Meghan Forbes

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The Multiplication of Perspectives, which took place in April 2019, brought together scholars, artists, and curators from around the world to engage publically with issues that have been taken up internally within the C-MAP research program over the last decade, while articulating a responsibility of the art museum to address questions of social and political importance in the present. A series of dialogues, forums, and keynote presentations addressed a diversity of topics that ranged from migration and circulation to climate crisis and justice. We have compiled these sessions on post, as individual videos, which will be regularly added here, until the full program is available in distinct chapters.

Zdenka Badovinac became the director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana during the wars for Yugoslav succession. In the two and a half decades since, she has been a powerful voice from the so-called “former East” in articulating a position for artists from post-socialist Europe within the contemporary global art infrastructure, where global most often means taking up models instigated in Western museums and exhibition spaces. In 2006 Badovinac curated the exhibition Interrupted Histories, which foregrounded the work of artists from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and, in her accompanying catalogue essay she asked, “What are the implications of the absence of systematic historicization in spaces outside, or on the margins of, the West? […] How might the processes of such historicization be accelerated?”

Badovinac is amongst a group of curators and artists in Central and Eastern Europe that have actively been working to resituate and inscribe a history of art that accommodates artistic production in countries like the former Yugoslavia into “larger” art histories, while at the same time maintaining a critical stance towards this process. 

In her keynote lecture, Badovinac introduces her concept of the “sustainable museum,” and explores possible translocal approaches to exhibition practice from the so-called periphery, nevertheless situated within the neoliberal global network of art museums and biennials.

Meghan Forbes

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In the 1980s, alternative publications flourished in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), originating in such cities as Berlin, Dresden, Halle, and Leipzig. The energy of the country’s final decade is captured in these underground periodicals, which incorporate a wide assortment of materials (from twine and foil to high-quality printing paper) and employ diverse print modes (including typewriting, silk screen, and lithography) and binding methods (from fine Japanese bindings to staples and brads). While the focus of this article is magazines that exhibit these properties, there are also publications that reflect a basically professional, relatively uniform publishing standard (such as Ariadnefabrik), and even the high-end quality of artists’ books (for example, Sascha Anderson’s Poe Sie Al Bum¹). Some magazines ran for only a few issues while others lasted several years. They all operated outside of the larger field of state-supported art production in the GDR, however, and were not affiliated with officially sanctioned publishing houses. 

Helgard Sauer, a librarian at the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB) in Dresden who began to collect these underground publications pretty much as they were being produced,² later underscored that they operated “independent of the censure,” and that “there were no borders set to artistic creativity by this form of communication.”³ And yet, as she continued, “In the cultural policy of the GDR, such an artists’ exchange [of material for publication] outside state surveillance was not ordained, and thus was regarded as subversive.”⁴ Thus, these publications, which Sauer alternatively calls “Künstlerbücher” (artists’ books), “Künstlerzeitschriften” (artist’s magazines), “Kleinzeitschriften” (little magazines), and “alternative Künstlerkommunikation” (alternative artists’ communications), collectively represent one aspect of an art scene in East Germany that managed to exist outside of state-supported structures and to remain relatively unhindered.⁵

The earliest publications, such as Entwerter Oder and UND (both first published in 1982) and U.S.W., were essentially “assemblings.”⁶ As Sauer wrote in 1990, “The principle behind these editions is simple: interested artists would send their contributions (text, graphics, collages, photographs, etc.) for the agreed-upon issue to the editor, who assembles the work into publication form and then sends a copy back to the participating artist.”⁷ The wide range of print and publication processes employed, and the creative use of materials, seemingly as both a matter of economy and a means of experimentation, were integral to the particular aesthetics of the GDR underground magazines. The publications I will focus on here are precisely those that embrace an aesthetic of scarcity and “deformation,” and that pose their assembled and irregular contents not as limited by material circumstances, but rather as incredibly dynamic objects enriched by haptic, textual, and visual qualities. 

The magazine Der Schaden exemplifies deformation as an intentional artistic practice, a notion embodied in the publication’s name, which translates as “damage” or “loss.” Its text is mostly typewritten on tissue paper, and in samizdat fashion, has been reproduced using carbon paper.⁸ The cover of issue ten (1986) is a collage of painted tissue paper, and the pages are bound together with five staples unevenly spaced along its length, about a half an inch from the left-hand side, and sewn through with twine. In issue twelve, also from 1986, poems are stamped directly onto foil paper, rendering them nearly illegible. Elsewhere, black carbon paper has been inserted, and thus the very material aiding in reproducing the publication is a feature of its contents.

When I was in Dresden in January of this year, I had the opportunity to visit the SLUB and to see firsthand Der Schaden and a few other magazines. There was not sufficient time to study the full collection, which the library has also digitized,⁹ but the following preliminary notes and observations mark the beginning of what I hope will become a larger research project. I aim to explore in the short space of this essay the place these magazines occupy in the history of underground publishing behind the Iron Curtain, and some of the ways in which they function as a record of art created in the GDR leading up to and just following the fall of the Berlin Wall. As the examples below will illustrate, these publications, fascinating material objects in their own right, also comprise a historical archive of the East German art scene as it was playing out—of the punk scene, gallery installations, and various performances that were taking place contemporaneously. 

The hodge-podge, DIY, and interdisciplinary approach of the underground art world in East Germany is reflected in the look and content of its publications. In a short text on the “unofficial” and “non-licensed” print magazines from the GDR, Ilona Schäkel emphasizes both their textual and visual components, noting that with regards to the “collaboration of different artists and media in one collective creative process, border crossing and multimediality were significant characteristics of the young art of the GDR in general.”¹⁰ Sauer also details the varied contents of these publications, which include “graphic arts, typography, visual poetry, photography, happenings, performance, and Fluxus,”¹¹ and comments on the connection between this multimedial diversity and how the print publications were organically integrated into the larger, variegated art scene: “Besides the publication of the magazine issues, readings, round tables, exhibitions and also concerts were organized. This combination of different possibilities for art communication is characteristic of the multimedial development of art in the eighties in the GDR.”¹² A single issue of one of these magazines might include, for instance, photographic documentation, advertisements, and reviews of exhibitions in Berlin, Dresden, or Leipzig, the combination evoking the vibrancy of the underground art scene in the late 1980s and serving as invaluable primary documentation for anyone conducting research on it today.

One artist who played a key role in recording the underground culture of East Germany was the photographer Karin Wieckhorst, who still based in Leipzig, was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum der bildenden Künste there last summer. Anschlag 6 features a taped-together triptych of her photographs, which when unfolded, reveals three scenes from the staging of Lutz Dammbeck’s REALfilm, a so-called media collage, from May 14, 1986.¹³ In this same issue, there is an interview with the artist Angela Hampel, and a drawing by her of a naked punk woman with a Mohawk who is brandishing a snake. These examples, among others, suggest the immersive involvement of women in the GDR art scene, even though they were in the minority and have not been prominent in recent histories and exhibitions.¹⁴

The previous issue of Anschlag, which has a black vinyl cover, includes another photograph by Wieckhorst, this one of a punk woman in a leather jacket and spiked dog collar, who, cigarette in hand, is having her shaved head caressed by a man with a Mohawk, who wears a chain belt and black bandana. It is both an intimate portrait of two young people looking impossibly cool, and documentation of the crowd at a significant event: Intermedia 1, a two-day happening that took place in Coswig on June 1–2, 1985, and was advertised as a “Klangbild/Farbklang.”¹⁵ In the background of the photograph, one can see hand-painted “Rollos” (roller blinds, or shades), a popular painting surface in the GDR because the cheap household objects could easily be stored and discreetly transported.¹⁶ Apparently there were more than forty of these Rollos installed in Coswig for the event, which also featured jazz, “Hard Pop,” “Tanz und Projektion” (dance and projections), and “Musikbrigade” concerts.

An invaluable record of the happening is captured in a publication titled Intermedia, which was billed as a special issue of U.S.W. and served as a catalogue for the event. At the back of the issue, there is an envelope containing seventeen black-and-white photographs of the installed Rollos, and a list of the artists who participated. The bound contents comprise photos of the event’s performers and audience members in action, including more images by Karin Wieckhorst.

Another set of photographs from Intermedia is by Else Gabriel, one of four members of the artists’ group known as the Auto-Perforationists.¹⁷ Gabriel participated in many GDR happenings during the eighties, including, perhaps most famously, Allez! Arrest! with Micha Brendel and Rainer Görß, as part of the exhibition After Beuys at the prominent East German GALERIE EIGEN + ART in Leipzig.¹⁸Allez! Arrest!, which took place over ten days in the spring of 1988, was also documented in several alternative magazines. Wieckhorst was again on the scene, and her series of black-and-white photographs, which are reproduced in Anschlag 10,¹⁹ capture aspects of what was a multifaceted event including installations, concerts, and performance art. Extensive textual detail about Allez! Arrest! is provided in articles by artist Olaf Nicolai, art historian Dirk Schümann, and gallerist Judy Lybke, and Gabriel herself contributed a multipage schedule of events. The happening is documented in a special photography issue of Entwerter Oder, and its representation in these various publications has, no doubt, been a factor in its relative visibility within the history of GDR art today.

Production of these publications petered out after 1989 (though, as Sauer notes, this period also marked an uptick in library requests to view the publications).²⁰ Common Sense, published in only two issues in 1989 and 1990 in Halle, documents this period of transition in real time. The first issue is stunningly creative in its execution, with sewn-in, glued, and torn-paper elements, collage, blind letterpress printing, lengthier articles, and tiny visual poems. The combination lends a DIY element to the publication, which was nevertheless professionally bound by the Buchbinderei Steffen Stolze (today apparently still operational in the town of Hettstedt). 

The opening pages of the first issue of Common Sense feature a black-and-white photograph by Ernst Goldberg of a slogan that, painted on a wall, reads “35 Jahre DDR” (35 Years of the GDR). But the image has been altered, with the number 35 slashed out in red paint, and the number 40 painted next to it. Though the issue came out in 1989, it does not anticipate the fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place soon after, on November 9, 1989. When the second and final issue of Common Sense—dubbed an “Edition Augenweide” (Eyesore Edition)—was published after German reunification, the moment of transition is naturally central to the contents. In an introduction, now typed on a computer and signed “November 1990,” Jörg Kowalski, one of the editors, looks back over the year since the border wall was dismantled and asks, “What right to still exist do alternative, independent book projects now have?”²¹ It would seem a somewhat facetious question as, indeed, Common Sense was still alive and kicking as he wrote. In general, the second issue looks like the first—again, various papers and printing processes have been employed, a haiku is paperclipped in, and collage and torn-paper elements are features. But this issue of the publication would also be the last, and a closer look at its contents reveals how it reflects upon the change of state. On one page, in a work titled “AKTeneinSICHT” (Record Inspection), Henry Günther has effaced what appears to be his Stasi file, rendering the Xeroxed text nearly illegible with thick black lines. Elsewhere, an advertisement for a “GDR Flea market” is pasted in, calling on “Friends from East Germany” to sell their belongings and handicrafts “for hard German marks” in the days and months just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kowalski has emphasized the words “handicrafts” and “sell” by highlighting them in pen, stamped the words “Found Poetry” below the leaflet, and signed his name.²² In a work by Hans-Georg Sehrt called “Ein Gespenst ging um” (A Ghost Was Here), a tatter of the East German flag has been pasted into a visual poem of repeating letters of the alphabet.

Kowalski was also an editor of UNI/vers(;), another Halle-based publication that continued well into the period of German Reunification. Advertised at the back of the first issue of Common Sense, it is described as “the international forum for new tendencies in visual poetry,” and purported to have editors from the GDR, Chile, and France—contesting an essentialist notion that artists operating in East Germany were not part of an international network. But equally or even more importantly, the magazine, which operated from 1987 through 1995, transmitted information and forged connections within the underground art scene of the GDR. The MoMA Library has a full set of UNI/vers(;) among its holdings, bringing the Museum, at least modestly, into the history of collecting alternative publications from the East Germany.²³

As the galactic scope of its name suggests, UNI/vers(;) perhaps most fully represents a more international frame within which to consider the East German alternative publications. Three collaborators in addition to Kowalski are associated with the early issues: Gregorio Berchenko, Ulrich Tarlatt, and Guillermo Deisler. Deisler, who made his way to Halle from Chile via France and Bulgaria, was the main progenitor of the project, and it is to his address that potential contributors were instructed to send submissions. Active at the tail end of the movement, UNI/vers(;) fits within the Fluxus, mail art networks active between Latin America and Central Europe.²⁴ Described as a “portfolio,” each issue features the work of approximately forty artists. The magazine was typically packaged in a carton casing with a collaged cover and bound in twine, though there is some variation, as in the first issue, which was tucked into brown paper and sealed at the top with metal brads.²⁵ Potential contributors to a particular issue were instructed (as in the advert in Common Sense) to send one hundred distinct copies of their work to Deisler for inclusion; submissions typically came from Europe, but others hailed from Latin America, the United States, Australia, and Japan. The contents were packaged together as distinct, loose items. In terms that parallel Sauer’s description of the 1980s GDR alternative publications cited earlier in this essay, UNI/vers(;) claimed to “offer an opportunity, without influence, censor, or restriction, to bring together artistic originals. In the best of cases, these are works of simultaneous poetry, CO/ART, or a collective, poetic form, that cut across distance to reach each other.”²⁶ This statement again emphasizes the lack of censorship as a creative mode by which to produce and propagate alternative art and poetry, which, in the case of UNI/vers(;)truly represents a simultaneously international and translocal network. 

Thanks to the preservation of the various publications discussed here in such locations as the SLUB in Dresden and the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin, and to a lesser extent, the MoMA Library, an international group of interested researchers continues to have access to this primary documentation, and thus the capacity to learn more about a neglected aspect of German art history. It remains to be further considered how a better accommodation of East German printed matter in the overall history of German art practices of the late twentieth century might in turn adjust the existing discourse in the more established field. The digitization of many of these magazines by the SLUB is an invaluable resource, but there is no substitute for experiencing the deeply haptic qualities of these uncanny publications in person. More frequent exhibition of these materials would be a welcome approach.

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Read a review of the new publication at Hyperallergic.

Meghan Forbes: The inextricable relation of art and politics is made explicit in the multidisciplinary output of the NSK, of which IRWIN was a founding member. In response to the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and the disintegration of communism in the region, NSK created the conceptual art project State in Time and has since operated as a sovereign state of sorts. With regards to the 1992 NSK Embassy Moscow, Eda Čufer and IRWIN wrote that “NSK confers the status of state not upon territory but upon the mind, whose borders are in a state of flux.” How does NSK reflect this tenet now, twenty-five years later?

Andrej Savski: I view the creation of State in Time a bit differently, not just as a response to the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and the disintegration of communism, but rather as a creation of a new form and of a specific social community; it is rooted in the practice of collectivism that characterized the early NSK and which was accelerated through the activities of NSK citizens, such as those at the Berlin Congress and Folk Art Biennials. The tenet you are quoting is an important one that is still relevant and necessary for the preservation of potential possibilities of further open development. It is important to keep all options open, not only for us but also for the citizens.

Borut Vogelnik: It seems important to indicate which politics are inextricably related, and how they are related, to art. Even before establishing IRWIN, we were, as young artists, very interested in the conditions of art production and were entirely dissatisfied with the art system in the former Yugoslavia. We publicly disagreed with the policies enacted by art institutions and decided not only to create art but to build an independent support system for the art we were making, from the level of production to distribution, without the need to emigrate. This was new. It was possible only because of the political instability within the former Yugoslavia that manifested already in the early 1980s. It is the inextricable relation of the genre of painting and its immediate political context, the politics of the art system, both local and international, that significantly regulates how the work is perceived and positioned, that can be traced in IRWIN’s work from its inception until today.

Miran Mohar: IRWIN and the NSK groups were never political in the sense of daily politics. We never commented on such political issues in direct political language. But IRWIN projects like East Art Map, contemporary art collections, and other projects related to the construction of missing elements within the art system in Eastern Europe were truly political.

We established the NSK State as a communication channel to serve our goals. It became evident over time that many other people from other parts of the world identified with its principles, demonstrated by the fact that the number of NSK citizens has grown to over 15,000 since 1992. We can see a constant flux of various activities and projects of NSK citizens related to the NSK State in Time. Just to mention some of the most recent ones: NSK State Reserve in New York started issuing NSK money and bonds, and in the last four years, there were also two NSK Folk Art Biennials (Leipzig in 2014 and Ballyvaughan, Ireland, in 2016) presenting art related to NSK and its groups, as well as an NSK State in Time initiated and organized entirely by NSK citizens. Such an expansion of activity was not predicted, and it occurred without advertising from our state. In my opinion, the development of NSK State in Time went beyond our own expectations, and citizens took over in full. One can understand NSK State in Time as an experiment that is opening new possibilities of social organization beyond the physical borders of nation-states. The beauty of this project lies in the fact that its outcomes cannot be predicted. NSK State in Time is an artifact that has taken on a life of its own, independent of its original creators. 

MF: It is interesting that you call NSK State in Time an “artifact.” There is a strong archival quality to the work of IRWIN, exhibited in its obsessive mapping, charting, and framing. Several past projects, such as the East Art Map volume and the Retroavantgarde installations hung in various exhibition spaces, are both a “re-make” (a term used by Borut Vogelnik in an interview conducted together with Miran Mohar for Alexandru Poglár in 2006) and a reappropriation of contemporary art-world and historical avant-garde imagery. IRWIN’s conceptualization of the relationship of the past to present seems less a Futurist-style rejection of all old models and more a process of collection and synthetic recontextualization of prior artistic strategies to confront directly the real social and political conditions within which you/we are operating currently. Do you conceive of IRWIN as creating a sort of living archive, prone to pedagogical ends? 

BV: You are right; we did not act like the avant-garde was supposed to. We had good reason for this. If you want to reject the old model, you should define what that model is and find out who is controlling it, in order for that rejection to have any sense at all. The Slovene and Yugoslav art system was completely dependent on importing -isms from the West and adapting those imports to the local context. We publicly declared the art establishment irrelevant and provoked it to enter into open conflict with us. At the same time, we had begun to observe that in the East it was still possible to intervene in the field of articulation as a “private individual,” while elsewhere this was the exclusive domain of institutions.

AS: IRWIN is less the production of an archive and more the creation of constructs that exist in time. To my mind, projects such as Retroavantgarde and East Art Map are vehicles that suggest a parallel view and thus shape our understanding of the past or present.

BV: Retroavantgarde, which is presented and regarded as an artifact, is in fact a scheme of specific art production subsumed under the category Retroavantgarde. It presents the interrelations between a group of selected artists represented by their original works. Meanwhile, the East Art Map was never meant to be an art project; it was meant to be a map representing the art production within a certain territory, an orientation tool that we, being artists from the East, knew from our own experience to be important. 

MF: To what extent does IRWIN and the NSK depend on a collective or community that extends beyond the group itself? 

Roman Uranjek: IRWIN is one of the founding member groups of the larger NSK collective, established in 1984, a year after the IRWIN group had come into existence. Our idea took the perspective of the historical avant-gardes—such as the Bauhaus and postwar movements like Fluxus—as a starting point. The fundamental body of NSK consists of twelve individual persons. Through our activity, various poetics have been developed, and the working principle of every individual group has followed the rules of its own creative medium (music, theater, design, contemporary artistic practice, painting). And now, after more than three decades, we have twelve different notions and interpretations concerning the question of what NSK represents and whether it still exists at all. 

MM: IRWIN is a collective with direct democratic decision-making, and NSK was always more of an initiative, an organizational umbrella of all groups rather than a collective in the true sense of the word. The formation of IRWIN and, later, NSK was partly also a substitution for the insufficiencies of the art system in the 1980s in Slovenia. We pooled our knowledge, skills, and economic resources. In the 1990s, relations between the various NSK groups became looser. NSK transformed into the NSK State in Time in 1992 as a decision of all NSK members. It is important to stress that each NSK group was always independent and that all groups have a different logic of functioning and decision-making, partly due to the nature of the mediums they work in. I can say that IRWIN understands the NSK State in Time as a sovereign community that independently uses the frame of the NSK State to realize its projects. IRWIN collaborates on various projects with individual NSK citizens or their groups. 

BV: The results of the self-organization of NSK citizens are increasingly on display. It is important that NSKstate.com, the key domain where one can find information about NSK, was organized and managed by NSK citizens and not by the original Neue Slowenische Kunst. Communication between the citizens of NSK has developed around and through this internet project, and has gradually grown into joint campaigns and projects. 

AS: We have always willingly collaborated with various communities, mainly on the project level. The Retroavantgarde project included collaboration with artists from the territory of Yugoslavia; East Art Map was done with the help of artists and curators from Eastern Europe; and the recent NSK Pavilion was probably the most complex collaborative project so far, which included what one might call an expatriate community of migrants, both artists and non-artists. 

MF: In the introduction to East Art Map, published in 2006, IRWIN posits: “While it is true that a number of catalogues and books dedicated to various aspects of the contemporary art of the East have recently appeared, rather little has been done in the way of making serious comparisons between the Eastern and Western European context for art production. In this area, a no-man’s land continues to exist that divides one half of the continent from the other.” This “no-man’s land” is delineated cartographically in the volume as a large, blacked-out area where Eastern Europe would be. Do you still find this division to be palpable today, or are there more comparative, dialogical East/West approaches to the region that have cropped up over the last decade?

BV: Definitely a lot has changed regarding this question, not only with regard to an East/West axis in Europe, but globally. By drawing a map of undefined entities, you are in fact inventing them, and as far as I know there are only a few initiatives at present dealing with art on a global scale.

MM: The situation has partly changed for the better, but there are still substantial differences between Eastern Europe and the West. In Eastern Europe, there continues to be a strong dichotomy between the development of an art system—institutions, galleries, collectors, and art education (with some very honorable exceptions)—on the one hand, and high-quality art production (since the end of World War II through today) on the other. Recently, artists from Eastern Europe have figured in some of the most important international exhibitions. Since the art system has developed only partly (though the state of things is much better than it was before the 1990s), artists still have to count on galleries and support from abroad. Of course, the expansion of the EU makes things easier, but there is still a big economic difference, which, as we all know, also plays a major role in art. We were always aware of the fact that unless we organized ourselves, we will be organized by others. It is great to see that there are many individual and official initiatives that are making Eastern Europe more conducive to fostering contemporary art, increasing the possibilities of living and working here.

AS: While I don’t have much insight here, I am sure things improved a bit in the last decade. However, with regards to established hierarchies and the valorization of art from the West, I do not notice any substantial change.

MF: NSK has often drawn on symbols appropriated from totalitarian or extreme nationalist movements belonging to different political ideologies. Now that ideologies are more codified within a global system, what are your most salient forms for quotation and critique? Can you speak a bit, for instance, about the decision to create the NSK State Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, in 2017?

MM: The iconography in IRWIN and NSK artworks was never iconodulistic. Different -isms and styles were always juxtaposed in our works. We said in the 1980s that we were painting -isms, art styles and symbols of political -isms, like Cézanne painted apples.

AS: We have often worked with images and symbols that have a strong activation potential. It is also true that over time and with repetition, the initial shock of provocative transgression lost its power. But I would say that what really interested us was not the provocation, since that is a statement in-relation-to, but the creation of a parallel form, a form that stands next-to, not necessarily against. In the case of the State in Time, it showed that this kind of reasoning actually had a bigger subversive potential, and not only in relation to the Slovene state but to the institution of the state as such.

BV: The decision to install the NSK State Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was intentional, but not intended to be a critique of the biennale itself, even if we understood that such a decision could not avoid being seen as one. Its specific organizational structure offered us a unique sociopolitical context in which it was possible to install the NSK State Pavilion side by side and in comparison with pavilions of other states. NSK State in Time has transformed into a community that started to live its own life. Although it is true that in terms of population size NSK State in Time cannot compare to most other states, one can claim that in terms of the structure of its citizens, it is already a superpower in the field of contemporary art. Its citizens include a number of exceptional, world-renowned artists, art theorists, and curators, for whom even the world’s most developed countries in this field would envy us. The NSK State Pavilion is, up to this point, the most complex installation of the abstract organism of NSK State in Time conducted in a physical space.

RU: When we decided to establish the NSK State Pavilion, we invited Zdenka Badovinac and Charles Esche to take over the curatorship of our pavilion. The curators decided to represent the idea of a state in which refugees participate and can issue passports. Ahmet Ögüt, a Kurdish artist living in Berlin, was entrusted with the visual representation of the state. The feedback from our colleagues, the visitors to the biennale, and the strong representation of our work across various media—including the BBC, CNN, Artforum, Financial Times, the Guardian—give us sufficient hope that we can continue with this project in the future.

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In the early twentieth century, two institutions of radical pedagogy—the Bauhaus in 1919 and VkhUTEMAS,¹ which was established in 1920 as the successor to

SVOMAS,² set up in 1918—developed in tandem and more than a thousand miles apart. Points of comparisons between the German and Russian schools of architecture and design are notable: both were founded with state support in the years directly following the First World War on principles of structural interdisciplinarity, and both were shuttered by the early 1930s. But there were also significant material and philosophical differences between the two, rooted as they were in disparate economic and political circumstances.

Vkhutemas is often referred to in relation to its more famous counterpart as the “Soviet Bauhaus,” relegating it to the diminutive other, and belying an assumption of a flow of influence from West to East. In fact, an exchange of ideas moved in both directions, though only occasionally and partially. In many ways, we are looking at two distinct schools existing at the same time in different places, with some salient points of productive contact. These points were generated through a variety of modes, including correspondence, exhibitions, and travel (in the form of student exchanges and guest lectures).

The intersections were likewise made visible and further encouraged in magazine publications. This platform was used across the interwar avant-gardes to strategically signal transnational alignments and to cross-promote the work of other movements, as well as to engage in a public dialogue about avant-garde aesthetics and their social utility. In Moscow, the magazine Sovremennaia arkhitektura (Contemporary Architecture) reported on various developments at the Bauhaus, including an article in its very first issue on the move of the school from Weimar to Dessau.³And in the Bauhaus magazine, initiated in 1926, personalities associated with Vkhutemas were featured. Developments at the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas were not, of course, only regarded with interest in Germany and Russia, but also garnered trans-European interest and involvement. To take just one example, information and images related to both schools were shared with some frequency in the magazine Stavba (Building) in Prague.⁴When one room of the First Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture, held in Moscow in the summer of 1927, was dedicated to works from the Bauhaus—“comprising photographs and drawings of student designs for furniture, ceramics, light fittings, fabrics, and typographical work”—a reviewer stated that the objects on view “were for the most part already known to us through the publications of the Bauhaus.”⁵ In evidence here is the successful utilization of the increased capacity of the print periodical to disseminate images and ideas in the early twentieth century more broadly than was previously imaginable.⁶

As the magazine has become increasingly valued as an important material site for telling cultural histories, it behooves us to turn to these dynamic platforms of exchange to help tease out and complicate the perceived flow of ideas between Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus. And while certain texts and images pertaining to either school, its teachers, and students may be well-known in isolation, a holistic, full-page view of the periodical layout takes into account the curatorial strategies of its editors, and evidences the connections and mutual points of interaction that they themselves noted, and found worth highlighting. The examples featured here speak to the importance of reading the content of a given periodical as it was published, adding a layer of interpretation to what is available from a close reading of texts extracted and reprinted elsewhere. It also points to the importance of researching more fully the print circulation of well-known images.

The magazine ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, in particular, is considered here for its rhizomatic properties, as it points to a multiplicity of interconnections in the avant- garde reaching in several directions. The history of ABC also underscores the seminal role of El Lissitzky—head of the architectural department at Vkhutemas before departing for Berlin in 1921, and then upon returning to the school in 1925— who played a major role not only in making sure that Soviet developments in architecture and design were known west of Moscow, but also in influencing art production and theory there.

Sima Ingberman describes ABC, published between 1924 and 1928, as “acclaimed for its radical Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] approach to modernism and for its role in presenting new Russian designs to the West.”⁷ The latter point can be attributed to the part that Lissitzky played in developing and designing the magazine. While in Berlin, Lissitzky was the coeditor and designer ofVeshch/Gegenstand/Objet (with Ilya Ehrenburg) and G (with Hans Richter), two magazines that were instrumental in circulating information about Soviet Constructivist art and architecture internationally.⁸Mart Stam, who initiated ABC, had met Lissitzky in Berlin that same year; Stam would go on to lecture at the Bauhaus from 1928 to 1929 (when the school was in Dessau and under the directorship of Hannes Meyer). He sought the editorial guidance of Lissitzky forABC, which Lissitzky willingly provided, and in exchange, Lissitzky “encouraged the group [of ABC editors] to join the network of small international constructivist magazines that he promoted.”⁹

The real fulfillment of this suggestion is evident in the second volume of ABC, each issue of which came in a bright orange wrapper with big and bold black letters (another contribution by Lissitzky that was, at the time, becoming a familiar trope in New Typography and Constructivist graphic design) that follows a practice common across the interwar avant-garde magazines of cross-promoting and signaling aesthetic alignments through advertisement. The Bauhausbücher series and publications by Adolf Behne, Le Corbusier, and Lissitzky are advertised on the inside front cover, and a list of international magazines, including Blok in Warsaw,G in Berlin, MA in Vienna, and Stavba in Prague, is printed at the back.

Lissitzky’s editorial hand is also evident in a series of issues from the first volume ofABC. In the second issue, in 1924, a student work from Nikolai Ladovsky’s core course on “Space” at Vkhutemas is pictured.¹⁰ Running alongside the image (of a proposal for a factory tower) is an announcement that the next issue of ABC will offer a “report on the problems and goals of the new Russian architecture (with illustrations).¹¹ As advertised, the following issue, a double issue which centered on the theme of “Concrete” (and including work by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who would later become the third and final director of the Bauhaus in 1930), features on its front page an article entitled “Russian Architecture,” which introduces Vladimir Tatlin’s model for the Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (Monument to the Third International). It also presents another student work for the same project highlighted in the previous issue, and on the last page, an advertisement by Lissitzky for his own Berlin atelier. The now-iconic photomontaged self-portrait, of a hand holding a protractor, overlaid on a head shot of the artist, with graph paper behind, is a visual manifesto of Constructivist, rationalized tendencies. The hand with protractor is repeated (without the artist’s visage) on the cover of the now most famous Vkhutemas publication, which was published by the school’s in- house print shop in 1927.

Perhaps the most compelling instance of the interactions between figures associated with both the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas showcased in ABC comes in a special issue from 1926 that was guest-edited by Meyer. As described in the commentary from a reprint of the magazine, Meyer’s issue “presents a representative, international cross section of currents in the constructivist art of the twenties.”¹² One double-page spread includes two works by Lissitzky as well as models by Naum Gabo¹³ and Kazimir Malevich, two other Vkhutemas affiliates. The band of text that runs alongside these illustrations is an excerpt from the typographer Jan Tschichold’s “Die neue Gestaltung” (“New Design”), which was featured in an issue of Typographische Mitteilungen (Typographic News) from 1925 that Tschichold guest-edited, and is followed by a brief text by Lissitzky. This particular excerpt from Tschichold walks through a series of isms, from Impressionism and Cubism to Dada and Suprematism (of which Malevich is the exemplary figure) to Proun and Constructivism (both associated with Lissitzky), and it ends with a description of the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas—rather than with two more isms. The editorial decision to excerpt the original text to cut off at this point and not later suggests that Meyer deliberately chose to emphasize the march of early twentieth-century artistic developments as having reached its apex in these two schools, which are described by Tschichold as “independently parallel movements.”¹⁴ Tschichold emphasizes that while contemporary and comparable, Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus “were founded independently and inadvertently at almost the exact same time, and consistently carried out their work along the same path; that is, in the shared conviction that only in the integration of all artistic work as construction [Bau] does it become meaningful.”¹⁵ In short, and to return to the argument with which I opened, while the two schools came together ideologically on critical points, emblematic of the general avant-garde vision across the European continent in the interwar period, they were working independently of each other, different trains on parallel tracks occasionally stopping in the same station.

Notably, Tschichold dates the inception of Vkhutemas to 1918, which, in fact, marks the beginning of SVOMAS. This timing also contradicts the assumptions that the Bauhaus, founded in 1919, and its pedagogical mission served as models for Vkhutemas. In fact, Lissitzky, in 1927, would go so far as to suggest that Walter Gropius, the founding director of the Bauhaus, was influenced by Vkhutemas, claiming: “Rumors of the revolution in Russian artistic life, and fragmentary information about the structure of the Vkhutemas had percolated into Germany. Walter Gropius gathered avant-garde artists around himself, and was fortunate to be put in charge of part of the former Academy of Weimar.”¹⁶ While Tschichold and Lissitzky did their part to set the insemination of Vkhutemas before the Bauhaus, as Christina Lodder rightly points out, “The Vkhutemas, as such, did not exist at the time the Bauhaus was founded, and it is difficult to imagine that the relatively chaotic State Free Art Studios could have had any precise influence on the German school.”¹⁷

In terms of establishing influence, the question is not so much who came first, but rather where points of intersection are visible and, in the case of the magazines, visualized. Where Tschichold’s text in its original appearance in Typographische Mitteilungen ends with a discussion of photography and film, it is telling that Meyer, in his special issue of ABC, cuts it short to conclude with a study of these two architectural schools. Meyer would be appointed by Gropius the following year to lead the newly formed architectural workshops, and would take over as director in 1928, orienting the school in a more clearly socialist direction, and attempting to forge interactions with its Eastern counterpart.¹⁸Meyer’s special issue of ABC is a harbinger of the networks that he would aim to cultivate from within the Bauhaus.

In the same year that Meyer put out his special issue of ABC, Lissitzky, now back in Moscow, edited (with Ladovsky) the single issue of Izvestia ASNOVA (The Bulletin of the New Association of Architects). This was the publication of an organization of the same name, which was established in 1923 in Moscow by Ladovsky and his Vkhutemas colleagues Nikolai Dokuchaev and Vladimir Krinsky.¹⁹ The front page, which employs the bold black lines of Constructivist typography, bears a striking resemblance to ABC, and indeed a horizontal line of text advertises the “international figures” who will appear in the publication, including ABC founder Stam, along with another editor Emil Roth. Adolf Behne and Le Corbusier, who had had work advertised in ABC, are also named. And Karel Teige, an editor at Stavbais listed as well. Similar to the other Central and Eastern European avant-garde magazines of the time not published in German, basic editorial information is included in Russian, German, and French, indicating—along with the graphic legibility of New Typographic tendencies—an ambition to be circulated and read beyond the Russian linguistic zone.

The few examples offered above, with emphasis on a single periodical, should evince the potentiality for mapping an extensive network of the protagonists who were observing, sharing, commenting upon, and comparing developments at the Bauhaus and the Vkhutemas in the 1920s. The Czech example of Stavba, too, reminds that this exchange was not insular, and that plenty more examples can be summoned to better grasp the extended influence and interchanges of these two schools of modern architecture and design. In turn, more attention to such research will help us to better understand the legacies of both institutions.

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In the broadest of terms, Theory of Vision, by the Polish artist Władysław Strzemiński (1893–1952), could be described as an expansive overview of centuries of European painting styles. But when it was first published— posthumously in 1958—the poet Julian Przyboś, in a preface to the book, maintains that the texts comprising it do not offer merely a sweeping art historical survey for art students that dictate how they ought to paint. He writes, “[This] is not a painting textbook; it does not teach the reader how to become a painter. The theory teaches an understanding of the evolution of man’s visual consciousness.”¹

Theory of Vision reflects ideas that Strzemiński had been developing and sharing in his lectures for decades, perhaps even as early as 1919 as Iwona Luba suggests in her introduction to a 2016 edition of the book. In that period, Strzemiński was taking classes at Svomos, or the First State Free Art Studios (the predecessor to the better-known Vkhutemas school) in Moscow, and on the staff of the Department of Fine Art (IZO), which had been set up by the newly formed Communist government in Minsk (his birthplace), before he moved to Vilnius.² Kazimir Malevich was on the faculty at Svomas, and would prove to be, famously, both a mentor and an artist against whose ideas Strzemiński formed his own. The younger artist encountered other important figures at Svomas, including Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, and was thus well acquainted with Russian Constructivism. By 1922, however, he came to write “against his Russian colleagues and the entire Soviet experiment,” in his polemic “Notes on Russian Art,” published in the Polish magazine Zwrotnica.³ Strzemiński is nevertheless strongly associated with the development of Polish Constructivism in the 1920s, which arguably has its roots in its Russian counterpart.

But he is perhaps best known for “Unism,” a theory that insists upon the organicity of an artwork, developed with his fellow artist and wife Katarzyna Kobro. In the November/December 1924 issue of the constructivist magazine Blok—the publishing arm of a group by the same name, which Strzemiński co-founded—he published “B=2; to read . . .,” his last statement printed in the magazine, and his first on Unism, in which he writes, “The law of organic painting requires: the greatest possible union of forms with the plane of the picture.”⁴ Strzemiński’s Unist paintings are abstract—though not in the starkly geometric sense of Constructivism—as well as deeply textural. In his Unistic Composition series from the early 1930s, for instance, he created repetitive, hypnotic forms with oil paint applied in high relief. His utopian stance toward his artistic production was distinct from both the mystical elements of Malevich’s Suprematism and the “art into life” philosophy of the Constructivists; rather than positing the role of art as exclusively utilitarian within the context of daily life, Strzemiński wrote, in 1932, that “the social influence of art is indirect.”⁵ While Strzemiński held strongly to the conviction that art was a relevant agent for social change, he also staunchly acknowledged certain formalist dictates; i.e. the “flatness (stemming from the flatness of the stretcher), [and] geometry of forms (stemming from the geometric shape of the canvas)” that would ultimately reflect the negotiation of the artist’s hand with the goods with which he or she works, and thus inherently relate to a greater material-historical context.⁶ Or, as Jarosław Suchan has put it, “the painting constantly reminds the observer of its own material nature, of the fact that it is just an ‘object.’”⁷

Strzemiński completed his Unist Composition series in 1934. Yve-Alain Bois argues that “anti-Unist” statements by Strzemiński and Kobro in texts from 1934–35 suggest that, by then, they had reached an “impasse” that “is more than formal; it is also political, in the broadest sense of the term, and concerns the utopian daydream that was one of Unism’s driving forces as it was of all the movements of the first modernist wave.” He continues, “Strzemiński no longer believed in art’s value as a model, in its role as the herald of a new social reality, because he no longer believed in the possibility of a future Golden Age.”⁸ Also in 1934, at an exhibition in Warsaw, Strzemiński showed none of his Unist, or abstract paintings.⁹

Immediately following World War II, Strzemiński began lecturing in Łódź at the State Higher School of the Visual Arts, which he helped found, and Theory of Visionis understood to come largely from the lectures he gave there and broadly reflects the various strains of his theoretical stance toward art production, as briefly outlined above. Besides offering a history of art linked to the biological evolution of the eye, the book reflects the artist grappling with his own art historical narrative, as he attempts to reconcile his earlier work in abstraction in the name of Unism with the politics of the postwar period, in which non-realist works were seen as counter to the socialist project. The language of Theory of Vision is rooted in a Marxist vocabulary of class struggle, which Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska argues “wasn’t just a facade for Strzemiński.”¹⁰ Rather, she writes, “Marxism offered a number of points coincident—apparently, at least—with Strzemiński’s own political/artistic perspective. They shared the same, dynamic and dialectical, vision of history, an aversion towards ‘formalistic’ art identified with vain aesthetics, and a strong sense of art’s connection with social reality.”¹¹ But as Rejniak-Majewska also notes, how that last point was envisioned and carried out in the work of Strzemiński differed drastically from the official position of the Communist Party. The consequence of this irreconcilability was stark: the Ministry of Culture removed Strzemiński from his teaching position in 1950, and he died destitute two years later of tuberculosis.

In the final section of Theory of Vision, Strzemiński seeks to justify his abstract art production from the 1930s and 40s, claiming, “When I set about making these works (most of which were burned by the Hitlerites during the Occupation) I subjectively experienced them as being realist and empirical, demanding a far greater degree of observation than paintings considered realist.”¹² Strzemiński posits a “development of visual consciousness” that evocatively proposes that our mode of and capacity for seeing, and our perceived “image of the world,” are in fact not constant but, rather, subject to economic, political, and social change—the developments in history that likewise shift our perception of reality, and the ways in which we see.¹³ Alas, it was apparently not an argument immediately convincing to the Communist Party, and so Theory of Vision would not be published until 1958, six years after its author’s death.

Excerpt from the Introduction to Theory of Vision:

Seeing

Our seeing has not been given to us ready-made and unchanging. Our eye developed from less perfect forms to what we have now as a result of lengthy biological evolution.

But seeing is not just the passive reception of visual sensations. We analyse the received sensations, confront them with corresponding fragments of reality, make sense of the emergent interrelations and causes: what sort of sensations they are and what they say about the objectively existing world. In addition to the passive, physiological reception of visual sensations, there is the active, cognitive work of our intellect. There is the mutual influence of thinking on seeing and seeing on thinking. Thinking poses questions for seeing to answer. Seeing accumulates a stock of observational material, which is validated and universalised in the process of thinking. Thanks to the constant corrections of thinking in relation to seeing, we are able to make ever better use of received visual sensations. We do not let them slip away, we do not let them pass fruitlessly by, because we recognise what each of them means and to which fragment of reality it corresponds.

There are thus two evolutions in the domain of seeing. One is the evolution of our visual apparatus, the development of the eye, which was at one time – in the simplest forms of life – merely a collection of skin cells more sensitive to light than other skin cells. Passing through a range of models and varieties, it became what it is now – the normal human eye. We know that, in a relatively recent phase of the evolution of the species, the eye could not see colours, that the eye of a mouse, for instance, sees a blurred image of objects, the better to discern movement in their background. There is, thus, biological evolution: the development of seeing through the development of the eye.

Alongside this first process, there is another: the development of skills that make use of seeing. Deduction, on the basis on visual sensations, becomes increasingly precise. Thinking and seeing develop through mutual influence. Their development does not take place in isolation from real, formative living conditions but on a social basis, depending on the needs of the labour process. That is why, by setting new tasks, each successive social system leads to the development of new skills in the use of visual sensations. This is why the second process, unlike the first, biological, one, is historically determined. Just as language developed in relation to successive social systems, so, too, the faculty of seeing, visual consciousness, cannot be formed outside its relation to history, the specific development of the forces of production and the class struggle. In this way, the process of the development of visual consciousness mirrors the process of historical development.

If man sees more than an eagle – even though his eyesight is less sharp – it is because man has a wider range of interests and in effect carries out a wider and more precise analysis of his visual sensations, and because he does not pass over those that would not interest an eagle. That is why man sees less, but his seeing provides him with more information about the world than the dog’s far superior sense of smell, because the correcting function of the human mind takes into account the components of sensations that would be passed over by the dog (e.g. the scent of flowers or chemicals).

Taking as a basis the historical development of visual consciousness, we cannot accept, as idealists do, the existence of a single, timeless, ahistorical image of reality, based on the same visual principles, by virtue of which the eye of every normal man sees reality. It is not the biological reception of visual sensations that determines how the real world is seen, but the co-operation of seeing and thinking – the historically determined development of visual consciousness. It is not the abstract void of “normal” seeing, but the ever-developing historical, concrete fact of visual consciousness.

Seeing is not only the passive, biological act of receiving visual sensations, it is not a purely mechanical reflection of the world, forever the same and unchangeable – like a mirror image. We acquire knowledge of the world not by merely seeing it but by thinking and recognizing what each visual sensation is telling us and which fragment of our knowledge of the world our eye is delivering – in a word, by analysing visual sensations, generalizing and repeatedly testing them. The scope of our seeing is determined not by some “natural,” “normal” seeing, but by the mutually related and interdependent processes occurring between biological seeing and our thinking. It is in this way that visual consciousness arises, which determines the number of components of the world our eye has perceived.

It is not what the eye catches mechanically that matters in the process of seeing, but the consciousness man has of his seeing. Increased visual consciousness is thus a reflection of the process of human development.

So-called professional visual competence is simply one form of visual consciousness. The eye of the experienced textile worker will notice ten times more faults in the fabric than the equally (biologically) able eye of someone of another trade. But that same eye of the textile worker will see nothing when before faced with a cornfield – will not be able to say anything about the humidity of the earth, the ripeness of the corn, the transpiration of the air, or the quality of the soil.

The mechanical visual sensations are in all three cases the same, but the scope of seeing is different. This is because, guided by thinking, eyesight has been attuned to the reception of sensations that it passes over in other cases. The range and quantity of what is seen is determined by visual consciousness as formed by real conditions of existence. Not some “normal,” arithmetically average, abstracted seeing, but seeing shaped by existence and determined by the socio-historical structure.

Realism – The Image of Reality

Idealist aesthetics has recourse to concepts of unchanging, “eternal” nature, and of a preconceived, unchanging, ahistorical man with a preconceived, unchangeable, “eternal” way of seeing nature. It occasionally lays aside this “eternal” seeing in favour of pragmatic “normal’” average seeing. In both cases, it insists on the unchanging, constant, ahistorical seeing of unchanging nature.

Taking into consideration only the apparatus of seeing and not taking account the directing and organizing role of thinking and experience, it concludes that we see a constant, unchanging, invariable image of the world from which we receive an unchanging fixed quantity of constant visual sensations.

It may be the case that seeing has not changed for a long time, that the mechanism of the eye’s functioning remains the same as it did several thousand years ago. But what matters to us is not what the eye grasps mechanically, but the consciousness man has of his seeing. He has only really seen what he is aware of having seen. The rest remains unrecognized beyond his consciousness and therefore goes unnoticed. Experience shows that we notice only the phenomena in nature upon which we focus our attention. It is as though our thinking poses in advance the questions to which our eyesight is to provide answers. The range of observation to which, by seeing, we are to provide an answer either confirming our previous assumptions or contradicting them, is marked out. The labour of thinking, in co-operation with the direct activity of seeing, is decisive for the wealth and diversity of our observations.

That is why the image of nature is not one and the same always and for everyone. Its limits are decided by the historically determined development of visual consciousness. Idealist aesthetics formulated the object, reality, sensations solely in terms of the object, and not as a human activity and practice – not subjectively. That is why it referred to the image of the world (constant and unchanging) rather than to human cognitive activity, intent upon an ever more complete understanding of this image. Nature was referred to as to something given once and for all and absolutely unchanging, whereas there was no discussion of the human activity of seeing and the socio-historical process of the development of visual consciousness and of coming to understand nature. Only when we consider seeing in its developmental dynamics, in its dialectical unity with thinking – can we understand that the image of the world is subject to change and development and is comprised in our visual consciousness.

The image of nature “as it is,” arises only from the conscious components of seeing. The unconscious components go unnoticed, are treated as an obstacle, an imperfection in seeing, a distortion of the real world and of real, not illusory, objective nature. Not subjected to the thinking process – they have failed to disclose the truth about reality (inherent to them) and were therefore rejected as marginal.

Thus, we distinguish between seeing (in the biological sense) and theconsciousness of seeing. In so far as the former is dependent on slow biological evolution and presumably remains unchanged for long periods of time, the latter develops over the course of history. Man’s ability to make use of his seeing develops and the quantity of consciously seen visual phenomena increases. The image of the world seen by man changes and develops. The process of the development of visual consciousness is a historical process, historically conditioned by the demands of socially determined processes of labour in different successive historical systems. Thus, the image of the world that we see through our real visual consciousness is not unchangeable, not the only “true” reality, given once and for all, in some abstract void outside history, but a changeable image, dependent on historical development, on social systems arising in its course and, ultimately, on the class struggle shaping history. Visual consciousness develops in active periods of history and remains unchanged in periods of stabilization or even regresses with the regression of historical and cultural structures. The expanding base of visual consciousness constitutes the essential foundation for the development and transformation of our knowledge about the world. This is how we see the world – not biologically, but historically. We see realistically – with our real, conscious eyes.

The idealist aesthetic deploys one, fixed notion of realism, one that does not capture the changeable essence of our seeing. It does not see realism as having been formed through the process of human seeing’s protracted cognitive work, or as the result of man’s work moving towards an increasingly deeper knowledge of truth, but as a given, once and for all, as binding for all times. One historical stage of realism is, in this case, taken for realism’s absolute.

Conceiving of realism in relation to human activity, seeing it as being the outcome of a development in visual consciousness, we must, in practice, acknowledge its infinite possibility of development. Every genuine, conscious visual sensation contributes a new element of knowledge about the world and enriches the domain of realism that has hitherto existed. Thus, in speaking of the historical process of the development of realism, we should, in each concrete instance, define the visual sensations on the basis of which it emerged and the scope of the visual consciousness that shaped it.

Realism is not a Platonic metaphysical absolute but the historically evolving process of the development of the human cognitive faculty.

1    Cited from an unpublished manuscript of the English translation of Władysław Strzemiński, Teoria widzenia, ed. Iwona Luba (Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 2016; reprint). English translations by Klara Kemp-Welch and Wanda Kemp- Welch.

2    For more on Strzemiński’s time in Russia and his relationship with Russian artists, see Christina Lodder, “Made in Russia: Strzemiński and the Russian Avant-Garde,” in Powidoki życia: Władysław Strzemiński i prawa dla sztuki/ Afterimages of Life: Władysław Strzemiński and Rights for Art, ed. Jarosław Lubiak (Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 2012) and “Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński in Russia,” in Katarzyna Kobro & Władysław Strzemiński: Avant-Garde Prototypes (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and​Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 2017).

3    Lodder, “Made in Russia,” 184.

4    Ryszard Stanisławski, Janina Ładnowska, Jacek Ojrzyński, and Janusz Zagrodzki, eds., Constructivism in Poland, 1923–1936: BLOK, Praesens, a.r. [Exhibition] Museum Folkwang, Essen, 12.5.–24.6.1973, trans. Piotr Graff and Ewa Krasińska (Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 1973), 82 (emphasis the author’s). Originally published as “B=2, powinno być” in Blok 8–9 (November/December 1924).

5    Ibid., 111. Originally published as a communication of the “a.r.” group, 1932.

6    Jarosław Suchan, “Kobro and Strzemiński: Protoypes of a New Thinking,” in Avant-Garde Prototypes, 26.

7    Ibid., 32.

8    Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 131.

9    Constructivism in Poland, 1923–1936: BLOK, Praesens, a.r., 28.

10    Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska, “A History of the Eye According to Strzemiński,” in Afterimages of Life, trans. Marcin Wawrzyńczak, 284.

11    Ibid.

12    Teoria widzenia, unpublished English-language manuscript.

13    Ibid.

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