To see the world – you have to look with all eyes. Research in ‘Po Prostu’

As part of the project, we have started a detailed library search covering the most important titles of socio-cultural magazines published in the People’s Republic of Poland. We are looking for clues to help us better understand the relationship between art and spirituality.
‘Po Prostu’ – a socio-literary magazine published in Warsaw from 1947, which, already as a “weekly of students and young intelligentsia” (1955-1957), became a symbol of Polish October. To art historians in Poland, it is well known as the tribune of the so-called Arsenal generation – participants of the Nationwide Exhibition of Young Art ‘Against War – Against Fascism’ (July – September 1955), which took place in the Warsaw Arsenal as part of the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students.

From the end of the 1940s, Lech Emfazy Stefański (1928-2010), later writer, author of the book Alchemists (1955), co-founder of the Theatre on Tarczyńska, as well as an eminent parapsychologist and researcher of paranormal phenomena, published texts on art in ‘Po Prostu’. In 1949, he wrote a series of articles entitled Painting is for Everyone (8-14/1949), the last of which, on the ways of further development of contemporary painting, was never published, as it did not conform to the doctrine of socialist realism, which had just been introduced. In 1950, Emfazy’s texts on art still appeared sporadically, among them three written jointly with Hilary Krzysztofiak (1926-1979), a painter, graphic artist and stage designer, later associated with the Katowice group St-53 (7/1950, 13/1950, 34/1950). These, too, were not understood by doctrinaires, and Krzysztofiak’s work Jaw, presented at an exhibition at the Arsenal, was contemptuously described as ‘metaphysics’ (28/1955).

Jerzy Ćwiertnia (1928-2009), a somewhat forgotten painter, graphic artist and poet, who withdrew from active artistic life for more than a decade in the second half of the 1950s and devoted himself to philosophical studies, including studies of Hinduism and Buddhism, also published many texts on art in ‘Po Prostu’. His texts reveal a deepening uncompromising attitude towards the role of art and the artist’s mission. Ćwiertnia preached individualism, formal pluralism (‘art is either the fruit of a creative and free spirit – or there is no art at all’, 47/1956) and strongly opposed ‘soc-abstraction’, which he identified with the uncritical following of the model of non-representational painting, including the rules of Władysław Strzemiński’s Theory of Vision, which gained wide resonance among young painters (47/1956, 2/1957, 8/1957, 23/1957).

It is not without significance for understanding the context of the work of young artists interested in the non-material sphere of human existence to observe the extensive debate concerning the place and role of religion in the life of a citizen of People’s Poland. In the pages of the magazine, numerous texts devoted to the critique of institutional Catholicism, and Christianity more broadly, were published by Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Legowicz and Janusz Kuczyński, among others. The latter’s collected essays were published in the book The Charm of Faith (1957), which was the 13th volume of the ‘Po Prostu’ Library. Despite the critical, anticlerical tone of most of these texts, the editors allowed for polemics – as exemplified by the publication of a series of responses to Janusz Reykowski’s text Does the soul exist? (34 and 41/1954) and the discussion On the Cooperation of Marxists and Catholics (14/1957) with the participation of, among others, Stefan Kisielewski, Stanisław Stomma, Jan Strzelecki and Jacek Woźniakowski, which appeared shortly before the magazine was closed by the authorities.
*The title of the entry refers to an article by Jerzy Ćwiertnia published in issue 20 of ‘Po Prostu’ in 1957.