Branislav Dimitrijevi

FOLKLORE, MODERNITY AND DEATH ANDRZEJ WROBLEWSKIS

VISIT TO YUGOSLAVIA

Andrzej Wroblewskis visit to Yugoslavia from October 30 to

November 21 1956 has a particular weight and meaning in the light
of his sudden death only four months after his return to Poland. It is
primarily because many of his works painted after this visit in late
1956 and early 1957, display a striking anticipation, or rather a
frightening intuition in their focus on the motives of tombstones and
funerals, as adjoining other works of that period converging on the
motives of the petrifaction or the reification of a human body. The
aim of this essay is to establish possible links between his
Yugoslavian experience and these works, i.e. to consider influences
of what could be discerned from what he saw and encountered
during his trip. However, this focus on his personal and artistic
discoveries will be traversed by the historical and political context of
his visit, its institutional framework in relation to cultural policies in
Yugoslavia and Poland in the period of the thaw. Yugoslavia and
Poland have been singled out as two socialist countries which most
thoroughly de-Stalinized their cultural models during the 1950s and
opened towards modern artistic language linked to the post-war
desiring for artistic freedoms allegedly outside of ideological
confinements constructed by the dogma of socialist realism.
As scholars who wrote about Wroblewski have shown, his position
was quite unique within this ideological polarisation and marks a
condition of a rather lonesome sense of coping with the relations
between political/social role of artistic practice and individual,
idiosyncratic artistic becoming. As opposed to two dominant paths
taken by Polish art colourism which established a continuity
between the pre-war influence of Jzef Pankiewicz with major figures
like Jan Cybis, and modernism under the influence of Parisian
tachisme and informel exemplified by Tadeusz Kantor and Grupa
Krakowska Wroblewski may be seen as an outsider, as a curious
case of the artist refusing to fully adapt to dominant trends and
refusing to fully abandon relations to his own understanding of
socialist realism and the need to see art as engaged and situated
and not as decorational neither simply novel nor experimental. In
her excellent comparative analysis of the roles of Cybis, Kantor and
Wroblewski, Anna Markowska sees Wroblewski as a symbolical
outcast in his cautious resistance to hasty promises of newly
acquired freedom in Polish political and cultural sphere. Wroblewski
was very suspicious about this process which meant for him a return
of a painter to a salon, and hence he had to content himself with

2
2
something fragile and risky: his own ability to trust his measureless
freedom and overwhelming misery.1
Wroblewskis work was never once socialist-realist and all of the
sudden modernist: he cannot be taken as in instrument to show
how European and free Polish art suddenly became, his art took
its path against the grain, especially against the consequences of
the ideology of normalization and economic liberalization.2 As
Markowska pointed out, instead of a chattering speech of the salon
thaw-modernist, Wroblewski offered an uncanny silence, instead
of collective joy about promises of freedom he offered an individual
self-irony, and finally instead of opting to visit Paris like most of the
leading modern artists not only in Poland but elsewhere in Europe,
he went to Belgrade.3Polish thaw and Yugoslav political
manoeuvrings
Available archival material about this visit is scarce but it seems that
the Yugoslav-Polish collaboration was initiated from the Polish side. It
found its confirmation in the document signed by V-ce General
Secretary Mr W. Chabasiki marked with a label of secret,
dedicated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is stated a programme
of cultural exchange between Poland and Yugoslavia for the
1955/1956, accepted by the Ministry of Culture. It assumed a
mutual exchange of people and events. In the field of arts and
culture it pointed an exhibition of works by Aleksander Kobzdej and
Tadeusz Kulisiewicz, a week of presentation of Polish films, travel of
2-3 writers, and promotion of organising a spectacle of Polish ballet
or opera. Amongst the events planned in Poland there was a show of
contemporary yugoslavian art including a visit of 2-3 artists. At the
end of the 2-pages document, it is stated that mentioned events
could be taken as a starting point for further negotiations with

Anna Markowska, The Great Now or, on Art

2
Wroblewskis statement entitled Confessions of a discredited former
communist written towards the end of his life exposes his particular political position
and a sense of disappointment with what he perceived as simplified critical
assessments of Stalinism. However, Wroblewski is principally on the side of
reformists and he is aware of a somewhat contradictory position he is taking and
which he tries to resolve by writing this statement.

3
3
Yugoslavian side.4 , but that these changes were seen as a most
welcome development for the Yugoslav side. Also, it is apparent that
the Polish Ministry of Culture and its entrusted institutions selected
Wroblewski for this visit, together with the young art critic Barbara
Majewska who accompanied him. As an artist Wroblewski was
entirely unknown in Yugoslavia at the time, and the role in which he
undertook this journey was primarily of someone mediating a
preparation to exchange exhibitions of contemporary art between
Poland and Yugoslavia. The visit was organized by the Yugoslav
Commission for International Cultural Relations, led by Marko Risti,
a surrealist poet and a pre-war communist with established links
with Andre Breton and French intellectual and artistic circles and one
of the leading figures of de-Stalinisation of Yugoslav cultural policy
in the 1950s.5 In the documents in a form of the report that
describes the artistic life in Yugoslavia, Ristic is described as pisarz
I sekretarz generalny. [] Risti reprezentuje kierunek
modernistyczny i jest uwaany w tym rwnie przez Jugosawian
za czowieka oddanego Zachodowi. W szeregu wypadkw on sam
inicjuje niektre imprezy artystyczne sprowadzajc znanych lub
zaprzyjanionych z nim artystw.6 Following Titos break with
Cominform in 1948, Yugoslav Communist Party gradually abandoned
some political and economic premises of Soviet-type socialism,
which in international relations implied a standstill in any exchange
with the countries of the Soviet bloc, and the improvement of the
relations with the Western countries, primarily the US. Just to
illustrate this, president Tito did not have any official contacts with
socialist countries in the period between 1948 and 1955, the year

4 Podaj za: Dokument sygn. W-IV/Jugos/211 Dot.: wymiany kulturalnej z

Jugosawi, teczka nr 115, Jugosawia (wsppraca kulturalna. Raport,
sprawozdania I wycinki prasowe nadesne przez ambasad PRL w Belgradzie)
19551956, akta Komitetu Wsppracy Kulturalnej z Zagranic, Archiwum Akt
Nowych, Warszawa.

5 Marko Risti (1902-1984) was a surrealist poet and a literary critic. His first book
of poetry (Of happiness an of dreams) was published in 1925. Before the war, he
became known as a harsh polemicist with strong modernist aesthetical and leftist
political standpoints. He was the first ambassador of socialist Yugoslavia in Paris
(1945-1948) and after that the President of the Federal Commision for International
Cultural Relations.

4
4
when Khrushchev came to Yugoslavia to sign the Belgrade
declaration which marked the political normalisation between the
two countries.7
Judging from the available documents in the archive of Ristis
Commission, the visit of Wroblewski and Majewska was one of the
first instances that illustrate this normalization in the field of culture.
However, as opposed to detailed insights in the processes of
negotiations about cultural exchange with Western countries, it
seems that relations with socialist countries were less a priority of
the Yugoslav Commission. For example, the improvement of the
relations with USA could be confirmed by the major exhibition of
Modern Art in the United States in Belgrade in the summer of
1956, organized by the New York Museum of Modern Art and
urgently coordinated between the US embassy in Belgrade and the
Yugoslav Commission for International Cultural Relations. Along with
the exhibitions of Ecole de Paris (1952), of Dutch modern art (1953)
as well as the very influential show of Henry Moores sculptures
(1955), this exhibition introduced Yugoslav art scene with works by
Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Gorky, Kline and other representative
artists of mainly abstract expressionism but also including realist
tendencies in American art of the time.8 Henry Moore show was
described by Polish cultural dygnitars in following tone Mimo, i

7 For a detailed study on Yugoslav foreign policy in this period see: Tvrtko Jakovina,
Ameriki komunistiki saveznik Hrvati, Titova Jugoslavija i Sjedinjene amerike
drave 19451955, Zagreb: Profil, 2003.

8 The exhibition was inaugurated as the first American modern art

exhibition in Yugoslavia, or, for that matter, in any communist
country until then. Belgrade was thus put on the map as one of the
locations of over 100 International Exhibitions that MoMA
organized between 1938 and 1960, among which as it was
explicitly stated in the first MoMA press release announcing the
Belgrade show (18 June) Modern Art in the United States was the
largest exhibition of American art ever to be sent abroad. For a
study of the relation of this exhibition to cultural policy and artistic
practice in Yugoslavia of the late 1950s and early 1960s see:
Branislav Dimitrijevi, Iron Curtain Raisers An exhibition of
American modern art in Belgrade and its relation to socialist
modernism and socialist consumerism in the SFR Yugoslavia in the
1950s, u Different Modernisms, Different Avant-Gardes Problems in Central
and Eastern European Art after World War II, Eesti Kunstimuseum, Tallinn,
2009, pp. 313-342.

5
5
prace Henrego Moore'a nie wzbudziy adnego zainteresowania
wrd publicznoci, odwrotnie krytyki byy bardzo sceptyczne,
odbya ona kilkumiesiczne tournee po gwniejszych miastach
Jugosawii, a sam Moore wykorzysta swj pobyt przy czynnym
poparciu Ristia na bezceremonialne wykady dla landsowania
abstrakcjonizmu wrd modego pokolenia plastykw
jugosowiaskich.9 Such examples not only show how political
manoeuvrings of Yugoslav leadership influenced cultural field, but
they also show an inherited, bourgeois, tendency towards valuing
Western art as a role model for the development of modernist
idioms in Yugoslav. In this respect the situation in Poland and
Yugoslavia was quite similar although it seemed at the time that this
process in Yugoslavia had been already advanced. Especially the
model of Parisian modernism (as there were suspicions towards
American art that were not primarily ideological but cultural in terms
of inherited bourgeois euro-centricity10) was received very
benevolently, as it reflected a lineage of art before WWII that
effectively survived the socialist revolution and was maintained as
dominant in academic institutions. But in general, the victory of
modernism over realism was interpreted as an index of the
modernization of the whole society.
It is no wonder that Poland was the first eastern country with
which Yugoslavia re-established broken links. First of all, Poland had
beforehand had a very favourable image among the Yugoslavs. It
was part of the tradition going back to the romanticism of the 19th
century and the idealization of Pan-Slavic culture with a particular
empathy with the plight of the Poles towards their independence
and their national cultural identity. This empathy was emphasizes by
the heroic image of the Polish resistance to Nazism but also to a
betrayal of the Soviets during the Warsaw uprising. Along with the
Yugoslavs, the Poles were seen as the biggest martyrs of the WWII2,
and a sense of joined identity was created. This sense was fortified
when Gomulka introduced the reforms in October 1956, following
the Poznan strike that summer which attracted sympathies in

10 The cultural elite saw American culture as shallow and

entertainment-based. This reluctance was not communist; it was,
rather, inherited from a bourgeois legacy in which the notion of
culture is somehow identified only with Europe (and, when it comes
to fine arts, with French culture specifically), whereas American
culture was seen as second rate. See Ibid.

6
6
Yugoslavia because it was used as a proof that only the Yugoslav
model of workers self-management can be a real and viable
socialist alternative to bureaucratic Stalinism. In a long report
published in October 1956 on the two leading pages of the most
influential political weekly in Belgrade NIN (Nedeljne Informativne
Novine), the correspondent from Poland, Velibor Popovi, praises
Gomulkas Resolution and describes it in a detailed manner, point by
point. The text reaffirms the heroism of the Poles during the war, the
amazement about the reconstruction of Warsaw, and the strength of
Polish workers to fight against the injustices of planned economy
where the worker is only an accomplisher of the bureaucratic plan
and not a bearer of rights in the decision making process. Also,
Poland has been singled out as the country passionately interested
in experiences, successes and impediments of its socialist
friends.11
In cultural sphere this interest was recognized primarily as an
interest in the Yugoslav political endorsement of a process of
adopting a previously ideologically unacceptable notion of
autonomous artistic freedoms associated with modernist visual
language. In a memo written about Wroblewskis visit it is stated
that this visit was organized in order to make a better acquaintance
of Polish art critics with Yugoslav contemporary visual art, and that
two Polish critics (Wroblewski and Majewska) responded to this
invitation.12 How were they selected for this trip is not entirely
clear, but apparently it was a decision made by the Polish Ministry of
Culture and the director of the Institute for Art and Exhibitions in
Warsaw, Ryszard Stanislawski.In another document Komitet
Wsppracy Kulturalnej z Zagranic informed that after negotiations
following decisions had been taken in the field of arts: In the
archive of the Commission there are no further details about this
visit, and the focus is put on organizing the exhibition that opened
under the title Moderna poljska umetnost (Modern Polish Art) in
Belgrade on March 22 1957 (and rather poignantly only a day before
Wroblewskis sudden death), which afterwards travelled to Ljubljana,
Zagreb and Skopje.13 Interestingly, this show did not include any
work by Wroblewski, and it seems that his works were shown later

11 Velibor Popovi, Poljski horizonti, NIN, 304, 28.10.1956, pp. 1-2.

12
Izloba Moderna poljska umetnost, Archive of Yugoslavia,
Belgrade (AJ, 559)

7
7
only once in Yugoslavia, as part of the exhibition Resistance
movement in the works of Polish Artists in Belgrade 1964.14
The political moment to organize this visit was ideal. As is already
pointed out, the reports on the Polish thaw were significantly
present in the Yugoslav press. In their only interview in Yugoslavia,
Wroblewski and Majewska appeared on the pages of the weekly NIN,
in the issue following the one with the big report on Gomulkas
reforms. In this interview (with Miodrag Bulatovi who later became
a prominent writer15), the emphasis is made on the break of Polish
art with socialist realism, and the example of Yugoslav art in fighting
for artistic freedoms was taken as a model. Majewska highlighted

13
Moderna poljska umetnost izloba slikarstva i skulpture, BeogradLjubljana-Zagreb-Skoplje, mart-juli 1957. The exhibition included
works by Maria Jarema, Jan Lebenstein, Jonasz Stern, Jerzy
Nowosielski, Henryk Staevski, Stefan Gierowski and others. The
commissioner was Roman Artimowski, whose work was incidentally
purchased from the budget of the project, as is mentioned in the
memo of the Commission for International Cultural Relations. The
introductotory text was written by Alexander Wojciechowski.
Wroblewskis works were not shown and his name was not
mentioned at all.

14
Pokret otpora u delima poljskih umetnika, Umetniki paviljon na
Malom Kalemegdanu, 21.7. 2.8.1964. It is interesting that this
exhibition was not organized by the Commission for International
Cultural Relations but by the Association of Veterans of the Peoples
Liberation War of Yugoslavia (SUBNOR). Two works were by
Wroblewski, oil on canvas titled Arrest from the Museum in Cracow
and the work on paper titled Wire from MHPRR in Warsaw. The
exhibition included paintings by Adam Bunch, Helena Krajewska,
Jerzy Krawczyk, Bronislaw Linke, Stanislav Poznanski, Erna
Rosenstein, Wojciech Weiss, Stanisaw Zlotowski, and others;
sculptures by Gabriel Hajdas, Mieczyslaw Naruszewicz, Franciszek
Strynkiewicz, Alina Szapocznikow, Adam Procki and others, as well
as a selection of graphic art and posters. Stefan Rassalski wrote the
introductory text in the catalogue.

15
Miodrag Bulatovi (1931 - 1991) was a writer and a journalist.
His first novel Stop the Danube (aka. Devils are coming) was published in
1955 and he is best known for his novel Men with four fingers (1975).
Most of his novels were translated into Polish.

8
8
some of the quintessential slogans of the time: the achieved
freedom from fear and conservativism, deeply humanist and
progressive goals, sense of optimism about the course of the future
that will bring normality, etc. Wroblewski mentioned the Exhibition
of Young Art held that summer in Warsaws Arsenal as a turning
point in the life of our art where true paintings and true artists
emerged, and as a result of the years long struggle against Soviet
impositions and state-policy art. Wroblewski politely stated that they
came to learn from the Yugoslav experience, because you went
much further then we did, but also made a personal comment
which is of biggest importance for the inquiry in the influence of this
visit for his own artistic practice: I am personally interested in the
relationship between modern painters and folklore. 16
The itinerary
This statement from the interview in NIN implies that Wroblewski,
when he accepted the offer to visit Yugoslavia as a representative
of Polish modern art, had already had his own artistic interests that
might be partly associated with a stereotype that had been already
created about the Balkans in the European cultural context since
romanticism. The folkloristic traditions were seen as authentic and
untouched by political, economic and cultural processes of
modernization, but also as something that could have been
employed as a valid visual tradition for a modern artist
endeavouring to find alternatives to academic traditions of
European art. A telling example dated 50 years before Wroblewskis
journey is to be found in the notes made in 1911 by young CharlesEdouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier) who hit the road to
visit many parts of Europe that he marked on his map either by I
(Industry), K (Culture) or F (Folklore). As all parts of France and
Germany, and most parts of Central Europe had been marked with
I or K, the more East Jeanneret went the more the letter F
appeared. When he came to Belgrade, he was disillusioned by this
ridiculous capital, dishonest, dirty and disorganized but attracted
by exquisite pots, costumes, carpets and instruments he
encountered in the Ethnographic Museum. By following the roots of
some of these objects he found himself greatly enjoying the
countryside and the authentic natural society, coloured by Tzigane
music, ruby-red wine and chamomile fragrance. The folklore he

16
Jedan trenutak sa Andrejem Vrubljenskim i Barbarom
Majevskom , NIN, 305, Belgrade, 4.11.1956. The text was illustrated
by a reproduction of Wroblewskis gouache titled Woman with
birds. In the same issue there is a text Poland on its way (Poljska
na svom putu) in which appraisals for Gomulkas reform continue.

9
9
appreciated indicated for him the resistance to the invading and
dirty Europeanization.17 These comments admonished against the
perils of modernization in regions still unprepared for it, and where
the folkloric, ethno tradition, appeared to be the only authentic
culture capable of generating cultural value.
However, Wroblewskis empathy with Yugoslav culture was much
stronger and with a feeling of a considerable empathy. Also, it is
apparent that his journey was undertaken in the times of his
complex personal crisis and troubled artistic self-inquiry. In this
sense Barbara Majewska explained that this trip was not only a trip
in the atmosphere of the Polish October, but also a trip south. In
other words this was primarily a sensual journey to experience
other hill forms, other smells, flora, other kinds of light, other
buildings and other people.18 Wroblewski was therefore not just a
man who was to represent the re-established political and cultural
links, but he was primarily someone from the cold and gray north
travelling south. It seems that Majewska and Wroblewski (unlike Le
Corbusier) were particularly impressed by the diversity they
encountered in Yugoslavia: from the Europeaness of Ljubljana, its
wealth and tranquillity to the mystic land by lake Ohrid in
Macedonia. Their itinerary can be partly reconstructed by the notes
Wroblewski scribbled in his notebook diary, some drawings he made
in his sketchbook, and by photographs that mostly Majewska took.
These personal documents19 show that they were taken on a quite a
considerable journey almost from the northwest to the southeast of
the country, and this attests how seriously this visit was considered
and organized, having in mind that they spent more then three
weeks moving from one place to another.
Apparently, the journey was structured so to primarily visit the cities
which were planned to host the Polish exhibition in preparation:

17
I am greatly indebted to Lljiljana Blagojevi for this reference.
See Lj. Blagojevi, Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins of Belgrade
Architecture, 1919-1941, The MIT Press, 2003

18
Barbara Majewska, Poszukiwananie Andrzeja W., Wi,
June 2007. Quoted after: Andrzej Wroblewski, To the Margins and Back, op.
cit., p. 157.

19

Courtesy of Fundacja Andrzeja Wrblewskiego.

10
10
Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade and Skopje. They spent most of their
time in these cities but were also driven to nearby sites. They
landed in Belgrade (via Vienna) on October 30, where the
representatives of the Commission greeted them. The very next day
they met Miodrag Bulatovi who made the interview for NIN. The
same evening, Wroblewski and Majewska went to a cinema to see a
Gary Cooper film (most probably High Noon20) implying that
Hollywood films since 1950 regularly on the repertoire of Yugoslav
cinemas presented a major interest for someone coming from a
country that was under the Soviet doctrine for a longer time. This
role of the American films was as well noted in the report on the
Yugoslavian culture delivered in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
We read there: Wrd rnych dziedzin ycia kulturalnego w
Jugosawii najwikszy a nawet dominujcy udzia USA zaznacza si
na odcinku filmu. Sprzyja temu fakt, e Jugosawia otrzymuje
olbrzymi ilo filmw amerykaskich w ramach pomocy. S to filmy
przewanie stare o treci sensacyjnej, najczciej krymilanej lub
ckliwo-sentymentalnej21. On November 1 they were driven from
Belgrade to Ljubljana, where the next day they had a meeting in the
Modern Gallery with the director Zoran Krinik22 (a portrait of his is
among Majewskas photos), National Gallery, the exhibition of Italian
contemporary art Savremena Italska Umetnost. Slikarstwo,
Skulptura (Moderna Galerija, 31.10 21.11.1956) and sculptors

20 This famous western movie has been subjected to various ideological

interpretations. Some critics see the film as a symbolic allegory about American
foreign policy during the Korean War, propagating the idea that war, under certain
circumstances, is both moral and inevitable. Marshal Kane wants to maintain
peace, after cleaning up the town five years before (the Second World War), but,
reluctantly, he has to face a new aggression (the Korean War). According to this
reading, the Quaker wife stands in for American pacifists and isolationists, though
she too later realizes the importance of supporting her husband. (See more at:
http://www.emanuellevy.com/popculture/high-noon-mccarthy-and-politics9/#sthash.aZQ9iCnG.dpuf) Interestingly, Wroblewski was fascinated by the French
activist Raymond Dien who protested against this war by stopping a train and
whom Wroblwski met in Berlin in 1951.

21

22 Zoran Krinik (1920-2008) was a Slovenian art historian and critic who was
director of the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana for almost 20 years, from 1956 to 1986.
He was a specialist in sculpture and also one of the founders of the International
Biennial of Graphic Art in Ljubljana.

11
11
Stojan Bati23 and Boris Kalin24 and the next day the painter Riko
Debenjak25. On the 2nd November they visited another exhibition
the international photography 6. Mednarodna Razstava Fotografij
(Moderna Galerija, 3.11 2.12.1956). Another entertaining moment
made its way in Wroblewskis diary on that day dancing in Slon
(Elephant) night club, which Majewska also mentions as the place
where they danced to I love Paris in the moonlight.26 On November
4 they took an apparently memorable trip to the Slovenian coast
(visiting towns of Koper, Izola, Piran and Portoro), and on their way
they stopped to visit the famed Postojna cave. A number of
photographs and drawings refer to this visit to the coast and the
cave: Mediterranean ambience of narrow streets and the port of
Piran, a newly built hotel in Portoro, mountains on their way and a
castle near the entrance to Postojna cave.
On November 6 they arrived in Zagreb and apparently went to the
Pavilion Ivan Metrovi designed and which was turned into a
mosque during the war and later used by the Croatian Union of
artists. Ivan Metrovi was supposedly the only Yugoslav artist
Wroblewski was quite familiar with and he made a few sketches of

23
Stojan Bati is a Slovenian sculptor born in
1925. He was in the Partisan movement during the German occupation of Yugoslavia
and in 1951 he graduated from the Ljubljana Fine Arts Academy. His figurative style
was influenced by Boris Kalin as well as by Ossip Zadkin with whom he temporarily
worked in Paris in the early 1950s. He completed 37 public monuments, mostly in
Slovenia.

24
Boris Kalin (1905-1975) was a Slovenian
sculptor who studied in Zagreb before the war and was influenced by his professors
Ivan Metrovi and Franjo Krini. After the war he became one of the most
influential professors at the Ljubljana Art Academy. He was a specialist in carving
stone.

25
Riko Debenjak (1908-1987) was a Slovenian
painter and a graphic artist who became one of the best-known representatives of the
so-called Ljubljana school of graphic art.

26
Andzeja W.

Barbara Majewska, Poszukiwananie

12
12
his sculptures that he saw (Crucifixion in the of St. Marks church in
Zagreb, Mother and the child, etc.). In Zagreb they had also a
meeting with the sculptor Ivan Koari27 and the painter Ivo Duli28,
and the next day with one of the most influential Croatian artists
Krsto Hegedui29, as well as with the painter Oton Gliha30. Travelling
on a night train he was back in Belgrade on the 9th in the morning.
For that day the only diary entry refers to his visit to the National
Museum (where he made a couple of sketches), and for the next day
only to the Ethnographic museum, arguably the most inspiring day
for his own artistic practice, to which we will get back later in the
text.
In Belgrade he also met Lazar Vujaklija31, the painter whose work
relating to local folkloric traditions might have directly influenced
Wroblewski, and whom he described on a back of a photo as the
most typical Yugoslav artist and later in the text he wrote for
Przegld Artystyczny (and to which we shall also return later), as the
man who combines the propensity for universal philosophising with

27
Ivan Koari (b. 1921) is arguably the most
acclaimed Croatian modern sculptor. In the 1960s he was also a member of the neoavantgarde group Gorgona in Zagreb. In recent years he received an international
acclaim and his entire studio was presented as part of the Documenta 11 in Kassel,
2002.

28
Ivo Duli (1916-1975) was a Croatian painter
known for his colorism and as one of the rare artist working on religious topics during
the socialist times.

29
Krsto Hegedui (1901-1975) was one of the
most influential Croatian artists of the 20th century. In 1929 he co-founded the group
Zemlja (Soil) which focused on social topics and rural life. In 195o he became
professor at Zagreb Art Academy and was on the the few artists in Yugoaslavia who
received the official title of the Master of art. Later he established his master
class where many younger artists practiced. He is known for his figurative painting
and for cycles of frescoes including the one at the memorial house dedicated to the
famous battle of Sutjeska in Herzegovina.

30
Oton Gliha (1914-1999) was a Croatian painter
who is best known for his abstract paintings relating to mountainous rocky
landscapes.

13
13
a simple-hearted common sense.32 During the next days in
Belgrade he also mentioned in his diary the names of painters
Aleksandar Lukovi33, Mario Maskareli34 and Milo Milunovi35 who was
one of the founders and the most influential figure of the Belgrade
Academy of fine arts and its moderate modernist course based on
Parisian pre-war painting.
On November 14 Wroblewski and Majewska left by night train to
Skopje, which was the fourth city planned to host the Polish
exhibition. They spent only one day there, and left by car to Prilep
(to see a vaar, i.e. a village fair), had a lunch in Bitola and arrived
in Ohrid in the evening. The next two days they spent by the Ohrid
lake, which was probably a most memorable experience during
which they took a majority of their photographs: the Byzantine
churches of St. Clement and S. Sophia, townscapes of Ohrid and
Struga, old tombstones overlooking the lake with some romantic

31
Lazar Vujaklija (1914-1995) was a self-taught
painter who worked as a print-worker before the war. His talent was recognized in the
1950s and he became the only formally uneducated painter in the December group
found in Belgrade in 1955. Medieval painting and particularly the Bosnian medieval
tombstones, steci, primarily influenced his decorative style in his paintings and
tapestries.

32

Andrzej Wroblewski, Notatki

Jugoslowianskie, Przegld Artystyczny, 1956, no. 4, p. 4647. English translation
courtesy of Fundacja Andrzeja Wrblewskiego.

33
Aleksandar Lukovi (b. 1924) was a member of
the December group and as a figurative painter he is mostly known for his allegorical
renderings of circus motifs.

34
Montenegrian painter.

Mario Maskareli (1918-1996) was a renowned

35
Milo Milunovi (1897-1967) was one of the
founders of the Belgrade Art Academy in 1937. From 1950 to his death he was the
most influential professor at the Academy, and his work is mostly situated at the
border between intimist figurative painting and associative abstraction.

14
14
views of the sunset. Wroblewskis sketches from Macedonia show his
interest in folk costumes (especially Albanian caps) and in typology
of characters, including a playful drawing of a street shoe-polisher.
On Monday, November 19, they returned to Belgrade. The only
entry for that and the next day refers to the meeting with some
members of the December groupu and the painter Zora Petrovi 36
probably at the gathering organized by the Polish Embassy. Which
members of the December group he met is not clear (as he already
met Lukovi and Vujaklija who both belonged to the group) but he
definitely did not meet Miodrag Proti the most influential figure in
the group and later founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Belgrade who was in Paris at that time.37 According to
Wroblewskis notebook, Majewska and him departed by plane from
Belgrade already on November 21 (although November 23 is usually
mentioned as the last day of this trip). According to the notebook,
on the 22nd Wroblewski was already in Poland, meeting Ryszard
Stanislawski in Warsaw, as well as his friends Andrzej Wajda and
Mieczyslaw Porebski to share with them information about this trip.
From hot springs of Middle Ages to a frail Yugoslav cultural
identity
As it is already mentioned, as an outcome of the initiative to
exchange exhibitions, the show of modern Polish art opened in
Belgrade on March 22 1956, and later also in Ljubljana, Zagreb and

36
Zora Petrovi (1894-1962) was the leading
Serbian woman painter who became particularly renowned for her last works: large
expressionist flying nudes in which she explored anxieties of female sexuality,
related to her own clandestine homosexuality.

37
Miodrag B. Proti (b. 1922) is the most
prominent figure of Serbian modernist art in the 1950s and 1960s.
He was the founder of the Modern Gallery in Belgrade in 1959, and
initiated the project of the new building for the Museum of
Contemporary Art which opened in 1965. He was director of the
Museum until 1981. He was very active as an art theorist and critic
defending modernist principles in art, and his painting gradually
moved from post-cubist figuration of the 1950s to geometrical
abstraction from the 1960s. He wrote extensive memoirs. However,
in his memoirs Wroblewski is never mentioned. Judging from them
Proti was visiting Paris at that time, which came to be quite a
frequent case for established artists at the time in Yugoslavia. See
Miodrag B. Proti, Nojeva barka I, Beograd: SKZ, 2000.

15
15
Skoplje. At approximately the same time the exhibition of December
group opened in Warsaw at Zwiazeku Polskich Artystow Plastykow.
In a memo about Wroblewskis visit from the archive of the Yugoslav
Commission for International Cultural Relations, another exhibition
was planned to be held in Poland, the exhibition Contemporary
Yugoslav Art which was at that time touring in Italy. It is possible to
speculate that Wroblewski might have been involved in initiating the
show of December group independently, as it seems that the
Yugoslav Commission for International Cultural Relations was not
involved in mediating this exhibition. The catalogue of the exhibition
lacks any information about the organization and curation, there is
no introductory text but only basic information about artists and
reproduced works.38
The December Group was established in December 1955 by 10
painters of the generation born in the 1920s and which have
become active as artists in early 1950s, so mostly unaffected by the
short-living soc-realist period in Yugoslavia and representing the new
modernist faction of Serbian art. The group never issued any formal
manifesto and but their work was predominantly interpreted and
promoted by its most outspoken member, Miodrag Proti, but whose
writings do not offer any explanation about what was specifically
common for the group outside of the general notion of the
discovery of aesthetic polarisation39 and of principally pursuing
modernist values in a social atmosphere still generally adamant to
non-realist painting. In practice, most of their work was
characterized by a synthetic attempt to somehow reconcile what
was understood to be the two dominating tendencies of modernist
painting: geometrism (in the form of post-cubism and influenced
by artists associated with the Parisian Abstraction-Cration in the
1930s, as well as by Ben Nicholson or Josef Albers) and lyrical
abstraction, with influences also coming mostly from Paris
(tachisme) but with some limited awareness of American abstract

38
Wystawa Decembarske grupe
Belgrad, 15 kwietnia 4 maja, 1956, Zwiazek Polskich Artystw
Plastykw Okrgu Warszawskiego, Warszawa. Works by all members
of the group were exhibited: Milo Baji, Dragutin Cigari, Stojan
eli, Zoran Petrovi, Miodrag Proti, Mladen Srbinovi, Aleksandar
Tomaevi, Lazar Vozarevi and Lazar Vujaklija.

39
Words from the text by
Miodrag Proti in the catalogue Decembarska grupa (1955-1960), Kulturni
Centar Beograda, 1969.

16
16
expressionism. Proti later highlighted a rational and disciplined
approach of the group in opposition to intuitive, spontaneous,
expressive, as well as intimistic kernel of the local pre-war
tradition.40
For this group the modernists had already won the dispute with
the realists and it was time to explore further the language of art
ultimately leading to abstraction, as is obvious in Protis own
oeuvre in the 1960s. However, no member of the group abandoned
at that time the associative character of painted forms and
representations, and some of them turned to the distant past in
trying to find some authentic or archetypical local paradigms of
pictorial organization and symbolical meanings relevant for modern
painting and specifically for the creation of a national school within a
universal visual language prompted by international modernism. In
works of some of the members of the group (notably Lazar
Vozarevi41, Aleksandar Tomaevi42, Mladen Srbinovi43 and Lazar
Vujaklija) this paradigm was to be found in Byzantine art, and
particularly in post-Byzantine folkloric traditions of the Balkans.
Medieval frescoes and funerary monuments and tombstones were
greeted as models of uniting the logic of modernist painting and

40
Miodrag B. Proti,
Slikarstvo este decenije u Srbiji, Jugoslovensko slikarstvo este decenije,
Muzej savremene umetnosti, Beograd, 1980, p. 32.

41
Lazar Vozarevi (1925-1968)
was a Serbian painter active since the early 1950s and whose work was influenced by
cubism and Byzantine painting and mosaic.

42
Aleksandar Tomaevi (19211968) was a Serbian painter whose gradual move towards constructive abstraction
was based on associating with Byzantine pictorial models and post-Byzantine Serbian
decorative art and textile. He was involved as restorer and conservator of frescoes in
Serbian medieval monasteries.

43
Mladen Srbinovi (1925-2009)
was Professor at the Art Academy in Belgrade since 1953. He has accomplished a
series of paintings and particularly public mosaics symbolising national cultural
heritage.

17
17
sculpture with some eternal, unchanging pictorial and spiritual
eternity elaborated within an attempt to secure a shared Yugoslav
identity of all nations consisting the federation. This model was for
sure not generated as a spontaneous or autonomous decision on
behalf of the artists, but it was already established as part of the
post-socialist-realist cultural policy. I tend to ascribe this policy
primarily to the major influence of the position the acclaimed
Croatian writer Miroslav Krlea44, and also a close comrade of Tito,
who was after the war a major authority in the field of culture.
For Krlea, the departure from socialist realism was not to imply
acquiescence with the West which denies us from the beginning
and merely uncritical imitation of western modernist trends, but
rather a revitalization of the authentic tradition of our civilization
which Krlea understands as Yugoslav dynamism that was
according to its own law of movement strong enough not to perish
and resistant enough not to passively succumb to much stronger
civilizations around it.45 Krlea stated this in the catalogue of the
large exhibition of Yugoslav medieval painting and sculpture in
Palais de Chaillot in Paris 1950, which was the first major Yugoslav
exhibition abroad after the war. The exhibition included three groups
of displayed artefacts: copies of Byzantine frescoes from Serbian
medieval monasteries, sections of portals and sculptures from
Romanic churches in Dalmatia, and Bosnian Bogomil tombstones
(steci). These artefacts as representing Serbian, Croatian and
Bosnian national traditions were seen in harmony with a rather
short-lived tendency in the 1950s to synthesise a Yugoslav identity
by establishing common roots as resisting cultural colonialisation of
powerful forces dominating this region in its history. For Krlea,
these medieval artefacts are taken as vehicles of identifying an
autochthonous visual civilization which is essentially based on
antagonism, on resisting to yield to any imposed alphabet,
language, sculpture, image, church or politics.46

44
Miroslav Krlea (18931981) is arguably the most important 20th century writer, poet,
playwright and essayist in the Croatian-Serbian language and his
plays and novels were translated into many languages including
Polish. His influence on cultural policy in Yugoslavia especially during
the anti-Stalinist cultural reforms in the 1950s cannot be overstated.

45
Miroslav Krlea, Izloba jugoslovenskog srednjevekovnog
slikarstva i plastike, Jugoslavija, 2, winter 1950.

18
18
Luxuriously illustrated official cultural magazine Jugoslavija (edited
by Oto Bihalji Merin47, another strong advocate of bringing together
modernist trends with local folkloric traditions and a strong promoter
of nave painting) was a major mouthpiece of such a cultural and
political model, and it brought about various visual material
illustrating the relationship between local cultural archetypes and
modern artistic aspirations. Ultimately, at the international Expo in
Brussels in 1958, Yugoslav culture was represented mostly by
modernist paintings and sculptures inspired by Byzantine and
folkloric traditions, including a painting by Miodrag Proti inspired by
frescoes from St. Sophia in Ohrid, Mladen Srbinovis rendition of a
frescoe from Deani monastery, a sculpture by Jovan Kratohvil 48
inspired by Bosnian tombstones, etc.49
What is at stake in our inquiry in the Andrzej Wroblewskis visit is
that his own interest stated upon the arrival to Belgrade (I am
personally interested in the relationship between modern painters
and folklore) was matched by the already structured cultural policy
in Yugoslavia that was promoting this relationship. Also, Lazar
Vujaklija, the artists with whom he spent some considerable time,
presented one of the clearest examples of this trend. Vujaklija was a
homo novus in the artistic circles of the 1950s, a self-taught
painter who was formerly a simple print-worker. His decorative style
(which brought him later a considerable market for his paintings and
tapestries) combined post-cubism and folklore, and primarily

46

Miroslav Krlea, Zlato i srebro Zadra, Eseji, Prosveta, Beograd, 1958.

47
Oto Bihalji Merin (1904-1993) was a Jewish art historian and writer who
lived in Germany in the 1920s (when he was, together with Georg Lukacs, one of the
editors of Linkskurve) and then also briefly in the 1930s where he was the member of
Communist Party and then emigrated to Yugoslavia. After the war he published a
series of illustrated books on visual culture, was the editor-in-chief of the magazine
Jugoslavija and he was dedicated to promotion of local nave art.

48
Jovan Kratohvil (1924-1998) was a Serbian sculptor. He was Professor at
Belgrade Art Academy, but also a successful sportsmen as a swimming champion of
Yugoslavia.

49

Reproduced in Jugoslavija, no. 15, 1958.

19
19
references to figures from Bosnian medieval tombstones, or steci.
Although appreciated primarily for his simplicity and of forms and
expressions, his work was already in 1955 induced by the
intellectual authority of Miroslav Krlea and his interpretations of a
lineage of common Yugoslav cultural heritage: If Krlea had not so
energetically insisted on the value of this artistic heritage, there
would be no desire on behalf of the artists to employ this brutal and
immediate style as is the case with the others, Vujaklija would not
have even known about the existence of this hot spring on our
soil.50
However, the critic Aleksa elebonovi51 who made this comment in
his first text written on Vujaklija, did nevertheless prised this semiamateur painter for his mode of translating his own emotions into
an archaic and powerful pictorial language, and for his ability to
show both sorrow and buoyancy, grief and humour. Although
Wroblewski was by far more skilful, intelligent and sophisticated
painter then Vujaklija, some of Wroblewskis works that are dated in
the period of the last 4 months of his life, bear a striking
resemblance to Vujaklijas paintings and tapestries. On the other
hand, Wroblewskis intellectual presence made an impact on
Vujaklija which is made obvious in a note Vujakljija wrote on the
back of a photograph that Barbara Majewska took of him (showing
him as a simple working man with moustaches holding a marigold
flower) and which he dedicated to Wroblewski: To the [?] and tall
critic who looks at us from above and hurts our minds with his
thoughts.52
Folklore, death and reification
We may presume that the major creative impetus Wroblewski found
in Yugoslavia was instigated by his visit to the Ethnographic
museum in Belgrade. The exhibition that was on display in the time

50 Aleksa elebonovi, Lazar Vujaklija (1955), in Lazar Vujaklija,

izdanje autora, Beograd 1972.

51 Aleksa elebonovi (1917-1987) was a prolific Serbian art critic, painter and
exhibition organizer. His brother Marko elebonovi was an influential painter.

52 A hand-written note on a back of a photograph taken by Barbara

Majewska. Courtesy of Fundacja Andrzeja Wrblewskiego.

20
20
of his visit provided him with the opportunity to see in vivo some of
the major examples of carved and painted tombstones that inspired
some of his last works. The exhibition was called Peasant
Tombstones in Serbia and it included Bosnian and Herzegovinian
steci from the 14th and the 15th century, tombstones found near the
Studenica monastery (roughly from the 17th and 18th centuries), and
some later examples of peasant tombstones including the so called
krajputai as markers for dead soldiers in central Serbia in the 19th
and the early 20th century.53 What is common in these simply carved
stones are representations of fully frontal figures that gaze upon us
as if they do not only represent petrified figures of the deceased,
but also present an interface of communication with them. These
figures are often shown as if greeting us in some clumsy yet
poignant way, as if standing in their vulnerable stillness at the
threshold between the world of the dead and the world of the living.
The creativity of the peasants who made them is interpreted in the
catalogue of the exhibition as something they knew how to do but
not knowing why they are doing it by forgetting their original
meaning in a heritage where the lack of written tradition were
supplemented by orally transmitted legends and visual symbolism.
This figure of the peasant-artisan was almost explicitly understood
as somehow akin to a modernist artist exploring a new artistic
universe: Knowing little, but feeling much, he continued to be an
authentic creator, free, almost extravagant, irresponsible, always
ready to improvise and seek the unexpected and the invisible. 54 It
is no wonder that the introductory text for this exhibition was not
written by some scholar researching this curious ethnographical

53 Krajputai means literally those that stand by the roads and

present a phenomenon appearing in the mid-19th century Serbia
during a series of wars (ending with WW1) in which many villages
lost majority of their male inhabitants who died on battlefields and
were buried at unknown locations. Krajputai are strictly speaking
not tombstones but simple monuments dedicated to the souls of
those who died elsewhere, an attempt of their families to calm their
suffering and supplement the lack of identified graves. Krajputai
are not located in the graveyards but by the roads in order to
establish some metaphorical channel of communication with some
distant location where these soldiers died.

54
Predrag Milosavljevi, pref. cat, Peasant Tombstones in Serbia,
Jugoslavija, Belgrade, 1956.

21
21
material, but by a prominent figure of modern Yugoslav painting,
Predrag Milosavljevi55.
If it was Krlea who promoted the interest in Bosnian steci, which
were researched only partially before the WW2, later scholars who
wrote on these tombstones and their historical context emphasised
that the steci represent rural social organization and culture which
was situated at the borderline of institutional Christianity and
belonging to archaic folk beliefs and rituals. They carry in
themselves a legacy of a post-Byzantine world, and they have been
most commonly identified with the beliefs and customs of the
Bogomils, a Gnostic sect originating in Bulgaria in the 10th century
that settled in Bosnia since the 12th century. Although the direct
connection of the Bosnian Church with the Bogomils is partly
disputed, scholars, including Krlea, claim that the steci reflect a
regional (Bosnian) cultural phenomenon rather than belonging to a
particular faith. Most importantly for Krleas establishing of a
distant historical lineage for Yugoslav identity, leading authorities in
this filed of research concluded that the steci tombstones were a
common tradition amongst Catholic, Orthodox and Bosnian Church
followers alike.56
Bosnian church had no territorial organization and it dealt primarily
with attending rituals of burials. The churches were mostly wooden
huts so only a number of necropolises (mostly in Bosnia, but some
in Serbia and Montenegro) with carved slabs of stone testify to
existence of these rituals. The word steak (pl. steci) itself is a
contracted form of the older word stojeak, which is derived from
the verb stajati (to stand). It literally means "the standing thing" and
it regularly represents figures in upright positions. The most
appreciated features of theirs are decorative motifs (spirals,
rosettes, vine leaves, suns and crescent moons, etc.) and figural
motifs including most famously, the image of the man with his right

55
Predrag Pedja Milosavljevi (1908-1987) was a Serbian painter and a writer.
He was also a diplomat and member of various cultural committees in socialist
Yugoslavia.

56
Cultural policy that promoted interest in these tombstones
initiated significant scholarly research resulting in a number of
studies from the 60s and the 70s. The leading authorities were
Marion Wenzel (Decorative motifs on tombstones from Medieval Bosnia and
surrounding regions, Veselin Maslea, Sarajevo, 1965) and efik
Belagi (Steci Kultura i umjetnost, Veselin Maslea, 1982).

22
22
hand raised from a number of tombstones in the biggest medieval
necropolis in Herzegovina, in Radimlja. This motif was literally
repeated in a painting by Lazar Vujaklija (Composition Steak,
1953) that Wroblewski must have seen as he mentioned a painting
of a man consisting of a head and outstretched arms with imploring
hands in the paragraph on Vujaklija in his Yugoslavian notes.57
Iconography of the steci and subsequent peasant tombstones
might be felt and understood as a form of non-verbal
communication between the mortal existence of the deceased and
the community of the living confirming the successful outcome of
funerary rituals. A tombstone is a replacement for the living body of
the deceased, its eschatological doppelganger, testifying about
the dual nature of the human soul passing from its bodily reality into
the world of its divine eternity.58 Simplified visual language of these
tombstones is based on decorative stylisation of figures, faces and
natural ornaments. Their flatness and presentness are formal
features recognized for their simplicity and intensity (and with the
same words Wroblewski described Vujaklijas work) and employed
for an intervention in the established art-historical narratives. It has
been commonly argued that the Byzantine iconicity appealed to
some abstract painters as an alternative to the narrativity of
western pictorial tradition59. However, in the case we are dealing
with here, it was not only the formal appeal that was at stake, it was
also an issue of representation. As iconicity might be a model for
abstraction that does not define its identity by appeal to a historical
narrative60, the stylized realism of the tombstones figures acted
as a representational model which is not only at the margins of the

57
Andrzej Wroblewski, Notatki Jugoslowianskie, Przegld
Artystyczny, 1956, no. 4, p. 4647.

58 Jelena Erdeljan, Steci pogled na ikonografiju narodne pogrebne umetnosti na Balkanu,

Zbornik Matice srpske za likovne umetnosti, 32-33, 2002, pp. 107-120.

59 For example, American modernist critic Joseph Masheck has

taken for granted that there is a parallel between Modernist
paintings and Byzantine icons. His usage of the term iconicity
relates to our, modern, experience of Byzantine art forms, and for
him an icon can be considered as a paradigm of organization and
meaning in abstract art. Joseph Masheck, Iconicity, in Historical
Present Essays of the 1970s, UMI Press, Ann Arbor, 1984, pp. 209228.

23
23
established narratives of art history but also outside the
confinements of both naturalism and formalism. In developing the
concept of direct realism or bare realism, Wroblewski stated in
the late 1940s that this new realism differs from formalism by its
extra/aesthetic content and from naturalism (or old realism) by
formalist means of expression.61 It may be argued that in the
tombstones he encountered, Wroblewski found a para-historical
precedent for his approach, as there is no formal or aesthetic
coherence that can be traced or repeated here, but a curious sense
of formality in expressing certain content.
There are no doubts that the content here is nothing else then
death. This is an ultimately and intimately shared content, as both
universal and subjective, and it formally works in accordance to a
statement Wroblewski made already in 1948 in which he declares
his goal to achieve an unambiguous mode of painting, meaning
that the content of the experience is in accordance with what I
expect, and is the same for each viewer.62 Wroblewskis death
drive can be directly summed up in a sentence from a letter to his
wife from 1953 when he asserted: I constantly carry death with
me.63 The artist suffered from the epilepsy and the awareness of
the closeness of death during the seizures when he was losing
control over his body, became an omnipresent part of his life and
most probably the literal cause of his death during the hike in the
Tatra mountains in March 1957. This illness, but also other
difficulties in attaining functional relations, accompanied a complex

60 As David Carrier points out, Mashecks goal is neither to assert that the abstract artists of our time
are influenced by the Byzantines nor to imply that abstract art is inevitably spiritual; rather, he seeks a
model for abstraction that does not define its identity by appeal to a historical narrative. D. Carrier,
Artwriting, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1987, p. 98.

61 Andrzej Wroblewski, [New Realism], in Andrzej Wroblewski To the Margins

and Back, p. 69.

62 Andrzej Wroblewski, Statement on the 1st Exhibition of Modern

Art, Ibid. pp. 30-32.

63 Quoted in Joanna Kordjak-Piotrowska, Body and melancholy. The

late works of Andrzej Wroblewski, Ibid, p. 112.

24
24
and apparently quite severe mood of melancholy. His letters reveal
standard symptoms of depression and his work in the last two years
of his life offer motives in which this melancholic content is
expressed. The most striking series of works from 1956 and 1957
are his enchaired figures which unambiguously indicate a
depressive entrapping of the subject, impossibility to move, to get
up a subject lacking a will and deemed to wait. A reference could
be found in his previous realistic representations of waiting rooms
and queues, but also in his best known execution series where the
suspension of time in the process of waiting is directly connected to
death.
It seems that the tombstones he saw in Belgrade provided
Wroblewski with a model of this temporal suspension, and a model
to be found on the margins of cultural narratives and artistic values.
Wroblewski identified with this outsiders creativity in a very direct
way, unambiguously. He sensed a relationship between the
universally shared experience and some fragile marginality or
distressing particularity. He found an air of eerie optimism in how
the dead were represented on these stones: figures possess an
infantile quality of voiding them of any sentimentality in the
presence of death. Death is presented as a motionless presence and
this presence remains a part of our world. As opposed to funerary
masks where eyes of the deceased are either shut or hollowed, here
the figures gaze upon us with eyes wide open. In an emblematic
work that Wroblewski made after his Yugoslavian trip (a gouache
titled Funeral), the artist is portrayed as laying in the coffin with
eyes wide open the eyes being the last relation of the corpse with
the living body, as it is in the most of the peasants tombstones he
saw.64 As Joanna Kordjak-Piotrowska has interpreted it, this ironic
double-sided religious image falls well within a series of
representations in which the artist depicts himself as a dead man or
one of the living dead.65

64 This work should be primarily interpreted in relation to his

personal dilemma how to pursue his political stance in the context
of the thaw. The figure with open eyes in the coffin holds a star and a
sickle in his hands and this work (Funeral) (collection of National
Museum in Krakw) has to be read in a direct analogy with the text
Confessions of a discredited former communist. In Ibid, pp. 90-94.

65 Joanna Kordjak-Piotrowska, Body and melancholy. .., p. 107.

25
25
In the sketchbook that he filled up during his Yugoslavian journey,
Wroblewski made a few sketches of tombstones from the
Ethnographic museum. Some of these sketches were apparently
used for a painting Wroblewski made in the winter of 1956/7 titled
The Tombstone of the Womanizer.66 However, at that time
Wroblewski was mostly using cheaper materials that were also more
appropriate for his artistic stance and personal self-reflection at that
time: most of the works from this period are gouaches, watercolours
and monotypes, having an unappealing and jagged character.
Interestingly, Wroblewski only started his monotype works after his
Yugoslav journey. In some of his last works on paper, the sketches of
tombstones he made in the Belgrade Ethnographic museum were
transformed to create a less archaic, less decorative and a more
immediate and austere visual quality, merging emotional desolation
with caricatural playfulness. In a watercolour/gouache Green
Tombstone, the figure clenches his hands whilst his face takes a
caricatural expression of sadness, as if in a self-ironical gesture of a
melancholically ridden self-portraiture. In another gouache
(Tombstones), three figures (a man, a woman and a child) are joined
together to make both ironic and poignant representation of a
family, as one of Wroblewskis ways to cope with difficulties in his
life especially after the birth of three children in 1954 and 1955. It
seems that it was the married life with children (which also marks
the period of his financial difficulties) that contributed to the feeling
of entrapment and the threat of reified human relations, and his
Yugoslav trip presented a break to reflect this anxiety.
And perhaps it is the complex notion of reification that might also
sparkle Wroblewskis interest in tombstones. This notion may have
its unambiguous visual representation in his enchaired figures as
well as in his tombstones, by dealing with the transformation of
the animate into inanimate, of the subject into the object. However,
this notion has important philosophical and ideological underpinning
and it was discussed in that time primarily because of the influence
of Georg Lukacs who was widely read in socialist countries in that

66 This work deserves particular attention, as it is the only larger

work that may for certain relate to his Yugoslav experience. The
cross-shaped figure merging the iconography of a crucifix with a
reference to one of the tombstones he sketched in Belgrade holds a
pole with a flag resembling the Polish flag with the inserted blue
triangle so to refer also to the Yugoslav flag. Beside the figure there
are depicted two disembodied female legs and some other works of
his at the time display certain anxiety with sexual relations, most
notably The lovers from 1956 or Chaired Woman from 1957.

26
26
time, and on several occasions quoted by Wroblewski who was
influenced by his Marxist philosophy. Lukacs further developed the
Marxian concept of Verdinglichung,67 as a form of alienation in the
act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations
and actions into properties, but also transformation of human beings
into thinglike beings. As characteristic for capitalism, reification is a
result of a dominance of commodity exchange as a primary mode of
inter-subjective agency. Apart from his personal troubles, it is
important to note that the motif of reification arose in the time of
Wroblewskis criticism of the spirit of the thaw, which, in a
disguised form of economic and political liberalization, brought
social relations alien for a true communist, relations based on
fetishization of commodity-form and desires for a consumerist
dream-world. In an often-quoted passage from a letter to his friend
the director Andrzej Wajda, Wroblewski ironically commented that
the thaw period opens to a loss of all aims in life except for food
and entertainment.68
Unambiguous notes
At the time of Wroblewskis visit, Yugoslavia was undergoing its
period of thaw in which the lack of political liberties was
compensated by gradual introduction of controlled market economy
and social tolerance towards consumerist dream-world made
attractive by the Western popular culture and entertainment.69
Interestingly, Wroblewski was not at all resistant to its flavours, as
he indicated in his notebook that upon his arrival to Yugoslavia he
went to see a Hollywood film and also a few days after Majewska
and him danced in a popular jazz bar in Ljubljana. If reification has

67 See Georg Lukacs, Reification and the Consciousness of the

Proletariat (1923),
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm

68 As quoted in Joanna Kordjak-Piotrowska, Body and melancholy.,

p. 106.

69 See Branislav Dimitrijevi, Sozialistischer Konsumismus,

Verwestlichung und kulturelle Reproduktion. Der
postkommunistiches bergang im Jugoslawien Titos, Zurck aus der
Zukunft Osteuropische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus, (B. Groys,
A. von der Heiden, P. Weibel ed.), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 2005.

27
27
come to constitute a second nature of the subject, we may
speculate upon Wroblewskis own struggle with this second nature,
his attempt to preserve his beliefs when confronted by his own
weakness to succumb to social and political detachments
characteristic for the period of the thaw. Similar goes for a
discrepancy between his own suspicions about the initiated reforms
and his outspoken capacity to welcome and support the changes in
October 1956, as could be confirmed in the mentioned Belgrade
interview where he acted as a semi-official of the Polish government
hailing new political processes. The case of Wroblewski shows how
complex is the relation between the personal and the political, and
how difficult it was for a sensitive and highly intelligent artist to
preserve his own distinctiveness in the world where there were only
polarized positions: either you were a conservative socialist realist
or a progressive modernist, either was your art disciplined by a
doctrinarian decree or it presented a departure from any social
concerns and a rather superficial understanding of creative freedom
of expression leading to a mostly decorative understanding of
abstraction.70
Finally, Wroblewski had his two natures primarily in his two
personal and social roles: one of the artist struggling against his own
reification and one of the critic writing for the leading art journal in
Poland of the times, Przegld Artystyczny, as one of the protagonists
of public life in Poland. His assessment of Yugoslav art of the times
in a text published immediately after his visit under the title
Yugoslavian notes presents an exquisite assessment not only of
artists whose work he reviewed, but also of the overall situation of
art in Yugoslavia of the 1950s.71 Wroblewskis approach manages
not to boil down an artistic review to a detached analysis and, on
the contrary, it shows direct involvement with artists themselves by
making straightforward comments about their personalities and
social status. Particularly in these terms this text is indispensable for
a researcher of Yugoslav modernist art as it speaks a language that
would not be entirely possible to be adopted by local critics who
were deeply involved in a network of acquaintances and unable to

70 For a comprehensive analysis see Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of

Yalta. Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe 1945-1989, London, 2009.

71 Andrzej Wroblewski, Notatki Jugoslowianskie

28
28
make comments outside of the narrow confinements of a work
analysis.72
So we can read from Wroblewski that the members of the
December group are fashionable painters and the current
elite; that Miodrag Proti, otherwise observed as the crucial figure
of established modernism in Serbian art, is actually not innovative,
or perhaps not even actually modern. Edo Murti73, the main
protagonist of decorative modernism on the Croatian scene is
perceived as militant, full of temperament, both in art and life and
as quickly gaining wide popularity, good press, and a good
position For the Slovenian modernist Marij Pregelj 74 he wrote:
While eliminating the imitation of nature from his painting, Pregelj
fully retains an imitative palette and painting method. This might be
good, and might not be good to use the style of Gombrowicz.
The review begins with assessment of the most prominent Yugoslav
artist of the time, Petar Lubarda75, whose works he characterised as
unforgettable and powerful but as writing the last, rather than

72 It has been mostly the case that some painters themselves were
also art critics with a particular example of Miodrag Proti.
However, in order not to offend anyone in a narrow artistic scene of
acquaintances, it rarely happened that a more direct critical
judgement was passed in local art criticism at the time.

73 Edo Murti (1921-2005) was one of the central figures of lyric abstraction in
Croatian and Yugoslav art. His painting were mostly inspired by the sensual
experiences of the Mediterranean. He was the first Yugoslav artist who got the state
stipend to visit USA in the early 1950s.

74 Marij Pregelj (1913-1967) was a Slovenian modernist painter, book illustrator and
mosaic artist.

75 Petar Lubarda (1907-1974) was a Montenegrin painter who was a central

personality in the Serbian art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. His painting are mostly
based on visual explorations of Montenegrin landscapes and often inspired by
national histories and myths. He created a unique style that also suited the tastes of the
political elite so his paintings became omnipresent as decoration of official
institutions and buildings. Critics heralded his 1950 exhibition in Belgrade as the first
example of an artistic break with the dogma of socialist realism.

29
29
the new chapters of art. Lubardas extravert work is contrasted
with the work of the Slovenian Gabriel Stupica76 whose introvert and
darkly lyrical works from that period impressed Wroblewski for their
successfully achieved directness in conveying the personal,
emotional overtones77 However, in the review he openly stated
that it was Lazar Vujaklija who was unquestionably the most
rewarding painter, as a subject for the critic, the craftsman who
combines the propensity for universal philosophising with a simplehearted common sense. Yet, Wroblewski does not explicitly refer to
Bosnian tombstone that inspired Vujaklijas work, and that can be
then linked to Wroblewskis own folkloristic interests. Some unease
could be detected in dealing with the trend of using folkloristic
images as patterns for modernist painting and sculpture in
Yugoslavian art, and which was, as we already concluded, a result of
a federal cultural policy. Wroblewskis interest in folklore was a part
of his artistic research something meaningful in dealing with his
own personal demons and the intuitively felt closeness to death
and not primarily a decorative model as employed by Vujaklija and
some other Yugoslav painters.
In fact, that can be concluded from a paragraph he dedicates to the
influential work of Krsto Hegedui, the painter of older generation
known also as the co-founder of the group Zemlja (Soil) in Zagreb in
1928 whose name aptly describes its folk and national
sympathies, as Wroblewski put it. Hegedui was close to Krleas
viewpoints in rejecting both socialist realism and modernist
tendencies towards abstraction, in favour of an identiterian inquiry
into local folkloristic traditions of representational art.78 However,
this rejection became fully institutionalized in the 1950s, and not
only as an ideological ploy but also in a very pragmatic sense of
marketing the so called nave painting which Wroblewski tackled
when mentioning that Hegedui was the founder of the Hlebina
school. This school brings together peasants whose talent was
discovered and protected from studied art by Hegedui. The

76 Gabrijel Stupica (1913-1990) was a leading modernist painter in Slovenia. His

figurative style had dark and existentialist overtones in the 1950s, and by the end of
that decade he entered the phase of his best-known white paintings to which he also
applied different materials and textual references. He was a professor at the Ljubljana
Art Academy, where he was twice elected as a dean until his retirement in 1977.

77 Singling out these to painters show how impeccable was his

sensitivity to recognize these two major figures of Yugoslavian art in
the 1950s.

30
30
nave painting has become one of the most promoted type of art
that was speedily gaining market especially in the 1960s notably
amongst the foreign diplomats who trusted this art to be something
authentically Yugoslavian. For Wroblewski it was difficult to
evaluate the results of those official primitives. Their paintings on
glass are not fully satisfactory as products of folk art. With some
exceptions ([Emerik] Feje) they rather resemble our own results
with amateur-artists.
Wroblewski showed critical sensitivity toward ultimately political yet
also commercial aspects of the promotion of folkloric traditions
within the discourse of modernist art in Yugoslavia. His own
fascination with these traditions clashed with his awareness of their
political instrumentalisation and their mostly decorative intentions.
As we already pointed out, Wroblewski was apparently interested in
Vujaklija and notably his rendition of medieval tombstones, as he
was somewhat interested in Lukovi and his circus scenes (although
not mentioning this artist in his text), which might seem obvious if
we see a couple of monotypes (Cyrk, Jezdziec) where he uses similar
motifs but with much more curious results. Also, his images
depicting boats and ships may also refer to his Yugoslav trip, but
their isolated loneliness also seems typically Wroblewskian. Finally,
the Yugoslav trip once again sparked in his work the motifs of bus
drivers looked from the back, images that also refer to certain
uneasiness with the very duration of time and the position of the
passivity of the subject. Wroblewskis critical spirit and his
overwhelming melancholy were main aspects of his artistic
personality and the Yugoslav experience confronted with both of
these aspects and influenced the last chapter of his work in
anticipation of his premature death.

78
For a detailed research on
complex artistic-political debates on the Croatian scene of the
1950s, see an outstanding study by Ljiljana Kolenik: Izmeu istoka i
zapada Hrvatska umjetnost i likovna kritika pedesetih godina, Institut za
povijest umjetnosti, Zagreb, 2006.