Agata Jakubowska: Radically personal. The Art of Adriena Šimotová and Maria Pinińska-Bereś (2015)

(The text was published in: “ACTA Historiae Artium”, 56, 2015, p. 271-278)

 

One of the important aspects of the art from the 1960s is the gradual emergence of art by women artists that dealt with the feminine experience. This tendency appeared in many different regions of the world at the same time. As noted by Kal­liopi Minioudaki, it is often treated in a reductive way, as if it was just the beginning of women’s art movement that emerged in the 1970s. We deal with the stereotypical over-privileging of 1968 as the marker of the convergence of 1960s revolutionary politics and aesthetics, while reducing feminist art only to manifestations influenced by the women’s liberation movement. 1MINIOUDAKI, Kalliopi, On the Cusp of Feminism: Women. Artists in the Sixties, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 83 (2014): 60. It is also the case of works that could be labelled ‘protofeminist’ created in Eastern European countries. There is a number of artists, such as the protagonists of this text, that is Adriena Šimotová and Maria Pinińska-Bereś, whose art from the 1970s and later is perceived as feminine and feminist influenced. However, hardly any art writers attempt to trace a process of gender consciousness-raising in their oeuvre in the earlier dec­ade. In case of Pinińska-Bereś this period of her art has almost been forgotten. Šimotová’s early works are analysed in art historical texts, yet not recognised as a radical proposition in terms of representation of female sexuality.

Two laconic, yet very important, remarks referring to that problem were made by Czech art historian Martina Pachmanová – in a short interview published in the catalogue of the Gen­der Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe exhibition.2Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, Pejić Bojana, ed. (Wien: MUMOK, 2009). The exhibition was curated by Bojana Pejić and showed first in MUMOK in Vienna (13 November 2009 – 14 February 2010) and then in the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (18 March-13 June 2010). It was the first exhibition which dealt with the topic of gender in art from Eastern Europe since the 1950s. In her remark Pachmanová stated that Eva Kmentová’s3Eva Kmentová (1928-1980) was a Czech sculptor. In the second half of the 1960s she began making works in which imprints of a body (also, but not exclusively, feminine) were important elements. attention to feminine experience coincided with [my emphasis – AT] the translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe into Czech in 1966.4Interviews with the Researchers Czech Republic: Martina Pachmanová, in Gender Check, op.cit., 345. This statement could be seen as a comment on the fact that for many years femi­nism and also feminist art were perceived as a phenomenon that emanated from the West. As Marsha Meskimmon observed, conceptions of the development of feminist ideas privilege tem­poral narratives. They imply that the process started in the U.S. and gradually spread around the world (also through Western to Eastern Europe), and they include the implicit assump­tion that the ‘feminist revolution’ will come to us all, eventually.5MESKIMMON, Marsha, Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally, in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MARK, Lisa Gabrielle, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 324. In this conceptual framework the emergence of gender perspective in the works of women artists from Eastern Europe is expected to be linked to a transfer of feminist ideas from the West to the East. Pachmanová’s statement invites us to confront that idea and simultane­ously, by using an expression ‘coincided with,’ and not ‘influenced by’ for example, to question it. Because foreign travels and knowledge of for­eign languages were limited, it is translations of Western texts that are seen to have been particu­larly important.6See for example, Gal, Susan, Movements of Feminism: the Circulation of Discourses About Women, in Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Power and Agency; HOBSON, Barbara, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 93-120. The reception of Le Deuxième Sexe in Eastern European countries has already been analyzed, although I do not know of any text that applies it directly to women’s art and not just the women’s movement in the region. The book was published in Czechoslovakia in 1966, with a second edition the following year.7DE BEAUVOIR, Simone, Druhé pohlaví: [výbor], introduction by PATOČKA, Jan, transl. by KOSTOHRYZ, Josef and UHLIŘOVÁ, Hana (Prague: Orbis, 1966). It was translated into Hungarian in 1969, with a second edition appearing in 1971.8DE BEAUVOIR, Simone, A második nem, transl. GÖRÖG, Lívia and SOMLO, Vera (Budapest: Gondolat, 1971); see also: JOÓ, Mária, The “Second Sex” in Hungary. Simone de Beauvoir and the (Post)Socialist Condition, AHEA: EJournal of the American Hungarian Educators Association 4 (2011): 1-13, http:/ahea.net/e-journal/volume-4-2011. In Poland it was published in 1972 and the second edition came out only in 2003.9DE BEAUVOIR, Simone, Druga płeć [Second Sex], trans. MYCIELSKA, G. (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1972); see also, DESPERAK, Iza, Recepcja, Drugiej płci Simone de Beauvoir w Polsce. Perspektywa socjologiczna [Reception of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex in Poland. Sociological Perspective], http://www.feminoteka.pl/readarticle.php?article_ id=920 [access: 10.08,2013].

These facts can lead to the conclusion that the circulation of feminist ideas was similar yet different in the countries constituting the region. The similarities lay in the fact that as it was de Beauvoir’s text, thanks to her leftist sympathies, it could be translated. The differences can be seen in chronology. So even if we can juxtapose some Czech women artists’ attention to feminine experience’ with the translation of the Simone de Beauvoir’s book into Czech, it is impossible in the case of Polish and Hungarian women artists, who were exploring feminine experience before the publication of this book in their countries. It becomes clear that we should consider other factors that could influence emergence of proto­feminist consciousness. Another statement of Pachmanová, from the above mentioned interview, gives an important insight.

She observed that if it is possible to trace a number of “gender-sensitive” art works by the above-mentioned Czech women artists [Běla Kolářová,10Běla Kolářová(1923-2010), trained in photography she used this medium in her experimental works. Notable in her practice was usage of everyday objects and camera-less photographs., Adriena Šimotová and Zorka Ságlová11Zorka Ságlová (1942-2003), trained in tapestry, she is mainly associated with land art, thanks to her happenings in the landscape outside Prague. are mentioned] and many oth­ers of their generation, this has less to do with their conscious political emancipation than it does with their growing reservations toward the dominancy of the canon of modernism.12Ibid., 346. Res­ervations resulted from the fact that modernist canons, not only the one that existed in Czech, excluded many perspectives, also were based on women’s experiences. It was problematic espe­cially for the artists born around 1930 and educated shortly after the war. They belonged to the generation that witnessed direct state regulations of art under socialist realism and thus remained reluctant to accept ideologically charged artistic practice. To them and their colleagues’ mod­ernist tendencies were a medium of freedom.13For comparative analysis of the modernist discourse in the 1960s in Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian art see PIOTROWSKI, PIOTR, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). Yet, there are a number of women artists from this generation – such as Adriena Šimotová and Maria Pinińska-Bereś – for whom the modernist framework turned out to be too narrow when confronted with their experience. Qualities (both formal and thematic) that are described as ‘femi­nine’ became a constant element of their artistic language in the 1970s and were recognized as such already by their contemporaries. In case of the reception of both artists’ works it is stressed that it was in the 1970s when the qualities charac­teristic for Šimotová’s and Pinińska-Bereś’s art, with which we associate them with, developed. What I want to concentrate on in this text is, how­ever, the earlier phase of their artistic development: the years of their gradual liberation from universalistic discourse and limitations of this liberation, As I will demonstrate, in the 1960s their art was highly personal, yet they both, for different reasons, abandoned it in favour of new formulas that brought them the recognition of feminine/feminist artists.

Adriena Šimotová (1926-2014) graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in 1950. For many years she worked mainly as a member of different groups of artists, First she exhibited with the artist groups Skupina G, then with UB 12.14Skupina G – a short lasting art group with the main exhibition in 1959; UB 12 – an art group active in the 1950s and 1960s (oficially 1960 -1970), comprising actually of 14 members. The lat­ter consisted of many of her friends from the Academy and among them Jiří John, whom she married in 1953. In 1960 she exhibited together with another UB 12 female member, Věra Janoušková,15Věra  Janoušková (1922-2010), a Czech sculptor working in different material, developed her typical collage-like technique. in Lidová Demokracie Hall  in Prague. This was around the time her son, Martin, was born, which probably delayed the development of her career. Šimotová’s friend and critic Jiří Šetlík claimed that she enjoyed her maternal duties, which her parents in the Podolí flat helped her with so that she could continue to work and she was not at all upset by the fact that up until the mid-1960s, before her star began to rise, she remained in her husband’s shadow.16ŠETLÍK, Jiří, Personal Fate as a Creative Source, in Adriena Šimotová: Tvaěř / Face, BRUNCLÍK, Pavel, ed. (Bratislava: Slovenská národná galéria, 2004), 2.

In the monographs devoted to Šimotová’s oeuvre one painting from the early phase of her artistic life is usually reproduced – Mirror from 1962.17She herself found her early works too decorative, ZEMINA, Jaromír, Introduction, in Adriena Šimotová- Setkání 1960/1990 (Prague: Galerie Hlavního města Prahy, 1990), 3. What seems most significant to me in that painting is that it depicts a woman art­ist, Jiřina Kaplická (1901-1984), who worked mainly as an illustrator. Kaplická was also the wife of Josef Kaplický, Šimotová’s professor at the Academy, and this is the fact that is usually referred to when she is mentioned. Mirror is interpreted, for example by another of Šimotová’s friends, Jaromir Zemina, as a representation of a widow (Kaplický died on 1 February 1962).18Ibid., 3. While it is true that melancholic ambience domi­nates the picture it seems that Šimotová did not forget about Kaplická being an artist too. What we see in the painting is Kaplická’s mir­ror reflection that can be interpreted as expres­sion of a need for self-analysis that could lead to a self-portrait (a frame of the mirror that evokes a frame of a painting is crucial for this hypoth­esis). In the same year Šimotová wrote a text that was published in a small catalogue of Kaplicka’s exhibition organized in the gallery of the Svazu čv. výtvarných umělců in Prague. It seems that being an artist and a wife of a male artist at the same time interested Šimotová a lot. The UB 12 group consisted of several married artist-couples (for example: Daisy and Jiří Mrázek, Vera and Vladimir Janoušek19Daisy Mrázková (1923) and Jiří Mrázek (1920-2008), both painters (she is also an author of books for children); Věra  Janoušková (1922-2010) and Vladimír Janoušek (1922- 1986), both sculptors, married from 1948), so it was not only her expe­rience but also that of her close artist friends.

Her star began to rise, to repeat Šetlík’s words, in 1965 when Šimotová’s first solo exhibition took place in Československý spisovatel Gallery in Prague. It attracted the attention of important critics who started to follow her art. What Šimotová presented were landscapes that showed her gradual move, away from informel. The texture of the paintings became less dense, colours brighter, and the ambience more serene, which led critics to define these works as lyrical abstraction. What turned out to be crucial in this period was the gradual emergence of the human figure. Its appearance was signalled already in those paintings that were labelled ‘abstract landscape.’ In June Day (1965) for example we can make out two figures, as if a mother and her child, who are probably spending a nice day by the water.

After 1965, Šimotová simultaneously turned her attention towards graphical techniques and towards the human figure. Art writers claim that her search for new forms of visual expression was related – as Pavel Brunclik wrote – to its sub­ject matter that she was newly discovering and formulating.20BRUNCLÍK, Pavel, Adriena Šimotová – Face, in Adriena Šimotová, op. cit., 1-2. Some authors suggest that these transformations were triggered by personal and political turmoils – such as her husband’s seri­ous illness (he suffered from kidney disease for several years and died in 1972) and the collapse of the Prague Spring (in 196821In January 1968 Alexander Dubček became the leader of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia and started to introduce liberal reforms. The Warsaw Pact forces (that is the Soviet Union and its main allies) invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 in order to stop this process.).22Also: She changed her means of expression in response to the urgency of the content, in ŠETLÍK, Jiří, The Human Condition, op. cit.. 248. Although, there is no doubt that they influenced the artist, it is important to stress that her interest in rela­tionship with the loved ones and everyday reality had found its expression in her art earlier. It is at that point that she became more radical about it, especially in terms of the form, which obtained a diary-like character.

In the mid-1960s, Šimotová seemed to give up on painting, a highly prestigious genre and instead began ‘taking notes.’ It does not mean that she concentrated on making sketches, but sketchiness became a quality of her works whose techniques are diverse and sometimes quite rich. She concentrated on the notation of ordinary activities, objects and fragments of her surroundings. This metaphorical abandonment of the outside world and its ambitions paradoxically brought her appreciation. One of the reasons was that these works corresponded to the new figuration that became an important tendency in the Czech and mainly Slovakian art scene. She should be seen among other artists who were dissatisfied with the gradual aesthetization of informel and fascinated by figurative tendencies developing in the West, mainly in France. Having said that, it is necessary to add that her works carried at least one quality that made them spe­cial – intimacy.

The intimacy of the subject in Šimotová’s works offered a direct insight into the artist’s pri­vate world. She concentrated on presenting ordi­nary repetitive every-day female activities (putting on stockings, combing, the application of cream) and also scenes from married life, as Jaromír Zemina called them.23ZEMINA, Jaromír, Four Times on the Subject of Adriena, in Adriena Šimotová, Pavel BRUCLÍK, ed. (Prague: Muzeum Umění Olomouc and Národní Galerie Prague, 2007), 266. In A Private View, the fig­ure’s context is not defined in any way. However, one should not take it as indicating a tendency towards a more universal picture of everyday life. Rather, it seems to have been a result of her withdrawal from the outside world and full devo­tion to the life at her home. The drawings and graphic works in which her occupation with her own body is depicted are not a result of a discus­sion with representations of the female body in the arts or popular culture. She did not indicate an interest in this kind of polemics. Her motiva­tion seems to have been the internal emotional reality, not the external social world. We can also talk about the intimacy of the detail she chose to depict. As Jindřich Chalupecký accurately observed, Šimotová showed reality experienced rather than seen, experiences of the body rather than of sight, gesture rather than glance.24CHALUPECKÝ, Jindřich , The New Art in Bohemia, in Adriena Šimotová, op. cit., 252. She managed to do it thanks to a perspective applied that demolishes the distance between the one who presents and the one who is presented. What we see are not whole figures, but often fragments of bodies viewed from close-up.

The same intimate perspective and self-observation can be seen in Šimotová’s paintings made around 1970 when she returned to that medium. What changed at that time was the ambience of these works. The uneasiness in col­our and space compositions could be – as noted by Jaromír Zemina – a reflection of the distress caused by her husband’s serious illness, which became a constant element of the family’s life.25ZEMINA, Jaromír, Introduction, in Adriena Šimotová, op. cit., 15. His death was followed by her abandonment of painting and of everyday life as the subject of her work.

Maria Pinińska-Bereś graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in. Cracow in 1956. In 1958 she had her first exhibition, yet together with her husband, Jerzy Bereś, and their col­league Tadeusz Szpunar.26Tadeusz Szpunar (1929), Polish sculptor. Soon after their daughter Bettina was born. Many years later she complained: consider my husband’s early artistic success, while I was celebrating the mys­tery of motherhood, to be a burden to me. I have never made up for this “station” on my artistic way.27Maria Pinińska-Bereś, manuscript, 1990, the family archive. In fact, Jerzy Bereś quickly got recogni­tion, especially after he became a member of II Grupa Krakowska [2nd Cracow Group] gathered around Tadeusz Kantor.28II Grupa Krakowska [2nd Cracow Group] was a group of avant-garde artists, established in 1957 that referred to the inter-war tradition. The first Grupa Krakowska functioned in 1933-37 and some of its participants joined the second Grupa Krakowska. They organized exhibitions in the Krzysztofory Gallery. Although Pinińska-Bereś also belonged to that social group, as an artist she was marginalized. In the 1960s her sculptures were exhibited in group shows, the first real solo exhibition was organised only in 1970 in an art club Piwnica pod Baranami [Cel­lar under the Rams].29This art club was famous for a cabaret. They also had a programme of exhibitions, yet they were never considered as important as in the Krzysztofory Gallery.

In 1961 Pinińska-Bereś started doing Rotundas, solid concrete forms, sometimes with chains, that evoked enslavement. Although all of them can be perceived, as Ewa Tatar pro­posed, as fleshless bodies,30TATAR, Ewa, Negocjując podmiot kobiecy – wczesne poszukiwania rzeźbiarskie Marii Pinińskiej-Bereś, [Negotiating Female Subject – Maria Pinińska-Bereś Early Works], Rzeźba polska vol. XIII (2008): 240. in the context of the artist’s later art Rotunda with a Chain (1963) turns out to be of special importance because of its most obvious reference to a female breast. Together with two sculptures created in the mid-1960s – Lady with a Bird and Lucyit reveals the clear (proto-)feminist message of Pinińska-Bereś’s early works. It was female sex­uality that stood in the centre of her interests.31For more about this see JAKUBOWSKA, Agata, Ambiguous Liberation. The Early Works of Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 83 (2014): 168-182. In her subsequent sculptures (Corsets created between 1965-67), the artist developed earlier ideas by focusing strongly on a process of disci­plining women’s bodies and minds. As she used burlap, leather strings and unworked planks to make them, they differ strongly from corsets as erotic gadgets and resemble rather instruments of torture.

Pinińska-Bereś works do not contain clear clues of being auto-biographical with one excep­tion – inside the Standing Corset (1966) the sculptor glued the long, straight, real black hair, which can easily be identified, on the basis of the photographs, as belonging to the artist herself. In the 1990s the artist started to point to her family and years of upbringing as a con­text for her art, yet it did not result in the auto­biographical dimension being addressed by art historians writing on her works. She underlined that she grew up with an ultra-Catholic mental­ity with the chief sin of a body and the vision of damnation, which resulted, among others, in the fact that already as an 11-12-year-old child I felt some kind of humiliation and disappoint­ment that I am a woman. 32M. Pinińska-Bereś, Jak to jest z tym feminizmem? [And What about that Feminism?], in Sztuka kobiet, CIESIELSKA, Jolanta and SMALCERZ Agata, eds. (Bielsko-Biala, 2001), 194-195. What is crucial for an understanding of Pinińska-Bereś early works is the combination of religion and female sexuality as two elements that are being played out in the process of controlling young women. We can perceive her poetic text written in 1965 also from this perspective: Corsets Real Corsets / Mental Corsets / 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.33Maria Pinińska-Bereś, in Maria Pinińska-Bereś 1931- 1999, GAJEWSKA, Bożena, ed., exhibition catalogue (Cracow: Bunkier Sztuki, 1999), 30-31. At that time she did not make any refer­ences to contemporary popular culture with its expectations towards the ideal female figure in her art (though she did little a bit later). It was her family, or more precisely the women in her family, that appeared to be responsible for transferring mental restrictions.

In 1967, another dimension of her private life made way into her art. She did two Covers for my Lover, one for the whole body and another one for a head. In a text ‘Corsets and Covers’ she admitted that it was a way to memorialize men that were important in her life and that she made a cover for each of them. One of the Covers for my Lover – the head – resembles earlier works and it evokes association of violence. The bigger Cover for my Lover has a different character. It looks like a costume that had been washed, ironed and hangs ready to wear. The small con­vex element situated on a level of loins, painted pink inside, is a clear allusion to a penis, which combined with the title causes that this work assumes strictly erotic nature. It is in this period that Pinińska-Bereś’s works had the most intimate and personal character.

The works created in the mid-1960s demon­strate that in Pinińska-Bereś’s early works, simi­larly to Šimotová’s, the emergence of a new topic was accompanied by formal experiments. First she introduced quilted fabric. The artist started to use it in presentations of her Rotundas, which were to stand on it, as if to soften their expres­sion. Quilted fabric also formed a kind of lingerie in the above-mentioned sculptures – Lady with a Bird and Lucy. The latter was the first sculpture made not of concrete but of papier mâché, whose usage was inspired by the artist’s daughter’s kin­dergarten activities.34BEREŚ, Bettina, in BUCZAK, Dorota, Różowa Rewolta [ Pink Revolt], Wysokie Obcasy; supplement of Gazeta Wyborcza (3 March 2008), http://kobieta.gazeta.pl/wysokie-obcasy/1,53662,4972303.html [ access: 23.03.2013]. By the end of the 1960s, lighter and softer materials started to dominate the artist’s works. Instead of burlap, she used cotton linen, unworked plank was replaced by plywood, and pink became a dominant colour. Her works started to acquire qualities that are recognised as ‘feminine,’ yet at first they were not dominant

Pinińska-Bereś first real solo exhibition, organised in 1970 in an art club Piwnica pod Baranami received almost no attention, yet soon her position in the art milieu was to change. The artist strengthened feminine elements in her new works that functioned as Psycho-Small­-Furniture. They are objects resembling furniture or home utensils (like a trashcan) with fragments of female body placed inside, all white and pink. This kind of art was well received by critics. One of them wrote in 1973 that these works are graceful, metaphoric, poetic. May be not always deep, but instead original.35grt, W warszawskich Empikach, Express Wieczorny, nr. 289 06.12.1973. At that time what is considered now to be the Pinińska-Bereś’s style was actually formulated.

In Pinińska-Bereś’s career a rapture, as in case of Adriena Šimotová, did not occur. She gradually changed her style until it obtained qualities described above. What is common for both artists is that the qualities described as femi­nine appeared in their art in the 1970s. It is worth comparing Corsets with Is a Woman a Human Being? from 1972 to see the difference. Many qualities of Pinińska-Bereś’s early works disap­peared in her art that gradually became more humorous, than terrifying. Starting with Psycho-Small-Furniture (since 1968) she presented sexu­ality as joyful, not as shameful and dangerous. In the 1970s her art – perceived as being frivolous, sensual, concentrated on pleasure – started to be defined as feminine and appreciated.

Adriena Šimotová and Maria Pinińska-Bereś are examples of women artists whose artistic careers started well before the emergence of femi­nist discourse, even in its limited version in which it existed in Eastern Europe. In the case of both artists, the slow emergence of a gendered vision can be traced back to the 1960s. It manifests itself basically in an attempt to put their female expe­rience related to eroticism into their art works – be it contemporary experience (for both of them) or introspection (in the case of Pinińska-Bereś). Their voice – expressed from the margins, as this was where women artists worked – was radically personal in comparison with that formulated by their colleagues leading in their art milieus. I agree with Pachmanová that its formulation was not a result of political emancipation. What is more, it does not seem to have been aimed as a direct confrontation with modernist discourse, but functioned rather – as Edit András remarked – as a kind of Freudian slip.36A remark made during The Long Sixties workshop in the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, 18 April 2013.

  • 1
    MINIOUDAKI, Kalliopi, On the Cusp of Feminism: Women. Artists in the Sixties, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 83 (2014): 60.
  • 2
    Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, Pejić Bojana, ed. (Wien: MUMOK, 2009). The exhibition was curated by Bojana Pejić and showed first in MUMOK in Vienna (13 November 2009 – 14 February 2010) and then in the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (18 March-13 June 2010). It was the first exhibition which dealt with the topic of gender in art from Eastern Europe since the 1950s.
  • 3
    Eva Kmentová (1928-1980) was a Czech sculptor. In the second half of the 1960s she began making works in which imprints of a body (also, but not exclusively, feminine) were important elements.
  • 4
    Interviews with the Researchers Czech Republic: Martina Pachmanová, in Gender Check, op.cit., 345.
  • 5
    MESKIMMON, Marsha, Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally, in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MARK, Lisa Gabrielle, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 324.
  • 6
    See for example, Gal, Susan, Movements of Feminism: the Circulation of Discourses About Women, in Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Power and Agency; HOBSON, Barbara, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 93-120.
  • 7
    DE BEAUVOIR, Simone, Druhé pohlaví: [výbor], introduction by PATOČKA, Jan, transl. by KOSTOHRYZ, Josef and UHLIŘOVÁ, Hana (Prague: Orbis, 1966).
  • 8
    DE BEAUVOIR, Simone, A második nem, transl. GÖRÖG, Lívia and SOMLO, Vera (Budapest: Gondolat, 1971); see also: JOÓ, Mária, The “Second Sex” in Hungary. Simone de Beauvoir and the (Post)Socialist Condition, AHEA: EJournal of the American Hungarian Educators Association 4 (2011): 1-13, http:/ahea.net/e-journal/volume-4-2011.
  • 9
    DE BEAUVOIR, Simone, Druga płeć [Second Sex], trans. MYCIELSKA, G. (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1972); see also, DESPERAK, Iza, Recepcja, Drugiej płci Simone de Beauvoir w Polsce. Perspektywa socjologiczna [Reception of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex in Poland. Sociological Perspective], http://www.feminoteka.pl/readarticle.php?article_ id=920 [access: 10.08,2013].
  • 10
    Běla Kolářová(1923-2010), trained in photography she used this medium in her experimental works. Notable in her practice was usage of everyday objects and camera-less photographs.
  • 11
    Zorka Ságlová (1942-2003), trained in tapestry, she is mainly associated with land art, thanks to her happenings in the landscape outside Prague.
  • 12
    Ibid., 346.
  • 13
    For comparative analysis of the modernist discourse in the 1960s in Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian art see PIOTROWSKI, PIOTR, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009).
  • 14
    Skupina G – a short lasting art group with the main exhibition in 1959; UB 12 – an art group active in the 1950s and 1960s (oficially 1960 -1970), comprising actually of 14 members.
  • 15
    Věra  Janoušková (1922-2010), a Czech sculptor working in different material, developed her typical collage-like technique.
  • 16
    ŠETLÍK, Jiří, Personal Fate as a Creative Source, in Adriena Šimotová: Tvaěř / Face, BRUNCLÍK, Pavel, ed. (Bratislava: Slovenská národná galéria, 2004), 2.
  • 17
    She herself found her early works too decorative, ZEMINA, Jaromír, Introduction, in Adriena Šimotová- Setkání 1960/1990 (Prague: Galerie Hlavního města Prahy, 1990), 3.
  • 18
    Ibid., 3.
  • 19
    Daisy Mrázková (1923) and Jiří Mrázek (1920-2008), both painters (she is also an author of books for children); Věra  Janoušková (1922-2010) and Vladimír Janoušek (1922- 1986), both sculptors, married from 1948
  • 20
    BRUNCLÍK, Pavel, Adriena Šimotová – Face, in Adriena Šimotová, op. cit., 1-2.
  • 21
    In January 1968 Alexander Dubček became the leader of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia and started to introduce liberal reforms. The Warsaw Pact forces (that is the Soviet Union and its main allies) invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 in order to stop this process.
  • 22
    Also: She changed her means of expression in response to the urgency of the content, in ŠETLÍK, Jiří, The Human Condition, op. cit.. 248.
  • 23
    ZEMINA, Jaromír, Four Times on the Subject of Adriena, in Adriena Šimotová, Pavel BRUCLÍK, ed. (Prague: Muzeum Umění Olomouc and Národní Galerie Prague, 2007), 266.
  • 24
    CHALUPECKÝ, Jindřich , The New Art in Bohemia, in Adriena Šimotová, op. cit., 252.
  • 25
    ZEMINA, Jaromír, Introduction, in Adriena Šimotová, op. cit., 15.
  • 26
    Tadeusz Szpunar (1929), Polish sculptor.
  • 27
    Maria Pinińska-Bereś, manuscript, 1990, the family archive.
  • 28
    II Grupa Krakowska [2nd Cracow Group] was a group of avant-garde artists, established in 1957 that referred to the inter-war tradition. The first Grupa Krakowska functioned in 1933-37 and some of its participants joined the second Grupa Krakowska. They organized exhibitions in the Krzysztofory Gallery.
  • 29
    This art club was famous for a cabaret. They also had a programme of exhibitions, yet they were never considered as important as in the Krzysztofory Gallery.
  • 30
    TATAR, Ewa, Negocjując podmiot kobiecy – wczesne poszukiwania rzeźbiarskie Marii Pinińskiej-Bereś, [Negotiating Female Subject – Maria Pinińska-Bereś Early Works], Rzeźba polska vol. XIII (2008): 240.
  • 31
    For more about this see JAKUBOWSKA, Agata, Ambiguous Liberation. The Early Works of Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 83 (2014): 168-182.
  • 32
    M. Pinińska-Bereś, Jak to jest z tym feminizmem? [And What about that Feminism?], in Sztuka kobiet, CIESIELSKA, Jolanta and SMALCERZ Agata, eds. (Bielsko-Biala, 2001), 194-195.
  • 33
    Maria Pinińska-Bereś, in Maria Pinińska-Bereś 1931- 1999, GAJEWSKA, Bożena, ed., exhibition catalogue (Cracow: Bunkier Sztuki, 1999), 30-31.
  • 34
    BEREŚ, Bettina, in BUCZAK, Dorota, Różowa Rewolta [ Pink Revolt], Wysokie Obcasy; supplement of Gazeta Wyborcza (3 March 2008), http://kobieta.gazeta.pl/wysokie-obcasy/1,53662,4972303.html [ access: 23.03.2013].
  • 35
    grt, W warszawskich Empikach, Express Wieczorny, nr. 289 06.12.1973.
  • 36
    A remark made during The Long Sixties workshop in the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, 18 April 2013.
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