Specters of Stalinism: Public Art and Political Memory in 1948 Poland

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

Abstract

This paper examines two short-lived public installations from 1948 by Polish artists Henryk Stażewski and Wojciech Fangor as markers of political memory. Created to fulfill state propaganda, these works obscured the physical and cultural devastation wrought by World War II: Stażewski’s installation, six vertical glass panels on concrete blocks, was part of the Exhibition of Recovered Territories in Wrocław, celebrating Poland’s reclaiming of former German lands. Following Stalinism’s denunciation in 1956, both works were erased from Polish art history, and the artists distanced themselves from political propaganda — preserved only in state press photographs, these projects remain specters of early communist Poland. Drawing upon surviving visual and archival records, I interrogate the installations as contested sites of historical memory. Shaped by their brief existence during Stalinism’s height and their later exclusion from public discourse, I argue, they stand as both markers of suppressed totalitarian memory and representations of an envisioned but unrealized socialist future.

Author

• Patryk Tomaszewski, CUNY Graduate Center