Kobro and Strzemiński. Avant-Garde Prototypes

characteristics, purified of everything alien to them, that would open up a gap leading to reality. Kobro and Strzemiński, on the other hand, departed from these premises in search of a lateral reality, equatable to the first but marginal to it.

Unism, the theoretical materialization of this quest, was based on the creation of models, of “organic forms, parallel to nature.” This idealist concept is not arbitrary, nor is it simply a way to “illustrate” ideology or give it a recognizable form. The search for abstract unist objects is subject only to the compression of pictorial and sculptural practice into preliminary phases, rather like sketches or—to borrow the term employed by the curator of this exhibition, Jarosław Suchan—prototypes. These prototypes are created for the fundamental purpose of being inserted into larger structures like architecture, design, or city planning, all articulated in their turn to function as parts of an even larger whole, society. The vision of art based on collectivity and assemblage, similar to the work done on a factory assembly line, reveals the strongly biopolitical nature of unism and the objective it clearly pursues: to serve humankind, making human life more rational by freeing it from emotional instabilities and turning society into an organism whose parts are perfectly coordinated so that it can advance in a single direction. According to Kobro, “spatial composition generates emotions based on the triumph of the active forces of the human intellect over the existing irrationality and chaos. … The aim of art is to contribute to the triumph of superior forms of the organization of living. Art’s field of action is the production of form in the realm of social utility.”

In the 1930s, Strzemiński abandoned pictorial unism to work on cityscapes and seascapes, and Kobro started to approach cubism through the figurative nude and to explore works in which sculpture ceases to present itself as an organizer of space, one example being Kompozycja przestrzenna (9) (Spatial Composition (9)). Unism had been a consequence of the revolutionary optimism of the 1920s, and of the economic, industrial, and technological development that had done so much to encourage a faith in man and rational social reform. Its abandonment came with the arrival of crisis, the urge to overcome it, and the need to give a voice to the visual content of the period.

The socioeconomic developments laid bare the worldwide synergies that were then starting to form, and the chaos that apparently ensued from them eclipsed the search for self-enclosed, uncontaminated objects in favor of a visual content that would assume this dependency. The cubist afterimage, of which surrealism, according to Strzemiński, had become