have already discussed the fact that the artistic milieu in which she functioned was interested in surrealism and followed the development of the movement. The second execution of Oppenheim’s action, made at the request of Andre Breton at the opening of the EROS exhibition (Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surrealism) was notorious, and its echoes probably reached Cracow.
In the case of Pinińska-Bereś’s work viewers are not dealing with the real presence of a female body (only its representation), nor with real food that can be eaten by them (only a suggestion of consumption), as was the case in Oppenheim’s performance. It is worth remembering that the two performances of Le Festin differed because of the contexts. The first one was executed at the beginning of spring and was a part of the Fête de printemps. A female body was combined with the food of the season and it was thought to refer to the process of vegetation and the emergence of vital powers. This Le Festin was performed for a small group of three couples who took part in a kind of ritual. The one performed at the EROS exhibition had a completely different character. It was received not as an intimate ritual, but as a public cannibalistic party. A female body was turned into an object of the erotic satisfaction of its viewers. Pinińska-Bereś’s work is much closer to the second version of Le Festin, especially that viewers are not asked to eat food served on the body of a woman – they are served a woman.34It is also not without meaning that it was not a performance but an object – a table-woman.
Let us return to the comparison of Corset on a board with Table II. In the case of the first work a body is clearly repressed. It is barely visible in the delicate drawings. In the case of Table II it is exposed. The erotic female body is not hidden under a corset any more. It is as if liberated. Ewa Tatar wrote that Pinińska-Bereś’s art appears to be a mental revolution that is fought in the field of eroticism, and she supported her argument with the artist’s statements from the texts that I have already quoted.35Tatar, 2008. The sculptor admitted there that already as an 11- or 12-year-old girl she felt disappointed and was disgusted by the fact that she was a woman. There was the fear of a fallen woman present […] Only damsels who were disgusted by the sexual sphere had a chance to avoid imbroglio. […] Women were not allowed to talk publicly about sex.36Pinińska-Bereś, 2001, pp. 194–195. In this light the artist’s direct reference to sexuality can be seen as liberation. At first, in the earlier works, she concentrated on repression of the female sexual experience. Later she abandoned this perspective of enslavement and started creating works that seem to have been an affirmative exploration of eroticism;37It could have been influenced by contacts of the artists from the Grupa Krakowska with hippies. See more: K. Sipowicz, Hipisi w PRL-u [Hippies in the Polish People’s Republic], Warsaw: Baobab, 2008 (especially an interview with Jerzy Bereś, pp. 333–335). yet this takes place when her representations of the female body become ambiguous because of its objectification.
The comparison with Meret Oppenheim’s Le Festin leads one to notice another dimension of this ambiguous liberation. They both functioned in artistic circles centered around strong male figures: around Andre Breton in the case of Oppenheim and around Tadeusz Kantor in the case of Pinińska-Bereś. And they both suffered from under-appreciation. Pinińska-Bereś for many years functioned as the wife of Jerzy Bereś who had a much better position in the Grupa Krakowska. Her first exhibition at Krzysztofory Gallery was organized only in 1980, a year earlier she had finally been admitted to the Grupa Krakowska. Anna Markowska, in her text entitled Women and the Grupa Krakowska, formulated similar objections to those being raised against surrealists. She wrote about the group as about a male community that aimed at sustaining elite modernism and did nothing to introduce changes in the social structure, nor to destabilize traditional roles and the position of the artist.38A. Markowska, Dwa przełomy. Sztuka polska po 1955 i 1989 roku [Two Breakthroughs. Polish Art after 1955 and 1989], Toruń: Mikołaj Kopernik University Press, 2012, p. 225. Women artists working in such an environment often play a double game, feminist-misogynistic. This is what observed Gwen Raaberg in relation to Oppenheim, writing that Le Festin opens a gap between women as male objects of desire and the female subject who assembled it.39Gwen Raaberg, “The Problematics of Women and Surrealism”, in M. A. Caws, R. Keunzli and G. Raaberg (eds.), Surrealism and Women, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 5.
Pinińska-Bereś’s career seems to be a confirmation of these allegations and of efficacy of her strategy. She began to be recognized and applauded when her works started reflecting traditional gender roles.40It is worth mentioning that another Polish woman artist who addressed gender issues in her art in the 1960s – Magdalena Abakanowicz – chose a completely different track for her career. She decided to remove those qualities of her art that were recognized as referring to the female experience and body and to turn her art into a universalist discourse on humanity. See A. Jakubowska, “Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Abakans and the Feminist Revolution”, in Sascha Bru et al. (eds.), Regarding the Popular: High and Low Culture in the Avant-Garde and Modernism, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, vol. 2, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter Inc., 2011, pp. 253–265. Although no reviews were published (just short notes) after the opening of the 1970 exhibition, it is clear today that art critics and curators found what Pinińska-Bereś showed to be truly interesting, and that her career soon flourished. In the 1970s she had several solo exhibitions organized in major Polish galleries, which finally allowed her to be admitted into the Grupa Krakowska. In that decade the qualities of her art could be described as feminine, and contrasted with the masculine work of her husband. This process began to gradually take place at the end of the period I am writing about here. The usage of quilted fabrics was the first sign of this. Pinińska-Bereś incorporated them into her art; for example, by arranging the Rotundas in such a way that they stood on small quilts. Then the artist reached for other soft materials that were to gradually replace the concrete (it is worth remembering here that the Rotundas did not appear at the 1970 exhibition). She also concentrated on an explicit representation of the female body, and turned the color pink into her trademark that worked – as Maria Hussakowska observed – as a sign of any female corporeality.41M. Hussakowska, “Thing Pink”, in Gajewska, 1999, p. 154. The author claims that in the Pinińska-Bereś’s art from the 1970s on we deal with a new category of object d’art labeled by her “thing pink”. Along with this process her earlier works, which were more gloomy and introspective, started disappearing from the artistic discourse.
- 1When the National Museum in Wrocław bought in 2000 three sculptures from the Corset series (1965–1967) and included two of them into the permanent exhibition, they are exposed in a way suggesting that they do not belong to the core of the artist’s works.
- 2Three Women: Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, curator: Ewa Toniak, Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw, 2011, http://zacheta.art.pl/en/article/view/203/trzy-kobiety-maria-pininska-beres-natalia-lach-lachowicz-i-ewa-partum [20.09.2013].
- 3Three Women: Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, a newspaper accompanying the exhibition, http://zacheta.art.pl/files/wystawy/2011/Trzy%20kobiety_ %20gazeta_PL.pdf [20.09.2013].
- 4E. Tatar, “Negocjując podmiot kobiecy – wczesne poszukiwania rzeźbiarskie Marii Pinińskiej-Bereś” [Negotiating the Female Subject – Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s Early Sculptural Experiments], Rzeźba polska, No 8, 2008, pp. 237–244.
- 5A. Osęka, “Różowe, białe, miękkie” [Pink, white, soft], Polska, No 314, 1980, pp. 14–15.
- 6Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Piwnica pod Baranami, Cracow 1970, a leaflet accompanying the exhibition.
- 7They married in 1957 and their daughter Bettina was born in 1958.
- 8M. Pinińska-Bereś, “Jak to jest z tym feminizmem?” [How is It with This Feminism], in J. Ciesielskiej and A. Smalcerz (eds.), Sztuka kobiet, Bielsko-Biała: Bielska Gallery, 2001, pp. 194–195.
- 9It was destroyed by the artist as she needed the fabric – information from the artist’s daughter.
- 10M. Pinińska-Bereś, “O feminizmie w sztuce?” [About Feminism in Art?], in B. Gajewska (ed.), Maria PinińskaBereś 1931–1999, Cracow: Bunkier Sztuki, 1999, p. 29.
- 11J. Ładnowska, “Ptyś i rąbek nieba” [A Puff and the Edge of the Sky], in ibid., p. 20.
- 12M. Pinińska-Bereś, Gorsety i wieże [Corsets and Towers], 1994, the artist’s archive.
- 13A. Markowska, Sztuka w Krzysztoforach, Między stylem a doświadczeniem [Art in Krzysztofory. Between Style and Experience], Cracow-Cieszyn: Art Association Cracow Group and Silesian University, 2000, p. 76.
- 14Poland lost its independence in 1795 after the so-called Third Partition (of Polish land between Prussia, Austria and Russia) and regained it in 1918. Cracow was under Austrian governance.
- 15J. Bereś, “Zwidy”, in J. Bereś (ed.), Wstyd. Między podmiotem a przedmiotem [Shame. Between Subject and Object], Cracow: Association Open Studio, 2002, p. 181.
- 16Pinińska-Bereś, 2001, pp. 194–195.
- 17The 1970 Pinińska-Bereś’s exhibition was the only one at which Lucy was exposed. Today this sculpture is in a bad condition and requires restoration.
- 18Tatar, 2008.
- 19The first Grupa Krakowska functioned in 1933–37 and some of its participants joined the second Grupa Krakowska.
- 20J. Mytkowska, M. Jurkiewicz and A. Przywara, eds., Tadeusz Kantor z Archiwum Galerii Foksal [Tadeusz Kantor from the Gallery Foksal Archive], Warsaw: Foksal Gallery, 1998, p. 14–15.
- 21Along with Jerzy Kujawski, who was much closer to the surrealists because he actually collaborated with them, but who did not have that strong a position in the Cracow art scene. See also D. Kuryłek, Przypadek Aleksandra Kobzdeja. Paradoksy obrazu w sztuce polskiej 1945–70, master’s thesis, Department of Art History, Jagiellonian University, Cracow 2005.
- 22A. Taborska, “Wstęp. Gdyby Witkacy żył nad Sekwaną…” [Introduction. If Witkacy lived by the Seine…], in J. Banasiak (ed.), Zmęczeni rzeczywiśtoscią. Rozmowy z artystami [Tired with the Reality. Interviews with Artists], Warsaw: 40,000 Painters, 2009, pp. 10–11.
- 23Andrzej Wirth, “Ionesco skantoryzowany” [Ionesco Kantorianized], Nowa Kultura, No 13, 1961. Available online http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/126102.html (accessed 11 November 2013).
- 24Gajewska, 1999, pp. 30–31.
- 25Especially Władysław Gomułka who ruled the Communist Party in the 1960s was known for his puritanism.
- 26This is the only work in which the artist used her body directly.
- 27L. Irigaray, Le corps-à-corps avec la mère [Body-againstBody with the Mother], Québec: Le Plein Lune, 1981.
- 28I would like to thank Monika Bakke for drawing my attention to this.
- 29See Jadwiga Maziarska’s letters to Erna Rosenstein in: Kolekcjonowanie świata. Jadwiga Maziarska [Collecting the World. Jadwiga Maziarska], Ed. B. Piwowarska, Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2005.
- 30It was the costume for Alice d’Or. The Cuttlefish inaugurated a new theatrical scene in Cracow Cricot 2. See more in: B. Ilkosz, Maria Jarema 1908–1958, Warsaw– Wrocław: Institute of Art Promotion and National Museum in Wrocław, 1998, pp. 58–63, 189–191.
- 31He also referred to her costumes from Circus (1957) in his performance Hommage à Maria Jarema in 1968.
- 32Later there appeared the term “psycho-small-furniture” to designate Pinińska-Bereś’s works created at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s.
- 33Ewa Tatar in her text “Sztuka Marii Pinińskiej-Bereś i surrealistycznie rozumiana korporalność” [The Art of Maria Pinińska-Bereś and Surrealist Corporeality], 2010 (http://www.intertekst.pl/201_artykul.html, 05.05.2013) reproduced these two works together, yet she did not give any comments on this comparison. Similarities between Pinińska-Bereś and surrealist women artists are also mentioned in A. Kostołowski, “Azyl Marii” [Maria’s Retreat], in C. Pieczyński (ed.), Maria Pinińska-Bereś. Imaginarium cielesności [Maria Pinińska-Bereś. Imaginarium of Corporeality], Sopot: PGS Gallery, 2012. Available online: http://www.sztukpuk.art.pl/documents/ 764.html (accessed 11 November 2013).
- 34It is also not without meaning that it was not a performance but an object – a table-woman.
- 35Tatar, 2008.
- 36Pinińska-Bereś, 2001, pp. 194–195.
- 37It could have been influenced by contacts of the artists from the Grupa Krakowska with hippies. See more: K. Sipowicz, Hipisi w PRL-u [Hippies in the Polish People’s Republic], Warsaw: Baobab, 2008 (especially an interview with Jerzy Bereś, pp. 333–335).
- 38A. Markowska, Dwa przełomy. Sztuka polska po 1955 i 1989 roku [Two Breakthroughs. Polish Art after 1955 and 1989], Toruń: Mikołaj Kopernik University Press, 2012, p. 225.
- 39Gwen Raaberg, “The Problematics of Women and Surrealism”, in M. A. Caws, R. Keunzli and G. Raaberg (eds.), Surrealism and Women, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 5.
- 40It is worth mentioning that another Polish woman artist who addressed gender issues in her art in the 1960s – Magdalena Abakanowicz – chose a completely different track for her career. She decided to remove those qualities of her art that were recognized as referring to the female experience and body and to turn her art into a universalist discourse on humanity. See A. Jakubowska, “Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Abakans and the Feminist Revolution”, in Sascha Bru et al. (eds.), Regarding the Popular: High and Low Culture in the Avant-Garde and Modernism, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, vol. 2, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter Inc., 2011, pp. 253–265.
- 41M. Hussakowska, “Thing Pink”, in Gajewska, 1999, p. 154. The author claims that in the Pinińska-Bereś’s art from the 1970s on we deal with a new category of object d’art labeled by her “thing pink”.