Awangarda: historia współczesna
The Avant-garde: a Contemporary History

Summary/Abstract: The avant-garde is one of the bestresearched phenomena in Polish art history. This research results in an ongoing verificationof the hitherto dominant theses, formulated at the beginning of the 1970s, concerning thescope of the concept of the avant-garde, the link between the radicalism of its artistic ex-perimentation and the slogans of social revolution, or the avant-garde’s one-sided politicalentanglements. The conceptual scope is broadened to include the participation of avant-gar-de artists in pro-state activities in the Second Republic of Poland and their interest in theissues of memory and history, as well as in the utopias of the regeneration and causality ofart. These new approaches are exemplified by the multifaceted celebrations of the “Year ofthe Avant-garde” (2017). Consequently, the avant-garde has become not a contestation, butan essential part of the Polish cultural code, and its history is inscribed in the contemporarydebate on the models of modernity developed by Polish culture in the 20th century.

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