Henryk Stażewski (pronounced: ; 9 January 1894 – 10 June 1988) was a Polish painter, visual artist and writer. Stażewski has been described as the "father of the Polish avant-garde" and is considered a pivotal figure in the history of constructivism and geometric abstraction in Central and Eastern Europe. His career spanned seven decades and he was one of the few prominent Polish artists of the interwar period who remained active and gained further international recognition in the second half of the 20th century.
Stażewski rose to prominence as a co-founder of Blok, Praesens, and a.r. group, three interwar artist collectives which spearheaded the development of Polish Constructivist art. During the 1920s and 1930s, he became acquainted with and influenced by prominent European avant-garde artists, including the Soviet Suprematist painters Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, the Dutch de Stijl artists Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, as well as the French Cubist painter and later founder of the Abstraction-Création collective Albert Gleizes, among others. As a member of the a.r. group, Stażewski was also one of the key artists—alongside Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro—involved in the formation of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in 1931, the first museum in Europe dedicated to showcasing and collecting modern art. Stażewski's career was hindered by the outbreak of World War II and most of his work was destroyed during the Nazi occupation of Poland. After the end of the war in 1945, he returned to painting but faced the cultural constraints resulting from the imposition of Stalinism and Socialist Realism in Poland.
Following the cultural and political Thaw of 1956, Stażewski began working on abstract relief sculptures, a medium that preoccupied him in the following decades and became his most recognized body of work. First exhibited in 1959, Stażewski's reliefs deployed diverse media and embraced various non-figurative visual vocabularies inspired by his interwar investigations into geometric abstraction. During the 1960s, still working behind the Iron Curtain, Stażewski helped facilitate unofficial cultural exchanges with numerous Western artists. In 1966, he initiated a years-long collaboration with the non-commercial gallery space Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, which played a critical role in the development of the Polish post-war avant-garde. Working alongside Christian Boltanski, Tadeusz Kantor, Allan Kaprow, Edward Krasiński, Annette Messager and other contemporary artists who exhibited at Foksal throughout the 1980s, Stażewski continued to cultivate international artistic connections with the West during the late communist period in Poland.
Stażewski's works are included in permanent collections of museums in Europe and the United States. For his contributions to Central and Eastern European culture, the artist was awarded the 1972 Herder Prize.
Early life and work Education and early work Henryk Stażewski was born in Warsaw on 9 January 1894, then part of the Kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous state under the political control of the Russian Empire. He was one of the four children of Leonard Rafał Stażewski, the owner of a small foundry on Wspólna Street in central Warsaw, and Michalina (née Skibicka). He enrolled at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1913, where he studied under the prominent portraitist and illustrator Stanisław Lentz. A surviving series of figurative watercolor paintings from 1915—including nudes, portraits, and landscapes—reveals the influence of Impressionist art in Stażewski's early work.
Stażewski graduated from the academy in 1919, a year after Poland had regained its independence. In 1921, he participated in Wystawa Formistów (The Formist Exhibition) at the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A Polish avant-garde artistic and literary group that drew on Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism, the Formists opposed naturalism in painting and sought to incorporate influences from other Western avant-garde movements. Later in 1921, Stażewski showed his work—together with several early compositions by a fellow Polish painter Mieczysław Szczuka—at the Polish Artists' Club in Warsaw. In 1922, Stażewski was included in the Trzecia Wystawa Grupy Formistów F9 (The Third Formist Exhibition F9) in Warsaw and a year later, in the Exhibition of New Art in Vilnius and the International Exhibition of New Art in Łódź.
Polish Constructivism (1924–1930s)
The Vilnius exhibition in 1923, which included works by avant-garde artists from across Eastern Europe and Russia, is credited with introducing constructivist tendencies to Polish art. Among the participating artists who would have a significant impact on Stażewski's approach to artistic production was Władysław Strzemiński, who had previously studied at two Constructivist collectives, INKhUK and Vkhutemas, in Moscow. While in Moscow, Strzemiński investigated various ways in which art could be harnessed to construct a new, socialist society in the aftermath of the Great War (later known as World War I), recognizing the role of an artist as that of an engineer as well as a scientist aiding in the process of social transformation.
For Stażewski, the connection between art and science was crucial, and he argued that "a painting's systematic quality connected it to contemporary civilization in a unilateral action—from science and machines to works of art". Through analyzing the constituent parts of their painting—that is, "space, faktura, line, and color"—the Constructivist artists were not completely beholden to the notions of intuition or talent, imbuing the process of art making with a sense of objectivity and collective labor.
Blok Group of Cubists, Constructivists, and Suprematists (1924–1926) In 1924, following the Vilnius exhibition, Stażewski, working with Strzemiński and Strzemiński's wife Katarzyna Kobro among other artists, co-founded Blok, or the Blok Group of Cubists, Constructivists, and Suprematists (Grupa Kubistow, Konstruktywistow i Suprematystow Blok). Active until 1926, Blok became the first Polish Constructivist collective focused on gathering like-minded artists, designers, architects, and theorists to help improve the lives of ordinary citizens. Inspired by leftist politics, Polish Constructivists associated with Blok had sought to use abstraction—applied to functional architecture, furniture design, typography or graphic design—as a radical tool to foster social and political transformation, thus bringing art into the service of the people. In a text from 1924, Stażewski emphasized the important role that abstraction plays in constructing a modern society:
At Blok, Stażewski collaborated with Henryk Berlewi and Szczuka who were considered leading figures in Polish avant-garde typography. After Blok was dissolved in 1926 due to internal disagreements, Stażewski became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde collectives Praesens (1926–1929) and later a.r. group (1929–1936), both of which also became critical in defining the direction of Constructivism in Poland. As a member of these groups, Stażewski contributed to Polish Constructivism through typography, posters, theoretical writings (including publications for the Blok magazine published between 1923 and 1926), as well as interior design and furniture design. Though predominantly idealistic and of limited impact on the Polish post-World War I society, the Constructivists completed some important architectural projects (Praesens, for instance, participated in the design of apartment buildings for the Warsaw Housing Cooperative in the Rakowiec district) and imbued the Polish avant-garde, up until then largely autonomous, with a sense of social commitment.
Kazimir Malevich's exhibition in Warsaw (1927)
In March 1927, Stażewski was among several Polish artists hosting the Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich during his trip to Warsaw. A pioneer of abstraction, Malevich coined the term Suprematism to promote the supremacy of "non-objective art of 'pure feeling', unconcerned with representation of the visible world". Malevich's theories of painting had served as a crucial point of reference for Russian Constructivists and avant-garde artists across Central and Eastern Europe. Stażewski helped organize Malevich's exhibition at Hotel Polonia and invited the artist to visit his studio.
In Warsaw, Malevich faced criticism from some contemporary artists, including Mieczysław Szczuka, who argued that Suprematism, as understood by Malevich, was no longer relevant for Polish utilitarianism-oriented avant-garde and that the artist was "a Romantic who loves painterly means for their own sake". Nonetheless, Malevich is said to have made a lasting impact on Stażewski in particular, who examined some of the key ideas of the movement regarding the autonomy of art and the superiority of non-objective visual forms in relation to his own artistic practice during the late 1920s and the early 1930s. In 1962, Stażewski would paint a reproduction of Malevich's Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying from 1915. Malevich's 1915 work was among the paintings he had exhibited at Hotel Polonia in Warsaw in 1927 and was subsequently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Relationships with European avant-gardes
According to literary scholar Michał Wenderski, Stażewski "played an invaluable part by functioning as a sui generis liaison between Polish artists and the West" in the interwar period. While working with Constructivist groups in Poland during the 1920s, Stażewski traveled frequently and participated in several international exhibitions, including the 1926 Paris Exhibition of Theatrical Art and the New York Machine Age Exposition in 1927. He also developed and cultivated relationships with representatives of Western European avant-garde groups, including Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian of the Dutch De Stijl movement, as well as the French painter Albert Gleizes. The influence of De Stijl can be found in Stażewski's work from around that time, including oil paintings titled Kompozycja (c. 1929–1930) and Kompozycja fakturowa (Textural Composition) from 1931, which rely on interlocking vertical and horizontal shapes to form a geometrical grid.
In 1929, Stażewski became a member of the Cercle et Carré and in 1931 joined Abstraction-Création, two Paris-based groups gathering international abstract painters. Also in 1931, as member of the a.r. group, Stażewski co-organized the International Collection of Modern Art in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Spearheaded by Strzemiński, the collection opened on 15 February 1931 with works by key modern artists from across Europe, including Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters.
By the second half of the 1930s, Stażewski returned to representational art while still exhibiting abstract paintings and graphic design in Poland and other European countries. He also supported himself financially through portrait commissions. During Hitler's invasion of Poland in early September 1939, the building which housed Stażewski's studio in Warsaw was bombed, destroying most of his work. Stażewski remained in Poland and lived under Nazi occupation, first in Szczekociny (1943) and later in Radość (1945), having mostly abandoned artistic production during that period, except for several caricatures and landscapes, virtually none of which have survived till this day.
Post-war career
Stalinist Poland (1948–1956)