Agata Jakubowska: Personalising the Global History of Pop Art. Alina Szapocznikow and Maria Pinińska-Bereś (2017)

(The text was published in: Öhrner, Annika (ed.) Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop. Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies, Södertörn Studies in Art History and Aesthetics, Södertörn 2017, s. 239-259)

As an art historian dealing with women artists who lived and worked in Poland, the country where art canons are not formulated, I am always excited by exhibitions that promise to challenge Western and masculine art dominancy. The feelings that accompany their reception are, however, ambiguous. It is fascinating, and sometimes frustrating, to observe which women artists on which occasions are included (or which are not) and how this influences their recognition outside Poland. It is interesting, and sometimes disappointing, to learn how their art is contextualised and (mis)understood, thanks to brilliant ideas and at times shortcomings in the historical knowledge of the local.

As far as the field that is addressed in this text is concerned – i.e. women artists and pop – I have had lately several occasions for that sort of excitements. In 2010, two exhibitions dealing with women artists and pop were organised. Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 originated at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and was later shown in three other North American cities. Power Up: Female Pop Art was on view in the Kunsthalle Wien. They both aimed at presenting women artists associated with pop art that mostly have been relegated to the margins of [its] history.¹ Both attempted to break the dominance of the Anglo-American version of pop, yet they had no ambition of really globalising pop art. No works of women artists from other places, such as Eastern Europe, were shown – with one exception, a photo of Alina Szapocznikow’s Stella (1968) was reproduced in the book accompanying the Seductive Subversion exhibition. As Kalliopi Minioudaki, one of its editors, explained to me, she had learned too late about the artist to include her into the exhibition and texts, yet the photo could be added.²

Two exhibitions were opened in 2015 whose authors had an ambition of presenting pop art from artists across the globe – International Pop at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and The World Goes Pop at the Tate Modern. In both cases it was underlined that in different parts of the world, popular culture stimulated artists – and the curators aim was to show multiple takes on pop art. Both exhibitions included Natalia LL with her Consumer Art (1972-1974), and the second also showed Maria Pinińska-Bereś’ pieces Love Machine (1969), Is a Woman a Human Being? (1972), and Screen(1973). The International Pop catalogue does not offer any passages devoted to Natalia LL. The situation is different in the case of The World Goes Pop catalogue, as that includes a text by Kalliopi Minioudaki – an independent art historian who has been working on women of pop for a long time. In her article entitled Feminist Eruptions in Pop Beyond Borders she aims at lifting geocultural and chronological borders among the women of pop, yet with due attention to its locational specificities.

Minioudaki’s text is a good example of global art history that proposes to move on our focus from binary relationships, such as West – East, centre – periphery, into a multifocal and polyphonic set of relations. This perspective is a response to the challenge posed by global connectivity to regionally based research, the latter being connected with identity formation processes, often of a nationalistic character. It advocates a transcultural overview instead of what is most often executed, in one of two types of projects. The first aims at capturing the dynamics of entanglement and cultural exchange, illustrating the way works, people, and ideas travelled across different kinds of borders. The second is of a more comparative nature and offers a juxta-position of similar artistic phenomena developed in different parts of the world in order to present multiple versions of global issues. Klara Kemp-Welch’s project Networking the Block and Piotr Piotrowski’s East-European Art Seen from Global Perspective can serve as examples of these attitudes, here in relation to East-European art.³ Kemp-Welch concentrates on international exchange among East-European unofficial artists in the period 1968-1981; for Piotrowski, it was just a pretext to offer comparative interpretation of their art. Most of the exhibitions that inscribe themselves into global art history, as the forementioned pop art show, correspond with the second type. Yet, there are not many art historians who are able and willing to undertake such a challenge to grasp particular art phenomena from the global perspective, as that requires access to a multiplicity of sources and the desire/possibility of understanding a multiplicity of social/cultural/financial/ political contexts. As a result, in practice countries or regions are very often used again as geographical frames. On the level of texts, the global perspective is offered in the form of a set of locally (country or region) oriented research papers, something that is clearly visible in catalogues. Particular artists are often closed in the frame they were just about to be freed from and risk being a representative of a specific country. The field of women artist and pop is special in this regard thanks to one scholar – the aforementioned Kalliopi Minioudaki. In her text in The World Goes Pop exhibition catalogue, she promises to unveil important transnational feminist affinities that in all their diversity underpin the radical intersections of women and pop across its centres and peripheries.⁴ What is crucial is that in her overview of numerous artworks from different parts of the world she offers an analysis of the global phenomenon that is always, in the case of each artist and her pieces, related to the local.

In the following, I propose a detailed analysis of works with the reference to pop art from two Polish sculptors – Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) and Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931-1999). My aim is to challenge the practice of country/region-oriented analysis in a way that corresponds to Minioudaki’s perspective. This is going beyond borders, yet not forgetting the local. Hardly any country has a homogenous art scene, obviously. Nor does Poland. Similarly evident is that in the case of every country we can point out numerous aspects of social, financial and political life that determine conditions of art production and reception. The artists that I am going to juxtapose here – Alina Szapocznikow and Maria Pinińska-Bereś – function as Polish artists. I will compare them, taking into account the local conditions and simultaneously pointing out differences that are the result of different career tracks and also diverse personal experiences. I will globalise the history of the Polish version of pop art, but also personalise the global history of pop.

Maria Pinińska-Bereś and Alina Szapocznikow were almost of the same age – Szapocznikow was born in 1926 in Kalisz, Pinińska in 1931 in Poznan. Their origins strongly influenced them especially at the beginnings of their artistic careers, stronger than what is normally the case, if there is anything “normal” in this matter. Szapocznikow, being of Jewish origin, spent the Second World War mostly in ghettos and camps with her mother (her father died before the war broke out).⁵ Pinińska-Bereś lost her father, who was a Polish officer; he was killed in Kharkov at the beginning of the war. Her family’s safety was assured by her grandfather on her mother’s side, who had an old German passport (he was born in Silesia, and before the war he studied and lived for a couple of years in Berlin).⁶ After the war, Pinińska-Bereś attended the fine arts high school in Katowice and then in 1950 moved to Cracow to study at the Academy of Fine Arts; she spent the rest of her life living in that city. After being liberated from the Theresienstadt camp, Szapocznikow went with her Czech inmates to Prague. In the autumn 1945, she enrolled at the School of Applied Arts and also started working in a stonecutting workshop. At the end of 1947, she moved to Paris and continued her formal education, but financial and health problems hindered its completion.

Thorough their whole lives, Szapocznikow and Pinińska-Bereś continued these life-tracks; that is, Szapocznikow changed life and working places quite often, while Pinińska-Bereś maintained a stabile life in Cracow. This strongly influenced their international contacts. In the 1960s and at the turn of the 1970s, that is in the period I will concentrate on, Pinińska-Bereś had hardly any exhibitions, while Szapocznikow lived both in Warsaw and Paris and exhibited internationally. To illustrate difference in their position in the international art world one can compare places of solo exhibitions organised in that period. Szapocznikow held them in Paris/Warsaw (1967), Bruxelles (1968), Geneve (1971), and an exhibition in Paris 1973 after her death. Pinińska-Bereś held exhibitions in Cracow (1970), Warsaw (1973), and Lublin (1975). So far no solo exhibition of hers has been organised outside of Poland.

Being an artist based in Cracow did not necessarily result in the locality of a career, as the examples of Tadeusz Kantor, or even Pinińska-Bereś’ husband Jerzy Bereś indicate. In the case of both women artists, what was crucial for their different career-tracks was, besides the above-mentioned historical conditions, their different attitude to artistic career and also personality. While Szapocznikow very actively, actually pro-actively, sought out chances and did quite a lot to take advantage of them, Pinińska-Bereś was much more resigned to her marginal position in the Cracow art milieu dominated by the strong personality of Kantor.

For many women artists in Poland, but not exclusively there, the first half of the 1960s was a crucial period in terms of artistic development, as many of them gave up previously used stylistics and turned to new forms, materials and subjects. The latter were usually connected with personal dimensions, subtly visible at that time. In the early 1960s, Pinińska-Bereś started her experiments that she herself presented as a kind of protest against professionally and commercially legitimised sculpture-monuments.⁷ At first she created Rotundas, which were compact concrete forms, some of them resembling female figures. Later, she started adding linen and creating forms more directly referring to women or feminine experience. Lady with a Bird (1964), half-gravestone, half-woman, with a linen gown and a comb, a ring and beads merged in cement, is a good example. Then Corsets were created that should be understood here metaphorically as de/formative for the entire personality, not only a body. These works (from Rotundas to Corsets) are archaic in character and had hardly any reference to the present-day. They are, however, related to the artist’s biography and the conditions under which she grew up, in an ultra-Catholic family whose head, because of deaths during the war, was the patriarch, a senior formed by the 19^th century.⁸ What was crucial for her at that time was a combination of religion and of woman’s sexuality as two elements joined in exercising control over young women.

At the turn of 1960s, Szapocznikow did abstract works, yet she soon became more interested in the representation of the female body. In 1962, still in Warsaw, she first cast fragments of her body – a leg and the lower part of her face. She explained her need for an experiment with the words beset by the academic approach to abstraction, partly out of spite, or perhaps due to artistic exhibitionism.⁹ At first, they remained studio works, as if she did not know what to do with them. She showed then, already transformed, only at her first Parisian solo exhibition in 1967. In the meantime, she created Goldfinger (1965) —the first work in which one can see clear reference to popular culture that is the third consecutive James Bond film of the same title. An image photo of a nude, reclining woman, covered with gold paint that appeared on the film’s poster and in its trailer must have also influenced the way Szapocznikow transformed her leg cast into a golden fetish (Leg, 1962-1967). In 1966, Szapocznikow started creating Lampes-bouche—lamps consisting of casts of mouths transformed into a lampshade. The lamps appealed to the visitors of the Galerie Florence Huston Brown in 1967. Szapocznikow received many orders, which she sought to meet by developing a kind of serial production. She began to create Souvenirs, that is photos of friends and also movie stars, among others Monica Vitti, covered with polyester. The photos with their arrangement, which can be found in Szapocznikow’s archive, depicting them standing on a coffee table, leave no doubt as to how she wanted them to be exhibited. She also developed an idea and undertook several more or less successful attempts to make poliuretan cushions that were formed from belly casts. Pierre Restany, the curator of her 1967 show, praised the change he had observed in the works by Szapocznikow, who

finally managed to free herself from dramatic expressionism. The artist seemed to escape the long torment of her life, the horror of her past of war and camps: she slowly woke up to a new objective consciousness of the world.¹⁰

Restany stressed that it had happened thanks to her staying in Paris. Yet, in order to better understand the changes in Szapocznikow’s art, it is necessary to take a closer look at the milieu she functioned it.

It is usually underlined that Szapocznikow had contacts with the new realists, yet it is in fact basically only Restany whom she was in touch with, and although he was an important figure for her, it was not her most, or at least not her only, inspiring relationship. Szapocznikow moved to Paris together with her partner – the graphic designer Roman Cieślewicz. Already in Poland he gained a high position thanks to his film and theatre posters and illustrations for magazines, for example for the very popular life style magazine “Ty i Ja” (You and Me). After moving to Paris he cooperated with several publishing houses and quickly managed to find work in fashion magazines, such as Elle, where he worked in the second half of the 1960s as an art director. The couple pursued ongoing artistic dialogue, which is visible when one compares their works from different periods. For example, Cieślewicz’s poster for Moda Polska and Szapocznikow’s sculpture Bellissima, both from 1959, when they still lived in Warsaw. Moda Polska (Polish Fashion) was a monopolistic state enterprise that was created to introduce new tendencies in fashion. Cieślewicz proposed a poster with a dominant bust of a woman having her head crowned with a huge rose. Szapocznikow’s plaster female figure, whose corpus is bigger though reduced (without arms and cut at the level of the hips instead of the head), has an abstract form resembling flowers. Among Szapocznikow’s drawing there are several sheets that present a transformation of a woman into a rose. Another comparison that I want to propose comes from the second half of the 1960s. It is when Szapocznikow transformed her leg turning it into a golden fetish, as has been said already. At that time, Cieślewicz used this motive on several occasions, for example on a cover of “Ty i Ja” (2/1968) and on a cover of one of guides from the Ultra Guide series (Gouraud editions) that he designed. Other guides featured a mouth and a breast, also extensively used by Szapocznikow at that time.

What I want to prove by these comparisons is that already in Poland, Szapocznikow might have been under the influence of the popular imaginary. In Paris, her interests found much better conditions to develop and her works became more openly related to popular culture. Firstly, this was because of the technical possibilities, which they both stressed as important when they explained their reasons for leaving Poland. Cieślewicz explained in one interview:

I could no longer stand in Poland this huge technical and mental delay compared to what is happening in the world. […] By this I want to say that in my profession, in which technology plays a huge role, [it is crucial to have] a possibility to compose an image without dirtiness, without stains, without dribbling […].¹¹

Szapocznikow’s friend, the film director Andrzej Wajda, recalls her saying that their move to Paris was an expedition to a place where they know how to cast any required form out of coloured plastic.¹²

The latest remark is related to the second reason for her more open dialogue with popular culture—the Parisian art scene was much more favourable to the incorporation of popular motives and contemporary materials and for artists’ interest in design. She met with approval she could not count on in Poland. Szapocznikow did not find understanding for her new works in her native country. What is interesting is that the opposition of expressionism and objectification, which was stressed in the above-mentioned Restany’s essay, can also be found in texts devoted to pop art written by Polish art historians. For example, once Alicja Kępińska explained that

in Poland it is hard to find objectivism that is typical for pop-art, because a strongly expressionist tendency prevails here, in which “expressing” one’s own inner experiences becomes a value.¹³

The reception of Szapocznikow’s 1967 exhibition, which after having been shown in Paris travelled to Warsaw, is an example of this attitude. It is symptomatic that the same lamps were titled here not Lampe-bouche, as in France, but Illuminated lips. It is clear that in the Polish version of the catalogue, the utility of these objects was pushed aside. One of the critics – Andrzej Osęka – recalled, shortly after the death of the artist, that he had been distrustful of these innovations. I considered them to be unnecessary, he admitted.¹⁴ These opinions are characteristic for Polish modernity, with its unflagging reluctance to popular culture.

The suspicion towards pop culture—similar to the one expressed by Polish critics – can be observed in Maria Pinińska-Bereś’ attitude. Yet, it is her – not Szapocznikow – who made a direct reference to pop art as a frame of her works. Pinińska-Bereś had her first solo exhibition in 1970 in a cultural club functioning also as an art gallery and called Piwnica pod Baranami. Dissatisfied with the lack of reviews she wrote one herself. In it she claimed:

In the exhibition a spirit of freedom of pop-art joined with the high discipline of the choice of accomplishments is present […] it [exhibition — AJ] contradicts vulgarly understood pop-art and yet it is freed from the all previous rigours [Pinińska-Bereś 1970, private archive].

The laconicism of this statement makes it hard to clearly understand precisely what Pinińska-Bereś had in mind. What she showed in the exhibition were not only the above-mentioned Corsets, but also new works that had clear references to the present day. A good example is Love Machine from 1969, as both in terms of formal elements and a message it was very much immersed in contemporaneity. It is a construction made of plywood, painted with bright colours, with mobile elements (yellow painted legs, for example) that could be seen as a loose example of psychedelic art. It resembles sex machines, pointing our attention to issues of women’s sexuality being not restricted by Catholicism, which was important for her before, but rather liberated by the sexual revolution.

The appearance of this kind of formal elements and subjects is easy to understand if one takes into consideration that the Bereś family was in close contact with hippies at that time. Avant-garde artists from at least two milieus were in touch with hippies – in the Cracow Group and in the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw.¹⁵ Many of them quickly distanced themselves from these youth groups, for different, often political reasons, yet not Bereś. Jerzy Bereś recalled:

Hippies had an incredible charm […]. The whole atmosphere was saturated with freedom, an idea of free love. I was almost forty then and it was a second youth. Never-ending youth. My wife [Maria Pinińska-Bereś — AJ] was a little nervous, because swarms of people kept coming to see us, sometimes very strange people. They hung around at nights, Bettina [their daughter – AJ] fell asleep next to them.¹⁶

I don’t know of any statements by Maria Pinińska-Bereś regarding hippies in particular. Yet her reference in the review of her exhibition, to freedom, which she associated with pop art, is telling. It seems that in her case, freedom was related to the openness in addressing eroticism but also everyday experience. Pinińska-Bereś’ references to the sexual revolution are by no means just celebratory. On the contrary. The liberation of the erotic female body is accompanied by its objectification, as is clear from the Table pieces.

It is here that Pinińska-Bereś and Szapocznikow meet, but comparisons of works of theirs that deal with objectification of the female body reveal that they had a completely different set of references. What they have in common is the focus on a female body, whose fragments are represented. Sometimes we even find similar motives, such as female body fragments offered for consumption. Maria Pinińska-Bereś’ Table II (1968) and Table-I’m Sexy (1969) could be compared to Alina Szapocznikow’s Desserts (1970-71). The first two works are wooden tables on which there are fragments of a female body, made of white-painted paper mâché. In Table II there are a tablecloth and table utensils attached to the board, which turns the woman into a dish ready to be eaten. In Table-I’m Sexy we see the contour of a potential consumer’s hands. In Desserts Szapocznikow used real platters and bowls on which she placed several female body parts cast in polyester. The whole composition resembles the way cakes or ice-creams are served.

A comparison of these pieces makes their differences evident. Although Pinińska-Bereś paid attention to her appearance and was considered to be fashionably dressed, and she used to read “Przekrój” – a popular weekly regarded as “a window into the West” (thanks to, among other things, its presentation of Western fashion), it is definitely not a world of glamour that was her point of reference. Unlike Szapocznikow she did not use modern materials and techniques, but wood, paper mâché, linen. Her works are not étincelant (Szapocznikow titled one of her lamps Buste étincelant – shining and sparkling) but rather poor in comparison. It refers both to earlier works by Pinińska-Bereś’ that could be characterised as rough and to later ones that were much lighter. In that period, instead of rough unworked planks she started using pieces of painted plywood and papier mâché. This can be perceived as signs that she distanced herself from the aesthetics of her everyday life, that is, from the Bereś’ apartment, which was furnished with furniture made by her husband and resembling his works, which were also made of rough pieces of wood, and also from the gloomy cellars where the most interesting galleries in Cracow were found. At that time, the aesthetics of her work could be considered an expression of her aspirations towards a modern fashionable world, or at least a comment on it. Yet simultaneously they reveal the nature of what was available in communist Poland.

One of the interesting tropes for Pinińska-Bereś’ version of pop can be found in the milieu of Piwnica pod Baranami, where – as has already been written – her first solo exhibition took place. It was an art club, but it was also a group of more or less professional artists who organised a cabaret. In 1965 they performed a programme titled “How we used to live, how we live, what we will bring to our apartments.” Its poster, whose designer is unknown, was an obvious reference to Richard Hamilton’s work from 1956, Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? A difference in aesthetics between them – for example the lack of colour in the former and its handicraft quality – can serve as support for the comparison made in the previous paragraph between Szapocznikow and Pinińska-Bereś, stressing the significance of the conditions in which they worked. It is also a good illustration of the technical arguments, discussed earlier in this text, raised by Szapocznikow and Cieślewicz, when they explained their reasons to leave Poland. Here, yet, I want to stress a different aspect of the poster. Its title – “How we used to live, how we live and what we brought to our apartments” – was, according to Olczak-Ronikier, related to a discussion among members of Piwnica pod Baranami that dealt with a family life and its influence on functioning of the cabaret group.¹⁷ For a long time, a philosophy of focusing on the present moment dominated what made the group’s members

ashamed of earning money, achieving professional success, spending money on a washing machine instead on a banquet […] and above all of ‘family life” and attempts put into its sustaining.¹⁸

This explanation clearly indicates that at that time in Poland, for many artists, also for Pinińska-Bereś and her husband, the way of life that is ruled by consumption was also a subject of critique. Even if that consumption was on a poor level, often hardly extending basic life standard. A washing machine that one could spent money on, after many necessary efforts because of shortage of consumer goods, was the only one he/she had, not a new and better one.

The same could be said of the apartments and their furnishings, which is important here since by the beginning of the 1970s Pinińska-Bereś concentrated on this subject, creating a series called Psycho-small-furniture. The communist government significantly limited the possibilities of private investors to build houses and offered instead a large (but not sufficient) number of small apartments in blocks of flats. Also, appropriate furnishing was offered. In the beginning of the 1960s, a massive production of a newly designed style of a set of furniture began. The set consisted of multiple modules, among which a pulled in desk and a bed were very characteristic and useful because of the small living space. It was called “the Kowalski Furniture,” which has a double meaning – referring to their designers, Bogusława and Czesław Kowalski, but also to an everyman, since “Kowalski” is used in Polish in that sense.¹⁹ This project was a good example of modern design, yet with time it became the symbol of the unification of the living conditions caused by the communist government policy.

The Bereś obtained such a small apartment from the government in 1960 and they moved there with their two-year old daughter. It was a studio/apartment, consisting of the studio where he worked, and one room where they all lived, where many people used to spend a lot of time (as hippies mentioned in one of Bereś’ recollections quoted above) and where Pinińska-Bereś worked. When the first pieces of furniture appeared in Pinińska-Bereś’ art (Table pieces) they did not refer to her current situation but they were metaphors of her family history and referred to her recollections of having grown up in a milieu that was dominated by an ultra-Catholic mentality with the chief sin of a body and the vision of damnation, as has already been said.²⁰ Later, the issue of eroticism was still crucial, yet a problem of space, especially of a lack of intimate space, became central. Such works as Cupboard I (1970) or Screen (1973) are important in this context. The latter is a somewhat miniaturised version of a real screen and has a handwritten slogan on it: “A screen is good for everything.” However, apparently it cannot hide everything since viewers can spot a pink, soft, sensual form placed behind it. Cupboard I, which offers an uncanny experience as a seemingly ordinary cupboard with a clean plate remaining, turns out to be as if taken up by a woman or rather by a woman’s breasts. This piece encourages one to think of possible relations to Richard Hamilton’s works that deal with domesticity.

Most critics writing on Hamilton stress his interest in new forms of consumer culture. Yet, according to Ben Highmore, what played a more significant role in his art were the social and sensorial perceptions through which such life was experienced.²¹ Writing about such works as $he (1958-61), Highmore concentrated on the depiction of a relationship between female body parts and machine tools and he claimed that we actually deal with an uncanny space.²² The phrase “the social and sensorial perceptions through which such life was experienced” could be used in reference to Pinińska-Bereś’ works from this period as well. Yet, with the reservation that by “such life” we do not mean an apartment filled with modern electronic appliances, but simply the apartment she lived in.

The reference to Hamilton’s work might be surprising in a country that is always considered to have been isolated from the Western art world. Especially if we deal with artists such as Pinińska-Bereś, who did not travel abroad and who lived in Cracow, which is known for its inclinations towards the Paris art scene, not to British contemporary art. Yet, there existed different channels for the transfer of ideas, such as people travelling and publications being sent. For example, we know that in the 1960s the Bereś received “Art in America” (the sender has not yet been identified).²³ Obviously, Alina Szapocznikow had much better access to the international art world because she spent most of her time in Paris, not in Warsaw. It was also easier for her to get life style magazines, especially since her husband cooperated with “Elle”. Pinińska-Bereś, who read “Przekrój”, was also in touch with popular culture and the beauty industry, although with a poorer communist version. Yet she reacted to it in a work from 1972 – Is a woman a human being? Once again she undertook the theme of the corset but this time formulating a statement that referred to contemporaneity. She made a form that oscillated between a fashionable swimsuit and a fragment of the female torso and attached a note to it with a date of production and an expiry date, thus making a reference to contemporary culture’s expectations towards women.²⁴ The same year Pinińska-Bereś made one more piece with a similar massage—a bittersweet house appliance titled Keep Smiling. It is an ordinary trashcan with a female face in it. Made of paper mâché painted white, it has one colour element—red lips.

In 1972 when Pinińska-Bereś created Keep Smiling, Alina Szapocznikow did Ashtrays for the Grass Widower. They belong to her design pieces, in which casts of female body parts were used, this time for example two breasts form an utensil into which ash can be flicked. Although in both cases we deal with a combination of trash and fragments of a female figure, they refer to different aspects of the feminine experience. This time it is Pinińska-Bereś, who concentrated more on commenting on the way women are treated in the consumer culture. Alina Szapocznikow’s pieces have a much more personal nature. They can be considered a dying woman’s farewell gifts to her husband. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1969, underwent surgery treatment, and after a short period of remission she had her second operation in July 1972. Several months later the artist died.

During her illness, Szapocznikow worked intensively, and in some pieces from that period references to death is clear (for example, Great Tumour 1969). Yet, the works in which she used female body casts had changed character earlier. Already in 1968 she exhibited pieces from the Expansion series, consisting of casts of female body parts immersed in black polyurethane. Trying to describe what had happened in Szapocznikow’s art, Restany claimed (in the 1968 solo exhibition catalogue) that the vision of Alina Szapocznikow has elevated to higher dimension, allowing the decorative aspects give way to the cosmic breath of energy.²⁵ My argument is that these were the political events of 1968 – that is, what is referred to as the incidents of March ’68 in Poland, and the Warsaw Pact forces invading Czechoslovakia – which had a strong impact on Szapocznikow. At the beginning of 1968, social disturbances arose among students and the intelligentsia caused by the censorship of the performance of Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve. In March, the students’ protests against censorship started to be represented by the government-controlled media as having been triggered by Jewish intellectuals. The government unleashed a campaign of anti-Semitism; citizens were controlled (for the purpose of determining who was Jewish) and general repression and persecutions against them arose (losing one’s job or prohibition of publication, etc.) with the aim of forcing them to leave Poland. When leaving, they received a document stating that they were no longer Polish citizens. In March 1968, Alina Szapocznikow – of Jewish origin, a former prisoner of the ghettos and concentration camps, who after the war very strongly believed in the possibility of building a new communist society – was in Poland and, as her friend recalled, was terrified by seeing a repetition of what she knew from the past.²⁶ Luckily, she was not in Prague during the forced entrance of the Warsaw Pact army (that is the Soviet Union and its main allies, also Poland) into Czechoslovakia in August 1968, with the aim of stopping reforms being introduced by Alexander Dubček in order to improve the communist system, which in their opinion could have weakened the Communist Bloc. However, we know from archival documents that she followed these tragic events with concern taking place in a country that was much more than just one of the brotherly countries for her (as the Eastern Bloc countries used to be called.)²⁷

Rather one would expect Pinińska-Bereś, spending time in Cracow, to be under the influence of the political events taking place in the Eastern Europe. Yet it seems that for her, living in a prudish Poland, not for Szapocznikow living in Paris, these elements of 1968, which dealt with the sexual revolution, were of greater importance. Szapocznikow’s art seems not to have been influenced by it.

The juxtaposition of two sculptors that function as Polish artists – Alina Szapocznikow and Maria Pinińska-Bereś – does not offer a clear picture of the Polish take on pop art. The case of Szapocznikow, who lived, worked, and exhibited across the Iron Curtain, both in the West and in the East, shows how problematic it is even to let our thinking about pop art (and more generally about art, obviously) be dominated by political and economic regions. She was immersed in the Western popular culture, yet at certain points there were events from the East that influenced her reactions to it. When we put her art into a dialogue with the art of Pinińska-Bereś it becomes even more clear to what a large extent their relationship to popular culture was conditioned by numerous aspects of private life, sometimes related to more general financial or political factors (as in case of living conditions), sometimes independent from them (as in case of illness). Globalising art tendencies, for example pop art, often seems to mean going beyond its narrowly defined borders. In some exhibitions – for example, those mentioned at the beginning of this text – we find an attempt to look simultaneously from a far distance to catch a general view of “international Pop” and from close-up to see details of particular parts of “the world that goes pop.” This text advocates taking an even closer look, from the perspective of the personal, as this reveals that political and financial factors, so crucial in the case of the art that refers to popular culture, whose development and reception is conditioned by them, do not explain all.

1
Sid Sachs, Beyond the Surface: Women and Pop Art 1958-1968, in Sid Sachs (ed.), Seductive Subversion: Women and Pop Art 1958-1968, Kalliopi Minioudaki: Abbeville Press, 2010, p. 18.
2
Conversation with Kalliopi Minioudaki.
3
Klara Kemp-Welch, http://networkingthebloc.blogspot.de. Piotr Piotrowski, “The Global NETwork: An Approach to Comparative Art History,” in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel (eds.), Circulations in the Global History of Art, Ashgate, 2015, pp. 149-165.
4
Kalliopi Minioudaki, Feminist Eruptions in Pop: Beyond Borders, in Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frier (eds.), The World Goes Pop, exh. cat., Yale University Press, 2015, p. 73.
5
Marek Beylin and Ferwor, Życie Aliny Szapocznikow, Warsaw-Cracow: Museum of Modern Art, Karakter, 2015, especially chapter 2, pp. 11-25.
6
Piotr Korduba and Aleksandra Paradowska, Na starym Grunwaldzie: Domy i ich mieszkańcy, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Miejskie, 2012, Chapter: Marcelińska 48. Ułańskie tradycje, pp. 154-159.
7
Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Piwnica pod Baranami, Cracow, 1970, a leaflet accompanying the exhibition.
8
Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Gorsety i wieże, 1994, the artist’s archive. More on the early works for Pinińska-Bereś, see Agata Jakubowska, Ambiguous Liberation: The Early Works of Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History, Vol. 83, No. 2, 2014, pp. 168-182.
9
Alina Szapocznikow, Z Paryża pisze Alina Szapocznikow, Współczesność, No. 5, 1966, p. 8, trans. Anna Szyjkowska-Piotrowska.
10
Pierre Restany, Alina Szapocznikow par Pierre Restany, in Alina Szapocznikow, ex. cat., Galerie Flocence Houston-Brown, Paris 1967, n.p. More on this see Anke Kempkes, Black Drips and Dark Matter – The Luxury Cap – Concept Individuel – Quarry Desert, in Agata Jakubowska (ed.), Alina Szapocznikow. Awkward Objects, Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2011, pp. 161-186.
11
Roman Cieślewicz Na maksimum wyobraźni. Rozmowa,” in Autoportrety: 0 sztuce i swojej twórczości rozmawiają z Wiesławą Wierzchowską, Warsaw: Agencja Wydawnicza Interster, 1991, p. 75.
12
Andrzej Wajda, Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973), in Jozef Grabski (ed.), Capturing Life: Alina Szapocznikow – Drawings and Sculptures, Cracow-Warsaw: IRSA Fine Arts, 2004, p. 131.
13
Alicja Kępińska, Nowa sztuka: Sztuka polska w latach 1945-1978, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1981, p. 101.
14
Andrzej Osęka, Alina Szapocznikow, Kultura, No 12, 1973, p. 12.
15
Kamil Sipowicz, Hipisi w PRL-u, Warsaw: Baobab, 2008.
16
Podejmowanie wyzwań – z Jerzym Beresiem (i Bettiną Beres) rozmawia Natalia Kaliś, Kultura i Historia, No 18, 2010, www.kulturaihistoriammcs.lublin.pliarchives/1885 (4 September 2015).
17
Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, Piwnica pod Baranami, czyli koncert ambitnych samouków, Warsaw: Pruszynski i S-ka, 1997, p. 195.
18
Olczak-Ronikier, 1997, p. 198.
19
Jacek Kowalski, Meble Kowalskich. Ludzie i rzeczy, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Debogora, 2014.
20
Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Jak to jest z tym feminizmem?, in J. Ciesielska and A. Smalcerz (eds.), Sztuka kobiet, Bielsko-Biała: Bielska Gallery, 2001, pp. 194-195.
21
Ben Highmore, “Home Furnishings: Richard Hamilton, Domesticity and the Post-avant-garde,” in (ed.), David Hopkins, Neo-avant garde, Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1997, p. 252.
22
Highmore, 1997, p. 256.
23
In formation from the artist’s family.
24
For more on this piece see Maria Hussakowska-Szyszko, Inny nieco aspekt lat siedemdziesiątych, in Tomasz Gryglewicz and Andrzej Szczerski (ed.), Sztuka w okresie PRL-u: Metody i przedmiot badań, Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 1999, pp. 135-146.
25
Pierre Restany, “La nature moderne est amour,” in Alina Szapocznikow, ex. cat., Galerie Cogeime, Brussels, 1968, n.p.
26
Tadeusz Łodziana in a documentary on Alina Szapocznikow: Każdy dotyk zostawia ślad, director Joanna Turowicz and Anna Zakrzewska, 2009.
27
Postcards to Wojciech Fangor, the artist’s archive.

Maria Pinińska Bereś

Agata Jakubowska: Personalising the Global History of Pop Art. Alina Szapocznikow and Maria Pinińska-Bereś (2017)

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Maria Pinińska Bereś

Agata Jakubowska: Personalising the Global History of Pop Art. Alina Szapocznikow and Maria Pinińska-Bereś (2017)

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