Reconciling Two Cultural Milieus: Henryk Berlewi’s Return to Abstraction

• In Event: Art, Ideology, and Memory: Polish Artistic Practices in the Early Communist Era

Abstract

This paper stems from Henryk Berlewi’s postwar manuscript “El Lissizky in Warschau” (1965), in which he attributed his shift of interests from Yiddish culture and figurative art to geometric abstraction to meeting the artist El Lissitzky in Warsaw in 1921. I consider how Berlewi mediated his memories of interwar avant-garde in 1957-1967, when he returned to abstract art after a 30-year hiatus and self-historicized his place in the history of Polish abstraction. I interrogate Berlewi’s personal archive, which included both Yiddish and Polish publications, his robust correspondence, and his role in organizing international state exhibitions of Polish art. Particularly, I focus on his 1966 exhibitions in Poland, where he arrived from beyond the Iron Curtain after reinvigorating his career in Berlin and Paris, and the approaches to Berlewi's Jewish-Polish identity during that travel.

Author

• Weronika Malek-Lubawski, U of Southern California